How a Simple Fix Boosted Conversions

Hey, everyone. It's Matt from Money Lab. I lied. I lied. I lied to you.

I didn't know I was lying, but I did. I so on the last episode, I talked about how, you know, I shipped this product, I shipped this lead magnet thing, and as of, like, 4:40, so it had gone from, like, 10 AM to 4:40. No one had signed up. And I was like, see you. I I'm glad I shipped sooner than later because maybe no one wants this thing.

And I would have wasted all my time on building this thing that ultimately nobody wanted. And the and so the reason I thought so so the truth, the reason I lied to you or the or the or the lie is that people did sign up. 10 people, as a matter of fact, signed up. And the reason I thought that no one had signed up is because I had put a notification on the email so that anybody who were basically, anybody who was sent the email that included the link with a custom plan, I would get an internal email saying, hey, someone someone new signed up. And I got none of those emails today.

Like, I just been on my email, it's been inbox 0, and I'm like, alright, I guess no one's signing up. So after I've recorded the last podcast, I went downstairs. I was like, let me just double check, you know, making sure things are working. And the internal notification was set to draft and not live, so I wasn't getting those emails. And then I looked in the type form and 10 people had signed up.

So so lied, but that's a good thing. Right? I also know the exact conversion rate. It's 2.92, which is pretty fucking great. So I am happy with that number.

That is you have to assume so I had, you know, basically, right, roughly 300 visitors to the homepage, 10 of them subscribed. Right? The reason it's lower because it's it was technically 342 or something like that, and then only not 10 subscribed, or 10 actually, you know, went through the whole process. So I don't know how many people clicked, but it doesn't matter. Yeah.

So what did I learn from this? Well, my the average of the cheat sheet across my website, the the the which is the original lead magnet, is around 2.92. It's really like it's somewhere between, like, 3%, and it depends on the season. Depends on the article. So, like, I have an article that has, like, it on that particular page, the cheat sheet has, like, a 10% conversion rate.

But on an article that maybe isn't really related to the cheat sheet, it's got a much lower conversion rate. And that's very interesting to me because it means that I have some levers that I can pull. It also means that this lead magnet is in line with the cheat sheet. It's close enough. I wonder if I wrote some better copy.

I could certainly AB test test that, that I could get more people to sign up for the custom plan. But here's the thing. That now that number that the the 10 people who signed up, I can make a slight rough assumption that those 10 people would have not have would not have happened at all because they landed on the home page. What are the chances that those people had gone on to another page of my website and it subscribed to the cheat sheet. So I got them pretty so the homepage was the one page on my website where I didn't have an opt in.

There's no way to opt in to the site. So now it is a new spot. And so it's an interesting it's interesting because the even I would I would argue the homepage copy, I know can be better. It doesn't really explain what it does. Like, it doesn't really say, like, okay.

You know, you know, get your free pool care cheat sheet. Like, it doesn't it doesn't give, like, what it is that you're gonna get. Right? It just says I think the I think the copy roughly says, save 100 on pool care with a free custom plan, and then the button says, get my free custom plan. That's that's it.

Nothing, earth shattering about that. So that's good news because 3% again, that's, you know, 3% on a Thursday between the hours of 10 AM and 4 PM, let's just say, you know, and to me, I think we're gonna see much better results in the weekend. But it got me thinking. The cheat sheet's really difficult to pitch because the cheat sheet is specific to cheat sheet. It's not custom.

So I worked really hard on the this programmatic cheat sheet thing, which I'm gonna continue to improve. And I'm starting to think that it it's it's a it's, you know, at first, I was like, it may not be the best candidate to replace a cheat sheet, but now I think, actually, it could be a really good candidate to replace a cheat sheet. So So when I said earlier and I was read so I was reading an article from Create and Sell, which is, Brennan Dunn's newsletter. And he had a story today, which is very timely for me, although that's his email is all about this, so I guess relevant too. But he had an email talking about how he had somebody in his audience, and, you know, they were getting, like, I don't remember the number, but it was, like, a lot of visitors to their website, but they were getting, like, 200 subscribers a month, which was pretty pretty bad.

Like, just for context, Swim University gets 500 a day, and that's in April. That's what we've been averaging, a little over 500 a day. And so with and I think we actually have less traffic than this person. So so he what he did was he basically, like, created a lead magnet, but he said, you know, the I there's an idea from Brian Harris a while back. He had a company called VideoFruit.

I don't know what it's called now or if he even has one. But the the concept was content upgrades. And content upgrades and I've and I've heard, Nick Loper talk about this, and I'm sure he heard it from Brian Harris or maybe vice versa. I don't know. But Nick Loper, because I talked to him in in person, he was saying that he was creating an a piece like a lead magnet, like a resource for every blog post he created, which Brennan's argument is like, I can't do that.

That's that's like a lotta that's a lotta creation. That's a lot of, like that's really hard to do. And it makes the email capture system way more complicated because you need to deliver the right content upgrade, and I'm sure people have made software to solve this problem. But, ultimately, he was like, my team and I literally can't make the these pieces of these content upgrades. But what we can do is the reason content upgrades work so well is because they are relevant to the content that you're reading.

So when you're reading a piece of content about, in my case, pool algae, right, the cheat sheet might not be the best lead magnet. And in fact in fact, the cheat the copy just doesn't make sense. It's like, hey. You're having a problem with your pool right now with algae. Here's a cheat sheet that'll just help you save money.

And it's like, well, that's not my actual problem right now. So the conversion rate from on that particular page to the cheat sheet might hover at around 3%, which again, very good. But as I said, I have another article on my website that converts at 10%, And that article is simply titled a beginner's guide to pool maintenance. That's the article that I get the highest conversion rate. And I believe the reason for that is because it is the most relevant to the cheat sheet.

Now in this in this, newsletter, he said the solution to this was something that he could do programmatically. All he had to do was change the text of the offer on that specific blog post page. So in my case, for example, somebody is reading my article about pool algae. And instead of the cheat sheet well, let's say it it's Let's say it let's say it's still the cheat sheet offer. But it it in the description of the cheat sheet, it says, you know, learn how to never deal with algae ever again with our cheat sheet.

You know, it's just a slight tweak on the copy that makes it more relevant to what they're reading to increase the conversion rate of readers to subscribers. And I thought, that's very interesting because that's something that I would love to do and can do. I know how to do that. I just was you know, before I really worked at Swim University, before I was, like, full time at Swim University, I I literally had the power to do all of these all this stuff, but I just thought, yeah, it's not really worth my time. You know?

Because it's like, well, I only have this many hours to work on Swim University, like, you know, I'm or I really don't even wanna do it, so, like, I'm not going to do it. But now I feel like my superpower is this. And if I can increase conversion rates across the entire website without changing the core offer and just doing some look. Quite honest with you, getting chat gbt to write me little code snippets to to stick on my website, then that's what I'm gonna do. Now I recognize that that sounds great in theory and will will probably work.

Not everyone can do this because it would require people to learn how to do PHP or perhaps your site is just you know, if you're a customer of Carbonate, I mean, you can do it, but it it would require coding knowledge. And there's no plug in that that I know that does this. So I was thinking, well, how would I do that? How would I now let's say, like, let's scrap the cheat sheet. The thing I the thing I kinda like about scrapping the cheat sheet, honestly, is and I'm not gonna scrap it.

The cheat sheet will always be available because we have so much evergreen content out there that has links to our cheat sheet that, you know, shows the cheat sheet. Like, that's always gonna be a lead magnet for us. But I think transitioning now that this I see this is actually working, and it's worth I'm not gonna AB test. I'm not just gonna jump into it. But I would be curious if it would work.

The reason I wanna get rid of it is because the cheat sheet requires a photo. It requires a picture of the cheat sheet for someone to go, I want that. A pool care plan that's custom, you really can't have a picture of that? I mean, you could. I could make up a fake one, but I could still use a Chi Chi for you know, doesn't even matter, really.

But I think I can make the copy way more way tighter, more compelling, and the action and the and the action button is a little bit better. So the other thing I can do is because it's a custom plan and not a cheat sheet, I kinda feel like I can tweak the copy depending on where you're what article you're on. And and the thing is is that I don't I don't know how I would do that. I mean, there's one way I could do it where I could base it on so I could base it on categories. Right?

So if, like, hey. If you're in the, you know, pool troubleshooting category, I could change the copy to that. But to me, I'm like, that feels like overkill, or that feels like it's too broad even. Like, yeah, it might help a little bit with conversion rate, but it's not gonna drastically increase. And then this is something I could do for the cheat sheet and test very quickly.

In fact, one of the places I would probably do this is, like, literally the just just a b test the algae article and see if changing the copy would result in more subscribers. Like, just just changing the copy to be more specific to that article and just test it on, like, that one page and see what happens. And if I can go, oh, okay. Well, it moves the needle, then it's like, okay. Well, now I have to get specific on, you know, what we're talking about.

So I think I could do it. So I've I've I got asked this question on Twitter recently, and I just didn't know how to answer it and whatever. But they were like, hey. It's it says that you use tags on your website, but I thought tags were dead. I'm like, yeah.

Well, not using them the way that bloggers used to use tags back in the day. The it's basically I'm using it as a subcategory instead of using you know? Because I I believe this is true, but I could be wrong about this. On the the categories in WordPress, I believe you can only have a parent and a child. I don't think the child can have a child because they literally call on parents and children.

So I don't think, like, there's a grandparent and then a parent and that child. So what I do is I use tags as my sub subcategory, and I also use it as my way to cross cross categories. So, for example, like, you might have an article about, so you might have an article that's under the so there's the I only have 2 parent categories. I have hot tub and pool, and then I have subcategories under each of those. And so I might have water chemistry.

Right? I think I call it pool water chemistry and then, like, pool troubleshooting. Right? And those are under the pool care category. And so I can I created a a a tag called pool algae, and pool algae can be applied to multiple posts across different subcategories?

So it means that a a a post that's categorized under troubleshooting could be labeled pool algae, and a post labeled under water chemistry can be labeled pool algae. And so that way, you can now you're not just kind of locked into one category when you're, you know, recommending post back and forth. I mainly use it for post recommendation at the bottom, like auto generated post recommendations. But I could use it also to change the the copy of yeah. I could also use it to change the copy of the, yeah, of the, offer.

It's interesting, and it's worth testing because I do believe that I could test it, and I would be willing to bet that it would have a marginal increase in conversion rates even if the cheat sheet was exactly the same, and I just changed perhaps the title and description of the cheat sheet or literally just a description, I bet you would have a significant but marginal increase in conversion rate. But you so that, like, on one post, but you apply that across the site, and all of a sudden, you might you now have, you know, a much more robust conversion rate across the site, which would be very helpful for us and would not be very hard to do. In fact, you could do it in a day and and literally, I wouldn't be changing anything. I could keep the cheat sheet for now and just say, okay, whatever I design code wise will work for any offer that we put in there. Yeah.

This is like I think this kind of stuff, I'm getting really interested in using and I this might be worth another this is definitely worth another episode. But I'm getting more interested in using code as a leverage point for growth. For example, there's this you know, obviously, with all the SEO stuff that has gone on this year, it it's bleak. Who knows if it's gonna come back or not? But there's one thing I know is that the more nuanced you are, the more specific the information, the better your chances are until the AI takes that over.

But I have this idea to do programmatic SEO. It would require a lot of data entry, but honestly, not that much to start, and you could just keep growing it. And it's sort of like the the way that we sort of programmatically, you know, not we're not programmatically doing this, but it's kinda works this way where we publish a YouTube video every week, we publish a podcast every week, we publish 3, you know, shorts a week. These are all like automatic, you know, they require work, but we do them because they continue to grow. We publish articles.

But what if it was like we also could create, like, 10 pages on our site? And I and I'm not advocating for this. I I'm not a 100% sure I like this idea, but, you know, being more of a, like, a resource that you could search for more specific information on our website that would that very specific people are searching for, and no one has solved this problem yet on the Internet I'm thinking of, and we could solve it. And it it would be a lot of data entry, but it could be done. So that's what I'm thinking of.

And I'm wondering if Brennan's post I saved it because I'm like, alright. This is something I think now that this pool care plan I know is working, it's definitely something I wanna, like, take it a little step further. So, like, just keep kind of hammering out, programmatic, you know, CRO tactics to get more subscribers on the things that we already have and start split testing these lead magnet offers. And then, I mean, I just really I really just wanna I really just wanna pivot to the plan because I know it's better. Like, it's a better product, and it will only get better.

And it is way more again, like I said before, in the last episode, it's better because a PDF can only be a PDF. And I can add more pages, but the the offer is just it is what it is. And the people who download it, it's like, yep. This is the same cheat sheet. Yep.

You know, nothing different. But with a pool care plan that's fully programmatic, I can just keep making the the the final product better and better so that the more people go through the funnel and end up at this page that is, like, kind of blows their mind over time, then that's just gonna create a word-of-mouth thing that I won't, you know, that I'm not gonna be able to quantify, but it'll be like, dude, you have to go like, the best thing I ever did was I put my email into this into Sun University, and I got this fucking plan, and it's been and it's worked perfectly for me. Now it could, the better it gets, kill conversions on the course, but I doubt it because as long as the like, people are still gonna need to learn the basics and still gonna need to learn the concepts around what the plan offers, And the book is something that the plan won't be able to offer because it's it's a resource for troubleshooting problems and all kinds of stuff. Like, I'm not the plan is not super detailed. It is it is here is your plan based on your pool.

This is the this is the the start. And then if you want to, you know, get product recommendations and you want to learn more about the best techniques and all these other things, then you go a step further and purchase the course or purchase the book. So I think it's gonna have a real impact there. Anyway, gotta go take this meeting, but I just wanted to say sorry for lying to you, but I'm glad we were able to I'm glad something good came out of it. So 2.92%.

Not too bad for the first day.