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Summary:
The SumoMe Welcome Mat plugin makes it easy to increase email conversion. It has a number of features that make it easy to design & deploy attractive email optin forms along with handy features like split testing.
If you’re like me and like to make more money without all the hard work of increasing traffic and spending money then I’ve got a special treat for you with the SumoMe plugin.
Today I’m going to reveal a case study that shows you how to increase your email subscribers by 431% in less than 15 minutes using the free SumoMe welcome mat plugin!
To put that in real numbers, for every 100 visitors that is the difference between earning $19.94 and $105.96 thanks to my email marketing strategy.
And if that is the difference it makes to just 100 visitors, think about the impact it has on a blog with nearly 60,000 visitors per month.
Regardless of whether you only have a handful of visitors or millions
Pay attention to what you’re about to learn!
You’re leaving huge amounts of money on the table if you don’t.
What Will I Learn?
What You Will Need
- An existing website
- The free SumoMe tools pack to grow your website
My Constant Quest For Conversion
Since launching the blog it has earned over $500,000 and that success is largely down to constantly testing different methods to increase my email subscribers.
I’ve done that since day 1 and cannot stress enough how important it is that you do too.
I’ve tried everything from changing the colours of buttons to improve CTR all the way through to testing logo designs.
All of these tests take minutes to setup but have provided huge ongoing rewards for life.
Every now and then I make a break through, last time I increased my email conversion rate that added $36,403 to my bottom line.
How To Increase Your Conversion By 431%
One way I tried to increase my conversion rate by installing a plugin to help my homepage.
Like most sites, my homepage gets most of the traffic and like most sites, it was not optimised for conversions.
Then when Stuart Walker called me out and made me look pretty stupid on my own blog I knew I had to fix it.
To do that I bought the premium PlugMatter plugin at a cost of $57 to add an optin feature box to the homepage easily that I could split test.
That worked great at first-
You can see the homepage feature box was converting at 2.22% on average, not bad at all.
The problem was that over time and no matter how many split tests I ran, this became less and less effective-
That resulted in an average conversion rate of 1.12% – nearly half of what it was originally.
So with that in mind, I knew something drastic had to change and decided to test some alternative solutions.
Introducing The SumoMe Welcome Mat Plugin
The SumoMe team recently released a free plugin dedicated to increasing email subscribers called Welcome Mat.
They promise that the plugin will take any page on your site and transform it into the highest converting page on your site, most sites either double or triple their conversion rates.
That is a pretty bold claim to make.
I’m going to tell you straight off the bat that they delivered big.
It took conversion from a stale 1.12% to an explosive 5.95% – the difference between $19.94 and $105.96 per 100 visitors.
The home page had 16,229 visitors last month, so that’s the difference between $3,237 and $17,197 from the same amount of traffic.
Let me be clear, the 100% free Welcome Mat plugin transformed the blog in minutes.
A Sneak Peak Behind The Scenes…
Installing the Welcome Mat plugin took a couple of clicks and I immediately created my very first campaign and Welcome Mat which looked like this-
I decided to keep the messaging and copy as close as possible to the original feature box that the premium PlugMatter plugin was generating.
Then I created a different version of the Welcome Mat to split test with-
I tried to keep all of the copy and messaging the same to work out which design converted better before testing anything else.
The results of this very first test that I setup were pretty impressive-
The first Welcome Mat converted at 4.13% and the second one at 3.65%
Both of which are a huge improvement over the original 1.12% conversion I was getting with the expensive premium plugin solution.
Taking It One Step Further
Most people would have been pretty happy with a 268% increase in conversion for 15 minutes work but I knew I could squeeze it further.
The first split test was all about figuring out which design converted better, so this test was all about figuring out which words converted better.
In the past I have had great success just by changing the colour of a button.
So I decided to see what impact changing just 1 word could have on conversion.
I took the winning design and duplicated it twice changing just 1 word each time-
The results speak for themselves, this time conversion increased to a staggering 5.95%!
All by changing just one word!
I guess you are wondering what word that was?
Wrapping It Up
So what are you waiting for?
Download the 100% free Welcome Mat plugin by SumoMe right now and set it up.
Then just follow these steps to maximise conversion-
- Install the SumoMe Welcome Mat plugin
- Create your first campaign
- Create 2 Welcome Mats with different designs but the same words
- Let the experiment run until a clear winner is found
- Create a second campaign
- Create 3 welcome mats with the winning design but tweak the headline
- Rinse, repeat, profit.
84 Responses
The tool looks pretty good. Another useful addition may be stepFORM for creating marketing quiz.
Thanks for the recommendation Jacob
I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I too am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any helpful hints for newbie blog writers? I’d certainly appreciate it.
You writing for your own blog or working as a freelance writer?
Hi Matthew,
Great article. Can you guide me how I can join SumoMe affiliate program? I couldn’t find any link. Are AppSumo & SumoMe same?
Thanks!
It’s invite only sorry, they will get in touch with you if they want to work with you =/
Interesting article.
Any suggestion for an alternative to SumoMe’s Discover? I am talking about a free plugin or a one time price plugin.
Thanks, Mathew
I don’t know of any off the top of my head sorry
I love how you still write and share about your day and experiences! You feel like such a real, nice, and humble person because of this!
I would love for everyone to be truly free online instead of stuck in jobs they hate
Just recently installed the plugin, it’s something I was looking for for ages and now it’s here free.
I don’t have any “scientific” data to share, because I’m not big at tracking, but the week before installing it I got 3 subscribers, then in a slow festive week I got 2 subscribers from welcome mat and in the last week I got 9 subscribers.
That’s likely to be a 3x increase. Will see how it will go further down the road.
Get to know your tracking, because if you don’t know your number – you will fail eventually.
any tutorials of yours you could link to? or maybe that could be a topic for a new post :)
I don’t but whatever you are using, should have some sort of reporting/tracking feature built in right?
Do you think this Welcome Mat would only be successful in the online marketing crowd, or it would have similar success across all genres of websites?
I think it will be more effective outside of the IM world
I’ve used it for 2 month, It’s a good plugin
It sure is :)
Hi Matthew,
Just two days back I Installed Sumome Welcome mat on my blog, results not yet tested, I too used Plugmatter feature box, conversions are not as I expected.
Thanks for sharing the information about welcome mat, what do you think of Sumome discover app?
No problem I hope you see the same uplfit.
I haven’t used the discover app and honestly its not likely I will
I’ve seen this used more and more recently. I’m not a big fan from a user perspective, but can definitely appreciate the benefits from a blogger perspective. Impressive results in your tests. That’s great they offer a free version.
I am currently working out a method to hide all optin forms from people that are already subscribed
Did you figure out how to hide welcome mat from subscribers?
I know its technically possible with some custom code so when a subscriber follows a link from an email, it would be hidden by default. However for 99% of people it would be much easier to use ThriveLeads which has a similar feature and then their SmartLinks feature to hide for subscribers.
When was FREE $20 per month.
Just another affiliate article.
Come on Matt you can do better than that.
The plugin is 100% free to use and install, however I arranged the pro version as a freebie for 30 days which means you can setup your welcome mats, do your split tests to find the best performing ones and then continue to use them when the pro version ends.
At no point do you have to enter any payment or credit card details UNLESS you want to continue with the pro version which has split testing and a couple extra themes, but as I have pointed out above – you can use the pro version I arranged for you for 30 days for free to do that anyway.
Nice write up Mr. Woodward
Thanks Richard!
Hi Matthew
This looks amazing. Will it slow down a blog?
Is my blog slow?
Hi,
I’ve never notice this before. I heavily rely on seo traffic. Maybe I can try your method. This free plugin is great. And I will try it.
Please come back and let me know how you got on with it
Matthew Woodward
Hi,
I have installed the free version on my blog. Let’s hope for the best. Thank for suggesting.
Thanks!
PSR
No problem :)
Awesome case study, Matthew. Neatly explained, and it provides a great roadmap to follow. Welcome Mat is definitely worth checking out; it is certainly a subtle way to ask your readers for their email. Thanks, Niraj (Founder at hiverhq.com)
No problem Niraj glad you find it helpful :)
hey matt,
The plugin says the pro feature is free for the first month, will it get deactivated from the next month ?
I guess the pro features will yes
Great post.
I run sumo me on my website as well but have been hesitant to run the welcome mat. It would be interesting to see of despite the increase in conversions you saw a decrease in time on site and pages per visitor.
It had a small impact on bounce rate of the homepage but its negligible for the boost in conversion
Hey Matt,This is a great case study and i am happy to say that i have got similar results after installing the welcomemat a few weeks ago.
One more thing.Just to mention that this setup can be easily created using Thrive Leads.(A great plugin you are already using)
Yeah they introduced in in the recent update but costs money where as this doesnt so it depends which side of the fence you are on :)
Well,I am using both.Free welcome mat and premium thrive leads
and love both
That makes two of us :)
I am sure there are many others like us here.
Hey matthew,
Awesome experiment cum case study, specially the difference made by changing only one word. I just installed Welcome mat but I have a problem with that.
Even for somebody who is not logged in the admin panel, the plugin shows that little blue box with crown on top right which is awkward.
Did u see that with free version?
There is a tick box to disable that in both the free and premium version in the settings
where?
I’ll just pull my finger out my arse and Google that for you http://geekflare.com/hide-sumome-badge/
I will surely try this plugin now. Have tried many autoresonders and popup but free plugins were not fruitful.
Thanks Matthew woodward :)
No problem this is a great freebie :)
I have to try on my website after your great explanation about conversations.
Please come back and tell us how you got on
What happened to Thrive Leads? What caused you to make the switch?
I haven’t changed anything about Thrive, just added the welcome mat into the mix.
It seems amazing!
Thank u for your suggestion, Matthew! :-)
No problem Willian :)
Hello Matt,
This is really a very awesome revelation. I’ve been seeing the welcome mat in so many blogs lately and i never was able to figure out what tool is that until now.
The craziest thing of all is that this amazing tool is free, i will have to go turn it on immediately.
Thanks for sharing.
Well go and turn it on, let it run and let us know what your conversion rate is!
Hey Matt you rock, though I saw this free plugin on Neil Patel’s personal website if I am not wrong, but you have taken this to the next level, once again I feel awesome and and/or excited once I see a email from you, because I know that something awesome is waiting for me.
Best
Ankit Yadav
Thanks Ankit – yes I wouldn’t be surprised if Neil is using it as well :)
Hi mat, thanks for anothe awesome case study, i’ve just installed the plugin, but unfortunately this doesn’t have support for Feedburner .
i can only use it if i have paid email marketing service ?
Yes you at least need something like Aweber and you should read https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/blogging/email/email-marketing-part-1/ because your losing a bunch of money right now.
Thank you Mathew
This looks like a great plugin and one I will certainly go and add to my blog
Now I just need to work out what is the perfect giveaway I think I’ll try tools or resources sounds like an interesting split test
Just need to increase traffic!
Well make sure you have all the building blocks of conversion in place before you work hard for traffic :)
Matt,
Your Twitter unlock feature isn’t working. I click the button and nothing happens. In fact the cursor doesn’t change or anything. I’m using Chrome on PC.
This is a great article and I want to share.
Hey Daniel,
I’ve just tested it here and is looking good, do you have extensions like noscript, adblock plus or ublock running?
Matt,
No I don’t have any kind of ad blocking extension. Its working in FireFox and the Twitter button opens up to a tweet button. Just nothing happens in Chrome which is the primary browser I use. Anyhow, I’ve tweeted it out using FF. Amazing how one word changes everything!
Weird its working fine for me in Chrome here so I can’t replicate it =/
Getting the same problem unfortunately :(
Hmm, I’ve just updated the plugin to the latest version perhaps that will fix it
I can also confirm that it does not seem to work on my ipad and viewing site inside twitter app
hmmm… looks pretty badass…. I’m curious…
how would this work if you have paid customers coming back to your homepage to log into the members area?
or if you have an optin thing on your homepage already?
thanks :)
This goes above your entire homepage, try it out you’ll see – then you can still have other optins on the home page if you wish.
With a members area you would have to work out how to disable it for logged in users I guess
cool cool….
just thinking the #’s will be lower than it could be or maybe lower than the current opt in overlay (they click a button and the overlay appears) because some of the traffic back to the homepage is people who just bought or returning customers.
would be interesting to see if there’s a good way to disable it for anyone who’s purchased and/or previously logged into the members area.
Just had a look in settings and there are a number of options – http://i.imgur.com/DOxtWlg.jpg
Eg by setting an exclude rule on the referring page or looking for a certain cookie
oh nice. thats good to know… ok… now, i’m not super techie… so I guess we would have to create a cookie and drop it on the pages inside the members area?
and probably need one dropped after they purchase, so like on the first upsell…. this way we’d know they purchased the course.
so there’s like 2 pages we would need to place the cookie.
that could work i think.
Well if people are logged in, they are cookied – just work out the name of that cookie and tell it to exclude anyone that has it
Nice bump!
It would have been interesting to see how the new entry popup affected your bounce rate for new and existing subscribers. As I know you’re aware, an obtrusive interruption like these welcome mats is a turn off for a lot of people (probably less so in your space, though).
The bounce rate of the home page did increase by nearly 5%
Thanks for the case study Matt,
I can confirm I installed it (the free version for now) after reading your previous mail/post and doubled conversions right away.
Glad to hear it :)
First!
Ok matthew, I’m going to go grow up now…
Well that’s no fun :)