How we gathered 2,7K emails & 6,2K page views in 72hrs spending only $150
If you’re a friend of mine, you’ve probably already seen this post show up in your Facebook newsfeed recently.
If you’re not a friend and have still seen it, that’s pretty awesome!
At a very early stage in our company’s life cycle we decided to invest in content marketing. We knew we were dealing with a sensitive demographic and felt we could easily connect with our audience.
We believed we could build ourselves up as thought leaders in the parenting space. Gaining trust with our community as we work on our mission to positively impact every family on the planet.
With that in mind we went on to setup a blog where we pushed to create fresh unique content daily.
The blog saw moderate success after taking it from 0–25K monthly visitors in our first 4 months. Although it was a good start, it was not that explosive growth you would expect from a startup.
After hearing about the culture of experimentation from some of our favourite startup’s that nail content marketing, such as Buffer, Hubspot & MOZ, we decided to setup our own culture of experimentation at Funifi.
We started running tests on various elements of the blog, all to try and find that trigger that would give us the explosive growth we were looking for.
A few of the tests we ran were:
- Post length
- Images per post
- Stock Images Vs Illustrations
- Infographics
- and the list goes on…
All the tests we ran led us to new findings and helped give slight incremental increases in traffic & conversions, but still none delivered what we were looking for.
Then came the test...
Out of all of the experiments we had run, none came close to the success of the “Parenting Test” we setup recently.
As a startup your time is extremely limited and as such at Funifi we always strive to find tasks that require the least amount of time that will yield the maximum results in anything we experiment with.
We had discussed the idea of running a parenting test many times before but never really gave it a priority, as we were concerned that the time required would not be worth the results we would achieve.
The motivation/justification to finally take it forward came after a recent fundraising trip to London where I was lucky enough to attend a Product Hunt meet up at the Google Campus in Shoreditch.
The keynote speaker was Juan Cartagena from Traity who are on a mission to create a world where we can trust one another.
Juan spoke of the various hurdles Traity faced, as all startup’s do starting out, but what stood out in his keynote was the hustle to their first million users.
As Juan put it…
“Telling an investor you have 1 million anything is a great conversation starter”
and they did whatever was necessary to get their first million signups, even if at times it was not what they really wanted to be doing.
So as you can guess, Traity’s initial traction came largely from those familiar personality tests we have all seen around the web and filling our Facebook news feeds.
I was embarrassed for humanity when we started researching into running personality tests and how popular they were.
-Traity CEO Juan Cartagena-
Juan joked that he was embarrassed for humanity and was shocked when he found out “personality test” was the no. 1 searched term in the early days of Facebook graph search, as well as one of the top searched for apps in the Apple & Google Play app stores after the usual suspects such as Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
Hearing the success from a fellow startup, as they “hacked” their way to traction and now knowing what was possible, we took the plunge…
The Test
When we decided to run the test it just so happened that we had an article prepared to go out on our blog that week asking 6 questions, each with 4 possible answers (a, b, c or d) which gave you a parenting style at the end of the article.
The results depended on which answer you selected most frequently for the questions between (a, b, c or d). If the majority of your answers were “A” you would have the parenting style “A”.
For us at Funifi this was not an ideal setup for a parenting test as we had discussed that as a company we would like to take a more serious approach to the parenting test, but we all agreed that this light-hearted quick fix would end up being our test.
If this test was successful it would justify the time to spend creating a more thorough parenting test, working with psychologists & child care professionals.
As you can see there was a lot of testing going on ☺
With Wordpress already setup for our blog and the test ready to go, all we then needed was a simple survey plugin and add a little design for a Funifi finish!
We spent a little extra time on the design as we wanted to separate ourselves from the ordinary personality test and as a team we strongly believe in the power of good design.
We wanted our test to be fast, engaging and shareable!
So here is what your results looked like
And here is what we prepared to share your results through your social channels
Distribution
Once we had the test setup we were ready to go, but what about distribution?
We started out for a lack of a better word by spamming all our family & friends through Facebook chat and encouraged them to take the test & share the results. (I think I chatted to more people on that specific day than I have since I created my Facebook account).
We also all shared our results and tagged friends who were in our target demographic on the post for them & their friends to notice.
This created a good buzz amongst friends and acquaintances and helped start a viral loop, as a lot of mutual friends were seeing the test pop-up on various friends’ feeds and as a result took the test themselves and shared it with their network.
Halfway through the test we realised we could do more for social sharing and introduced a pop-up to encourage sharing the results. After the user spent 10s on the results page they were greeted with a message to share their results that had been optimised for Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest.
We then started targeting bloggers & parents through twitter encouraging them to take the test, as well as putting out our results through other various distribution channels such as Reddit & various parenting forums.
This worked great and gave us good traction but our target market for the campaign was UK and having our headquarters based in Cyprus we wanted the campaign to have a little more focus.
So as a final push we setup a highly targeted PPC campaign with Facebook ads and set a budget of $150.
We targeted a small closely knit demographic in the UK in order to try and encourage the same viral loop we had seen amongst our friends & family, which gave us the cherry on top!
There were other small adjustments made here and there but that was the setup in a nutshell.
What started out as a test of a test turned out to be a really successful experiment that we will most definitely be running again in the future as user aquisition becomes more and more of a priority for us at Funifi.
So without further ado the result…
The Results
The test received over 6,2K pageviews from 4,8K users. Our bounce rate and avg time on site was skewed as it was a 1 page test and directed you to another page for the results which unfortunately did not have GA tracking.
With the test we collected around 2,7K email addresses, but started out in a panic as we had tested the app across all browsers but neglected to test on mobile version for the submission of the test results.
We placed field validation on the submission form however the specific validation method did not work on mobile and the first 100 people or so, viewed their results without signing up.
Working with the test still live we were lucky to find a work around relatively quickly and although not nearly at the scale of buzzfeed, the adrenaline of working under pressure when your post starts going viral was exciting.
The test was initially optimised for mobile reasonably well but once the results started coming in we scrambled to give it a more app like experience after seeing that 71% of our traffic was coming from mobile devices.
How do the results compare?
Prior to the test we acquired a mere 100 signups for our blogs newsletter per month when we were hitting 25K monthly visits, so this was a big step up and a big “aha” moment for us.
So following the test in true experimentation culture, here is a little post experiment analysis we did.
Things we did well:
- Created a fun and simple parenting test.
- The design of the test & result pages.
- Mobile optimisation.
- Images for personality type’s to share through social channels (Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest).
- Optimised links for social sharing which included the images for each personality type.
- Spamming ☺
- A highly targeted PPC campaign.
Things we could have done better:
- Integrated the test with Facebook to have the users activity visible in their news feeds.
- Designed for mobile first (71% of the participants came from a mobile device).
- Base the results on more than 1 questions answer.
- Included a reference to our app in the footer from the beginning.
- Added Google analytics on all pages of the test & results.
Things we could try next time:
- Have the email optional to view results.
- Encourage social sharing to view the results.
- Try additional distribution channels.
- Create an i-frame embed code for bloggers to embed the test in their sites.
How could you apply the test?
After the test we had a lot of fellow startup friends let us know they had started planning their tests and we look forward to trying them all out soon.
Do you have an idea for a test? It would be great to hear from you on twitter @andrewmichaelsa when your test is ready to try out too!
Key Takeaway
The digital media landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. With the vast amount of content available today, simply producing good content is not enough anymore.
The true winners will be the ones who not only create good content but can deliver an engaging experience in which to consume the content they put out.
Content started out as king and was overthrown by Context. Will Experiential Content with Context be the one to rule them all…
Or is there more to come?
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