Building your email list & GA ecommerce funnels

All right, so welcome to the second ever profitable publishing webinar. Today we're going to tackle building your email list, building your sales funnel so that you reach more people and ultimately encourage them to pay to subscribe. And we're going to do that. We're going to look at mailchimp's RSS to email feature to do that. And Jeremy's going to talk about how to use Google Analytics E commerce to track goal funnels. I believe we'll do a Q and A afterwards. And we are recording the presentation so we can email it out to those that missed it or if you want to review it, of course. All right, so I'm going to jump right into this. What, what you're looking at here is what I call the start of the organic pestering sales funnel. So with this publication T journey, we have a mailchimp pop up or slide in or fly out or whatever you want to call it that comes in. In this case, it's 20 seconds after a visit. And the idea is that you're going to ask somebody, the casual reader, not the subscriber, but the casual reader, drop off their email address, get on the list and then set a schedule for your content. We're going to automate that so that every week, every day, every month, however often you set the schedule for or immediately, there's an email that lands in the new subscribers mailbox with the title and excerpt that if they're interested in it, makes them click back to your site, triggers the meter count and then over time you're sending that content to their mailbox automatically in this nice loop that organically pesters that person to come back in, read the content, trigger the meter, and then finally over time get them to say, hey, you know what? I really want access to all of this and I want to support the publication. So let me subscribe and get full access so this can be set up. In this case, this actual pop up slides in from the side. It's kind of subtle. If you want to be more aggressive, you can make it pop up like that traditional pop up. I know it's a little dirty feeling, but the truth is it works great. And once you close it, it goes away and won't bother the reader again. All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump in and we're going to set up just a sample campaign in mailchimp and you'll see how super duper easy it is to automate this whole process of having mailchimp automatically grab your news content and email it out to your subscribers on a schedule. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to log in. You go to your campaigns menu here. We're going to click the Create campaign button. We're going to click on email. We're going to make this an automated campaign. So we're going to click on automated and then we're going to share blog updates. So that's the sequence. So we'll just call this test and whoops, now we'll call it test. It's going to go to the T Journey list. We're going to hit begin, and off we go. Now it's going to ask you for the RSS feed URL. All you really have to do is type in the URL of your publication and it will find the feed for you. It will probably be something like yourpublication.com feed, but Tjrnium will find it for you. You can set the schedule and all this information you can change later. So I'm going to kind of just skip through it. I'm going to say, okay, that's fine. And I might resize these images to fit the template that I choose. Click that box, hit next, and okay, we're going to send it to our entire audience. You can send this to segments as well. But we're going to keep this simple. And then we have some campaign information. So we have the name of the campaign. So you have an email subject and you can just, you can leave this alone. I would change this to news or latest news from. And it'll pull the, the title of the feed and the date. But you might want to change it to latest news from your publication name or something like that. Preview text gives you that little subtext in the email that tells the reader what the email is about. So it's usually a good idea to put something descriptive in there. Here comes the latest news from such and such publication. Just short and sweet from. Name your email address. I would leave the tracking options on and keep going. And then what we do is we select a template. There's lots to choose from and you can kind of play around with this. I like the basic template and you can always sort of enlarge, improve, design the template as you wish. But they give you a place to drop your logo, some maybe introductory text. And then what you need to do is you need to go find the RSS items button, which is here. And the way these little buttons work is you just drag them in.

So I Grab that.

Let's say I want it to be below the intro text, which you can edit. Just hit these little edit marker to edit the content here. And what you'll see is you'll get this code here from mailchimp to RSS items and titles. And this will use the RSS feed function to actually scan your website every day and see if there's something new. And then it'll pull that content into and send the email. So it pulls it into the template here, sends the email and again you'll be scheduling it. So let's say it's every Friday at 11am Everything goes out well, you can hop into this template before Friday at 11 and I would say nine, just to be safe, make the edits that you want to it. Let's say you have a new advertiser that you're going to, you find a sponsor for email and you're going to drag in an image at the top here. Well, that's an old timey kind of a ring. That's cool. And, and then that's all you have to do. This RSS template is ready to go. And hit save and close. Let's say you have an ad. You just grab this little image guy and you say, okay, I'm going to put the, put the ad in up top. Then you can upload your image and link it and that's it. Then you've built your fully automated campaign in mailchimp. And what's cool is you can make it advanced. In other words, if you have categories of content and you want to let people sign up for, let's say you have breaking news and you have sports and you have community or whatnot as categories in WordPress. You can tie those categories in WordPress to interests in Mailchimp. Mailchimp calls them interests. And actually when somebody comes to sign up for your newsletter for the news, you can take them to a page that mailchimp creates for you and the person can check off the categories that they're interested in. And that's good for customizing some of the the news flow to the reader. Okay, I think that's the short and the sweet of it. Did I forget anything? Jeremy? As far as configuring the RSS to email, it's pretty straightforward. With mailchimp, we have a two of that plugin, the mailchimp plugin for leaky paywall, so that new subscribers can automatically be added to the list. But this really targets the casual reader. Just to circle back. It's the first priority you absolutely, positively want to build up a list of casual readers that will automatically get your news as you publish it. And mailchimp makes that all super easy. And that's what makes it super easy.

So powerful.

Okay, so that's the building your email list portion of the segment. And that was about 10 minutes. And so, Jeremy, I'm going to hand off to you to talk about the funnels.

Talking about goals and funnels. Yep. I will get the screen here in a moment. Do you have to hand it to me? I don't see a way to take it.

I'll hit stop sharing and then if you're logged into Zoho, there should be a button that says start sharing. Let's see if I can.

Make presenter Start sharing.

Okay, I see you. Okay.

Let's give this one a shot. I gotta select the right window. Give me just a minute.

Yeah, we're sort of intermediate level at running Zoho.

Figuring it out.

Yep. Yeah, see, you are presenter.

Yeah, I'm trying to adjust what I can show. Kind of giving me an error on that.

Okay.

Might have to do this next time.

Okay. Do you want me to log into something? Let me see if I can share while you talk.

Yeah, if you just want to go, go into the automobile. Google Analytics.

Okay. Yep. Let me go. And that's fine. Let me hit share.

All right.

Can you see? Can you see my screen?

I can. All right.

All right, let's hop in. Oh, you know what? I think let me go to here and let me sign in for here.

All right.

Okay. All right, coming in. Okay.

All right, so we'll talk about goals. If you go down to conversions on the left hand side at the bottom and then go down to goals.

Okay.

And then funnel visualization.

Say that 10 times fast.

Exactly. Yep. So here we have a couple different ones. So we've set up a goal of comparing vehicles on this site. But what I want to look at is the registration. So you can select the different goals in the top left. So see where it says goal option.

Drop down, Compare vehicles.

So go to registration complete there. And then let's adjust the date range to include all of May as well. And that will give us more data to look at.

We'll go back May 1st through June 12th. We'll apply. Okay. All right. All right.

So by setting up a goal, this is kind of the end result. And go over how to set it up. But basically what this shows is people that have gone to the subscribe page and then from the subscribe page, how many people clicked on register and how many didn't. And then from the registration page, how many people completed the registration and then how many didn't. So let's go ahead and pull up the automobile site itself and then let's take a look at the subscribe page to the register page. So you can see how this would apply to any site that's using Lehi paywall. So the first thing is to subscribe. So this is a subscribe page. So this triggers the first phase of that goal and then if someone hits on one of the subscribe buttons, then that triggers that next phase. And then if Pete were to continue and go through with the transaction, then that would trigger the final step and a goal completion would be marked. So as soon as someone finishes this. So by doing that you can see where people are falling off from the subscribe to the register to completing registration and maybe see where you need to adjust the content or adjust your benefits message to get people to subscribe more. So you see in this case a lot of people fall off at the subscribe page itself. So maybe adjusting the content on there could help improve click throughs onto the registration page. So let's take a look at how to set up one of these. So let's go ahead and click admin in the bottom left. And then on the right hand side there's a goals about three down from the top there I'll show how I set up this registration complete one. So if you click on that one you can always click new goal and that will show the same information. But let's start at the top with goal setup. So go ahead and edit that. So this will look the same if you're creating a new goal. So in this case we'll just do a template and then you can do either acquisition, create an account or view more viewed product or service details. Either one of those would work in this case. And then after you do that then you go down to the goal description. So the next section there and then here you just put what the name of your goal is. And this is what you'll see in the Google Analytics interface. So you want to make sure it makes sense. In our case we're doing a destination because we're tracking when they go to a specific URL. So that will work there. But you can see the other options that are also available. If you go to Gold Details.

In.

The next section, then here's where you put in the information. So in this case when someone hits subscribe and after they register we take them to A thank you page. So we're tracking that. So you can see begins with so that's the URL there. And then we're also doing the funnel. So the funnel view, if you want to see that is where you add these URLs. So you can see there I have the subscribe and it's just subscribe for this URL and the register page, which is the URL to the register page. And if you required, then that means that they have to visit those pages in that order in order for them to show up in the funnel, which in our case makes sense. And then you would just hit save. So if you are sending users back to the content they were viewing, then you would want to do this a little bit differently. So if you're using our registration redirect, add on. Which if someone's reading a piece of content and they hit the nag, they subscribe from that nag, it will send them back to the content they were reading. So they won't actually go to a thank you page. What you can do is change the destination to regular expression. So you can go ahead and click that real quick.

Regular expression.

What am I clicking on where it says begins with.

Oh, I see, got it. Regular expression. Okay.

And that just means kind of match any of this text what you're viewing. And so this would be anytime someone completes a transaction, we add a transaction ID to the URL for tracking. And so I just sent you in Slack, this is the text you would put in that field. And then it would know that if this is in the URL, then the goal is completed.

Okay, hang on.

So you just put that text in place.

Sneaky text here.

Yep.

The whole thing. Yep. Like that. Uh huh.

So that's lptxnid, which stands for leaky paywall transaction id. And so that's how you would handle that situation. But by using that, you can then start tracking that data and see it in that goal kind of funnel visualization and it will give you a lot more insights into how people are moving through that particular funnel on your site.

Yeah, that's cool.

All right.

So I think the tricky part of this is actually getting to the right place in Google Analytics to do this.

Yep. Yeah. And another thing you can do at that point is just to go back so you don't have to save this. Just go back to home real quick in Google Analytics. All right, Cool.

All right.

And then let's go back to that goal funnel visualization section. So conversions, Goals funnel visualization. There you go.

Yep.

And you can actually share this. So if you don't want to come back, remember I have to come back in here. You can have this emailed to you every day, every week, every month. So in the top right corner there, where it says share.

Yep. Right?

Yep. Then you could put in your email address and then how often you want to receive it. Cool. So that can be helpful as well. All right.

Yeah. Nice. That's nice. So for end now, for automobile, we're metering the actual searches, the comparisons that are being run. But for traditional article publisher, what will this read?

That's just any page that they come from. So that's the entrance page from before they hit subscribe.

Okay.

So this would be an article, could be the homepage.

Got it. Be a variety of pages. Okay, great. Awesome.

All right, so that's what I got.

Cool. All right. Did you want to talk about the revenue tracking? Do you want to look at that real quick or do you want to do that next time?

We talked a little bit about that last week with the E Commerce integration.

Okay. All right, cool. Well, you hit your 10 minutes.

Yep.

All right, so any questions? That is the next question. And you can type the questions under Q and A in the Zoho meeting panel if you have any. Okay. Yep. Don't have a mic. Yep. That's great. No problem. And. We can always answer questions after the fact. What we'll do is we'll get this recording wrapped up and we'll post it. You'll get an email on it, and if you have any questions on it in the meantime, you can always shoot us an email. You know, get in touch and we can, we can take it a little bit further.

That's what we're here for.

Okay, cool.

I'll go ahead and stop recording.

Okay, great.