Uncategorized

Social Conversions: The Launch Story of BO.LT

by on October 7, 2011

Nobody in this industry has been in the conversion rate optimization game as long as my brother Jeffrey and I have. Yet, brothers Matthew and Jamie Roche are responsible for many organizations beginning to test. They founded Offermatica (which is today’s Adobe Test & Target). So when the Roche brothers decided that they were ready to start their next project, BO.LT, you assume they’d  know something about speaking to their audience and converting them into customers; especially since the product was free.

The launch plan:

Basic mechanics:
When people came to BO.LT, it was a closed Beta, and they left their email address to receive invite codes.  They were told that their code would be sent over in a few days, but that it would come faster if the invite were shared.  This is a fairly standard, and effective, mechanism to increase viral demand.

What is BO.LT?
BO.LT lets you remix pages and share them with the people you want to reach. Once you BO.LT a url they make a copy of the page and run it on very advanced content delivery network that is tuned for incredibly fast page serving and incredibly fast editing and sharing. When you put a page on BO.LT, it is a copy. Don’t worry, the original page on the original site is still safe. Your page, however, is nimble, changeable, and completely under your control. The service includes fabulous analytics as well. This is a great way to launch new landing pages or make changes to existing pages for A/B testing.

The BO.LT launch twist:
You could use the “RED” BO.LT editor to remix the invite prior to retweeting or sharing to increase its odds of being shared.

Social Conversions:
The results would seem to show us that when it comes to social conversions no one knows their audience better than the members of that audience.

Would you have predicted that this would be one of the best performing pages?

The Darth Vader version was the top invite: http://bo.lt/cqpzs was shared 617 times.

The top converting page was a remix that converted nearly 8x better than the original page designed by BO.LT. 100% of the top ten most shared invites were remixes and within the top 100, 60% personalized.
About 6% of all invites were remixed. At least 700 invites were forwarded at least once.

BO.LT had versions of their page that were translations into Japanese (at least 5 versions), Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Tagalog (Phillipines), and more. Translated pages had 2x  the conversion rate of un-remixed pages.

Check out some of the other great BO.LT remixes:

Does this have you rethinking your social conversion strategy? I suggest it should.

{ 0 comments }

Testing – What’s the Big Idea?

May 20, 2011

Is yours the typical company launching 2-5 tests a month, struggling to eke out more from your marketing optimization program, and wasting critical marketing resources of your team and website traffic? That’s the result of not focusing in on the Big Idea! How much should you be testing? A mid-size company can easily handle 30-50 [...]

Read the full article →

FaceBook Advertising – Might it Be Broken?

April 27, 2011

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising.  However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising.  Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed. If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads. Most [...]

Read the full article →

Content Marketing: Where’s The Value?

April 13, 2011

After the first dot-com bust, “content is king” was the rallying cry of any competent Web worker. Back then this revelation was novel online. Soon after, this mantra became a cliché. As it often goes with clichés, they start out as something true and meaningful. Eventually, the words become common, outlive their value, and are [...]

Read the full article →

Play the Online Marketing Game Like “Charlie Hustle”

March 1, 2011

With Major League Baseball’s spring training under full force, it inspires me to look at how we approach our “online marketing game.” We can learn a lot about winning “conversions” from how the game is played. Most baseball people will tell you that you can win the game with the “long” ball or with the [...]

Read the full article →

How to Prove That Your Designer Is Costing You Money {4:00 video}

January 14, 2011

Often times, marketers approach me to tell me they think something is wrong with their page but they aren’t sure how to convince their designer or management that their are any issues. In this four-minute video, I share a simple technique and how to use attention mapping software like Feng-GUI.com to prove to your designer [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries