Seamus Redmond: Level-up Your Lead Flow, with Lead Flows | INBOUND 2016:

Thank you. Morning, everyone. I hate to disappoint you, but although I am from Ireland, I actually don't really have an Irish accent. Siobhan trumps me there a little bit. So thank you all for joining. I am really, really pleased to be here. This is my first time presenting at Inbound, hopefully not my last. Did everybody enjoy Club Inbound and Inbound Rocks last night? Nice. I hope to catch the reruns. I was actually asleep in bed preparing for this morning. This early in the morning is not a good time for me. My name is Shay, Shay Redmond. I come from our Dublin office. I'm a product manager there. And one of the tools that I help build are leapflows and Christopher o' Donnell talked a little bit about that at the Kinos on Wednesday. Wednesday, yeah. I have a somewhat rhetorical question for the audience by a show of hands. Who here has a website? Okay, good. You're all responsible. Responsible company owners, responsible business people. Nice. A follow up question by a show of hands. Who here knows that website like the back of their hand, knows where all the resources are and knows how to convert on a form? Nice. Okay, my next question is a little bit more important and helps frame a lot of this talk. Who here expects that a fresh visitor to that website knows all about the different ways to utilize the website, all of the resources there? Okay, nobody raised their hand. Good. I was expecting everybody to and this would ruin everything. I have experienced this a bunch of times myself when I come to a site brand new and I expect that a lot of visitors do as well. This is what it feels like to me. There's a lot of content to consume, a lot of different channels I can go around and a lot of dead ends that I can hit where there's not really anything else for me to do. And the solution to that at the moment would be to maybe put a CTA or a call to action there and offer a conversion point on the website. But there's a lot of work involved. There kind of ends up looking like this to me as the visitor of the site. This helps frame a lot of what we're trying to solve with lead flows. And I want to get a couple of definitions out of the way before we move forward. And a lot of you might know what these are. We're going to talk about lead gen. It's in the title of the talk today, basically short for lead generation. And it's the process for converting strangers into prospects and visitors of your website. A slightly more technical term is CRO. A lot of you might have heard it around. Basically short for conversion rate optimization. I actually don't want you to read all this. I got this off the Internet. It's a definition of CRO. I just want to point out number four, there's a acronym inside of an acronym here. Yo, dawg, I heard you like acronyms. I want to actually talk about a different concept of CRO that I actually think is more impactful. And it's basically taking all of the walls and all of the dead ends on your website and getting rid of them all and turning it into a little bit more like this for your visitors and for you. Okay, that's what we're going to talk about with lead flows. So a very quick agenda. We're going to talk about what they are. I'm going to talk about why I think everyone should be using one. We're going to have a couple of case studies. We're actually going to walk through how to build one. I will finish with a little bit of a Q and A if anyone has any questions. Sound good? Nice. All right. What exactly are lead flows? Good question. This is usually how one would go about building a conversion funnel on a website. We build a call to action or a CTA gets the visitor's attention, offers some additional resources. They click that CTA brings them to a landing page which has more information and usually a forum to convert on. They fill out that form, brings them to a thank you where you actually deliver on that promise and deliver that resource or that value. Two particular steps to that that I want to point out. There's usually redirects involved here, additional pages that need to load. Not the best experience for the end user. And if we get a little bit selfish for a moment, there's actually a bunch of work involved in getting this built. We have to connect a domain name, build some templates. We have to actually get the whole thing set up. And that's not great for us. Takes us a little bit of. While a little time consuming and it's not great for the end user because there's a bunch of redirects involved, there's a bunch of waiting and there's a lot of work invol on their part. So what we basically wanted to do with lead flows was get rid of all the redirects and put the entire inbound conversion funnel inside of one singular widget that you can put on your website. That's the ethos for what we were trying to set, what we were setting out to build when we built Lead flows to show you guys what one looks like. This is actually one that we've been using on our website for quite a while now. You'll see it has the call out step, which is where we get the visitor's attention. We say, hey, I actually think you might be interested in this resource. In this case, it's a zero budget growth marketing guidebook. The user interacts with the callout step. They click a button seamlessly right there. And then inside that widget, we're actually showing them additional information and a conversion form that they can a form that they can convert on once they submit. We're then seamlessly showing the actual thank you message. And there's one really important bit that I want to point out there. If you haven't noticed already, emojis have taken over pretty much my entire life, including this presentation. So I was really pleased to learn that I think accidentally emojis are actually supported in lead flows as well. Cool. For context, this is what it looks like on the website. Super unintrusive sits in the bottom right hand side there. And the point here is we're creating an opportunity for the visitor to convert on the website anywhere that we want to. And it's super unintrusive. Sits right there, ready to go. Of course, with most of the Internet going increasingly mobile first, lead flows are mobile optimized right out of the box. This is the exact same lead flow on a mobile device. You'll see it takes up a super minimum amount of space on the screen. And again, there's no redirects involved here. They're just submitting a. But clicking a button, submitting a form and then we deliver the resource. Okay, I'm thinking it, you're thinking it. There's an elephant in the room here. Fake Bill Murray on Twitter is also thinking it. They're just pop up forms. Shay. This is not revolutionary. When we set out to build lead flows, we decided to really focus on the concept of inbound marketing and the inbound conversion funnel. But I'm actually going to put this back out to you guys. Lead flows are just a tool. You can either use it for good or you can use it for evil. And what I'm going to talk about a little bit later are a few great examples of how we consider building leadpost to be a great experience for the actual visitor of the website as well as for you, because it's super easy to get set up. Cool. Everyone with me. Everyone with me. Nice. All right. Why should we use lead flows? So we know what they are three step conversion funnel all squished into one single widget that we can put on our website. Why should we use them? I'm going to talk about a few examples of customers of ours using lead flows and some of the success that they've seen already. Anybody from Pennsylvania here? Nice. This is Lynn. She runs a website called Bucks County Taste. Lynn built one single lead flow, just one, and blanketed her entire website with that one lead flow. But the key here is that she gave an opportunity for every visitor to reach out, to submit and to get value at every step along their journey on the website. This one sits in the bottom right hand side. Super non intrusive. Doesn't really, doesn't really cause too much disruption to the end user. But again gets rid of all those dead ends on our website and creates an opportunity for the visitor to reach out and get some value. Lynn put this one lead flow on her site and increased her convert the amount of leads generated from her website. Did I get this wrong? Is this a disco? Lynn put one single and one single lead flow on her site and increased the amount of leads she generated from the visitors by 60%. Very, very minimal effort on her part and she just created an opportunity for visitors to actually get in touch with her. Same goes for 24.0.com this is a company that offers service to review and help design PowerPoint presentations. It's actually quite niche. I didn't reach out to them for this. So this isn't necessarily the best PowerPoint you've ever seen. Probably should have exactly the same scenario here. They created one single lead flow on their website and with that lead flow they blanketed their entire site with an opportunity for users to convert and actually get some value and reach out to the company. Again, 24.0 increased the amount of leads generated from the visitors on their site by 63% with this one single lead flow. So those are two pretty similar use cases. One single lead flow across the entire website. Basically breaking down all of the walls and all the dead ends on the site. I want to talk about one more which is Aquaspresso Co za they build, sell and rent coffee machines to home and businesses. What Aquaspresso did is what we actually aspire to help you do, which is they actually created several lead flows. Not one, not two, but actually 12. But the key difference here is every single one of those lead flows was hyper contextualized to where the visitor was in the journey. So they have a bunch of product pages. They created one lead flow per product page that offered an opportunity for that visitor to reach out to request more information or get a PDF of the specs of that coffee machine. They were able to increase the amount of leads generated from their visitors by 128% by simply creating additional lead flows and being very, very, very targeted with their lead flows. Cool. So we talked about what a lead flow is. Three step conversion funnel all squished into one. We took a look at a few examples of lead flows and again the key thing here is I want to Talk about AquaSpresso Co ZA12 hyper contextualized lead flows. Now let's actually take a look at what's involved in building one. This is it. Again, just to reiterate, three single steps all in one. And I'm going to make a bold claim that you can get one set up and live on your website in five minutes. I've timed it. I sat on the phone with customers and we've timed it. And if anybody gives it a shot after this and takes them more than five minutes, let me know. We have a bunch of work to do in the product and to make it much faster. All right. The first step of building a lead flow and actually creating one is we choose what type of lead flow do we want to actually put on our website. So the examples that I've shown you are the bottom right hand corner one. So you'll see it here. We have additional options of lead flows as well. We have a pop up box which takes over the whole screen. Arguably a little bit intrusive, but there are definitely use cases for where we might want to use a popover box. We have drop down banner, slide inbox left and slide inbox right. And super open to feedback here if anyone has any additional types that they'd like to see. This is really where we have a lot of work to do. This is an example of a bottom right, but here's a great example of a use case for a drop down banner. So here what we're doing is we're actually offering a subscription to a webinar for everyone who comes to our site. This will appear just at the top of the website for anybody who comes to the site. And this is actually today's date. There's not actually a webinar. This is the session that we're in right now. So sorry you can't actually convert on this. But again we have the callout which grabs the user's attention. Super minimum. Takes up very, very little space but offers just enough, just enough information. That they can actually know what's involved here. Once they interact with the callout, we then show them more information. My pretty face, not really. And we offer them an opportunity to convert on the form. Then we have the actual thank you. And thank yous are usually under appreciated or undervalued. Once we have the lead's information, we kind of move on with our day and we say, cool, got that in the bank, ready to move on. But this is where you actually have the opportunity to delight the visitor, offer them the resource that they requested, offer them an additional call to action, or if it's me converting, I would always appreciate an emoji. Cool. Let's actually take a look at each of the steps. The callout is the first step, so it's the one that's going to grab the visitor's attention. And this is where we have an opportunity to offer a little bit of information, upload an image to get their attention. So in this case we're offering the COVID of the ebook that we're at, giving us a download here we can choose the title and the button and the color. So obviously the color here is a little special. We either want it to blend in or we can actually have it stand out and be super visible in the bottom right or bottom left of the website. In this case, once we have crafted our call out, we've built the call out here, get the user's attention, visitors attention, we then move on to the form. So here we offer a little bit more information. We can add additional fields like first name, last name, phone, and if you're an existing HubSpot marketing customer, you can add any fields you want that are available in your contact property database. We've crafted our callout, built our form, and then we move on to the thank you message. So here's an opportunity for you to deliver delight, give them the resources they requested. So in this case an ebook, here we have a link that's clicked to download and we offer them an opportunity to follow us on Twitter or tell us their friends. This is pretty standard in the conversion funnel of a standard inbound funnel, but here we have condensed it all into one single widget and then we move on to the option, oh, that shouldn't be in there. I'm joking. We're actually working on probably my most favorite feature of lead flows right now, which is the ability to extend the conversation beyond your website. So beyond those three steps on the website and actually set send a follow up email straight into the visitor's inbox and actually deliver a delight there. So in this case we're sending them. We would send them a link to the ebook they requested or just simply say, hey, thank you so much for getting involved with our website with our company. Let me know if you have any additional questions. I'm more than happy to help out here. We're actually building on the relationship and we're giving them an opportunity to get involved with us. This is where the relationship actually really, really stands out. If you're an existing HubSpot marketing customer, this is already possible. We'll get into that in a little bit. But for everyone using our free suite of tools, this is really, really where I'm most excited. And then we move on to the options. There's a few options here, but in particular I want to focus on just a couple. So the lead flow location is what I talked about before. Two of our examples blanketed their entire website with one single lead flow. But we have the option to target specific pages, series of pages or a bunch of pages. This is where I actually want you guys to focus on most. If you're building a lead flow, you really, really want to consider where is the opportunity that I can offer the most value here? If you're using Google Analytics, I would imagine quite a few of you are. There's actually a report that they offer under audience and user flows, names actually unrelated. This is my dad's Google Analytics account. So like a lot of you, I would expect you build websites for your friends and family. I am not paying a huge amount of attention to it. Obviously these red waterfalls are bad. This is a place where people are actually leaving the website entirely. They didn't find value, they didn't convert. They're actually just exiting the site entirely. So in this case, the polished concrete page. My dad does flooring for businesses and residential. I'm actually going to implement a lead flow on that page and it's going to be hyper targeted to that specific product. Offer additional information or even just be human and actually offer say, hey, fill out this, we'll contact you, we'll give you a call, we'll tell you more about it. This is really where we have the opportunity to be inbound. And if you have HubSpot mark, there's a bunch of reports in here that can help you leverage and learn where people are falling off. The next one is lead flow triggers. So right now we have three. There's a bunch of work we're doing here to expand on these. A lot of these are focused on waiting until the Moment is right. So if a user comes to your website, very, very. The very moment that they come to your website, you don't want to hit them with a conversion funnel covers the entire screen, says, hey, before you go any further, give me your details. The first one we have here waits until the user has engaged with the website, has scrolled halfway down the page, and then we actually trigger the lead flow and we say, hey, you're engaged with this content. We think you might be interested in this additional information or these additional resources. The next one is actually really, really great paired with the popover box that we talked about before. So the popover box is a little, I mean, it could be a little intrusive, but the exit intent only triggers when someone's actually about to close the page. This is actually a great opportunity to offer a coupon code if you have a product or service that you're selling or a subscription to your blog, if it's on your blog. So you can target the entire blog with the lead flow targets that I talked about before. The last one is time delay, arguably not super relevant to engagement on the page, but it does have a minimum of seven seconds to give the visitor the opportunity to actually get situated on the website. Learn a little bit of what, Learn a little about. Excuse me, Learn a little of what we're about. And of course, at the very, very end, we have an opportunity to take a look at what the lead flow looks like, what it will appear like on desktop, tablet, mobile. We can interact with it and take a look at how it would work with each of the steps individually tied together. The key thing here is we talked about the original, the standard conversion funnel that you might find in a normal marketing suite. At the moment, we're talking about creating a landing page, creating templates, connecting domain names. There's actually none of that involved here. Delete flow, location. We have the opportunity to target the pages and we don't have an embed code that we need to put on the website. So once the account's actually set up, all you do is just say, I want it to appear on this page. And it does. That's what computers are for. They do it all for you. So we have the opportunity to be hyper contextualized, really, really active, and add in additional ones if we see that there are people struggling on certain pages on our website and actually just try things out. All right, so what happens next once we have a lead flow conversion? Well, we actually create a contact record in the account. There's nothing special there but obviously we're capturing the cookie at this account same time. So the visitor. So the contact inside of your account will have all of the page view information. You'll be able to learn how they navigate around your website, how they found you, which is pretty crucial. What's working, what's not working. And this is something that we think is actually pretty key and available in the free tools as well. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. This is me if you tell. No. If you have HubSpot marketing, professional or Enterprise right now you can actually leverage lead flows to trigger workflows. So you can actually create a hyper contextualized workflow, nurture that lead all the way to a paying customer right from within your account. There's no connections necessary. It's all integrated for you. Simply use the form submission filter and with HubSpot marketing, basic performance, Professional and Enterprise you have list segmentation. The lead flows work right alongside there as well. So just underneath the form submission filter you'll be able to create a list of all of the leads that have submitted a lead flow on your website. And if you are not using HubSpot marketing, basic, professional or enterprise, we actually have a native integration in the free tier with mailchimp. So you can actually send all of the leads that submit your lead flows into a specific list or lists inside of mailchimp and market to them. Further nurture them to become a paying customer. Cool. I actually think that last bit is pretty cool. So do lead flows rule all? Should I nuke my entire website and actually just turn it into a bunch of lead flows? Not necessarily the real key of lead flows here. What we're trying to do is create a way for you to break down all the walls on your website, get rid of all those dead ends and be human and actually reach out to the visitor. I'm sure that, I mean it happens to me all the time. I'm sure that it happens to quite a few of you. Where you enter a shop and the first thing that happens is somebody shows up right in front of you and says, hey, can I help you out with anything? It's not really that helpful because you haven't had the opportunity to get situated, you haven't had the opportunity to engage, you haven't been given a chance to actually come up with some questions that you want to ask. This is exactly what we're trying to do with leadflows. What's much more helpful is if a sales assistant waits for me to navigate around the web, the site or, sorry, the shop interact with some items, actually come up with some questions. That's exactly what we're doing with leadflows. We're giving you a way to build a really, really helpful widget that you can put across your entire website and just be human and actually reach out to those people and offer a place for them to say, hey, all right, my CTA to you, if you're not already a HubSpot marketing customer. We now have HubSpot marketing free and I am really, really proud and really happy to have this tier. We've been working on it for a really long time and Christopher o' Donnell talked a bit about it. Lead Flows is available. Exactly what I've shown you today is available for free inside of HubSpot Marketing free. Head on over to bitly.com marketingfree to learn a little bit more. If you're using HubSpot's free CRM or free sales tools, the Marketing tier free tier is totally accessible to you as well. You can integrate it all inside of one account and actually leverage the lead flows to pump really, really contextual and really ready leads into the CRM for your sales team. If you're already a HubSpot marketing customer, lead Flows is available to you, albeit a little buried. We're working on bringing it right inside of the nav for you as well. Head on over to bitly.com lead flows to actually learn a little bit more about that. Again, totally free for anyone who's paying for HubSpot marketing already and totally free for anyone who's not with the free marketing tier as well. Thanks everybody. Pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest of Inbound.