<p>Hi Coleman, </p> <p>Great idea - videos always tend to perform better on landing pages as they are simply better at grabbing and holding the user's attention. You might even want to try making the video a downloadable take-home asset to gate. This way, you users still are getting all that helpful, convenient, and engaging info plus they are entering your pipeline. Having a take home asset should help boost your conversions as well. <br /></p>

<p>Hi there Anuj, </p> <p>We actually used the same form for the "schedule a demo" and "download free demo video" CTAs. So they both had the email form field. The main differentiator for the conversions was the idea that our users could download a take home asset as opposed to having to coordinate scheduling options with the agency in question - making it more convenient for the users while still collecting all the same info. <br /></p> <p>Make sense?</p>

<p>Great point Rachel. As Garrett said that most success we've seen has come from better understanding where your buyer is in the funnel. Often times marketers are bouncing users away with high-friction high-contact-info forms. Wherever these are on your page, more often than not a preliminary user isn't interested in giving up that much information. It's better to ask for nothing but an email and get them into your drip cadence to slowly nurture them over a long period of time. The key is not to jump the gun. You don't have to schedule an intro meeting on your first interaction - in fact shooting for that will probably end up hurting your conversions. </p>

<p>Hey Paul, </p> <p>I'm glad you're going to be testing out these implementations on your own - great to hear! I've found that it usually pays off - even for those of us that are slammed - to invest an extra day or so in initial set up and prospecting so that once we automate or formalize a system we can consistently rely on a certain number of opportunities coming in each week. </p> <p>I think there's a lot of psychology and philosophy behind these tests that can be expanded on by other optimizers and other tests. There's always more room for customization and oprtimization after all ! <br /></p>

<p>Hi Juan - great to hear that you loved the post so much! And Canva is a great tool for quick and easy creatives - I use it myself for creating helpful infographics when I feel screenshots aren't quite engaging enough. </p> <p>I'm just waiting for somebody to email me with one of these letterheads - that'll be an exciting moment :) </p>

<p>Hey Anthony - thanks for the comment! </p> <p>So true - we all want to scale up our systems to maximize our growth opportunities. But the quality over quantity rule always wins. </p> <p>The simple truth is that receiving cold emails can be annoying and harassing. We want to change this process to make it far more about relationship building and continued partnerships. After all, each guest post opportunity we win is a chance to better myself as a writer and a marketer - I owe my prospects more than respect for these growth opportunities alone! Not to mention the backlinks ;) <br /></p>

<p>No problem Brendon - as a general rule when checking out marketing and email automation tools I've noticed one of two trends: </p> <p>1. A lot of big name automation tools like Marketo and such market themselves as the superior software because of their granular tracking and multi-touch lead scoring. But for the most part what I've noticed is the only thing they can <em>guarantee </em>is a <strong>really</strong> high price...</p> <p>2. The other tools are usually less sophisticated (pitchbox is no lead scoring monster like Marketo) but by combining smaller more focused tools (like combining pitchbox with growbots) usually gets you a more customized system AND is usually going to be drasticaly cheaper than going with a comprehesneive automation software. </p> <p>Just some tips to keep in mind when checking out different tools - hope it helps :) <br /></p>

<p>Hi there Josh - and thanks for the repost on <a href="https://inbound.org/article/how-we-increased-our-guest-post-outreach-reply-rate-from-8-to-34" rel="nofollow">Inbound</a> by the way ;) I really love how much you engaged with the piece - I'm glad you got so much out of it. </p> <p>In terms of those initial variables that we changed I actually tested each of those changes one at a time (but on smaller time scales). For the sake of making the post more reader friendly I jumbled each of those into their own "test" focused on a macro solution. For the most part we were already using the first name insertion whenever we could (but because I was scraping email and contact info manually, I wouldn't find a name for every opp, so I would default to "Hi there to the {COMPANY} Content Team!" if I couldn't find anyone). </p> <p>So in terms of actually improvements the header actually made the biggest personalization impact, given that I was already using (or trying to use) a first name address in I'd say about 70% of my emails. </p> <p>To your second point: yes, you caught me using an inaccurate screenshot - I didn't always use the "because" sentence in isolation but it looks like I pulled an email screenshot that was in between tests instead of one from before I ever started testing. </p> <p>--</p> <p>I really like your point about offering a super specific blog post and providing the context of how it's new and relevant to their site - that's an awesome tactic! And I like how cheeky it is by not actually having the topic in mind until you get a positive response. </p> <p>What this post doesn't address is our continued testing after we hit the magic 34%. I actually automated these outreach emails and added second and third follow emails to the cadence - which continued to increase our response rates. But because of the automation I found it easier to keep the outreach scaleable by having a list of topics prepared and outlined. This way once we got a positive reply we could get straight to writing the piece instead of having to pitch new topics once we get our foot in the door. </p> <p>I really like your idea - it's time efficient and value-oriented, but I think at scale it might start to slow down your actual production once the positive replies start flooding your inbox. I mean - heck - I had to freeze our campaign because we had too many guest posts opportunities coming in and our content queue was backed up for the next 3-4 months. I'm only one man and can only write so much after all ;) haha. </p> <p>Thanks again for the awesome comments and repost!</p>

<p>Congrats Segrio! Those are some crazy stats - I'd love to see how you are mining your outreach data! Your stellar performance proves that success comes from killer segmentation ;)</p>

<p>Hi Nick, </p> <p>Thanks for the kind words of praise :) I actually added a second and third follow up email to the sequence once I scaled up and automated our system via PItchbox (see the above comment for clarification). The second email bumped our reply rate about the same as it did yours. But what was really surprising was how effective the third follow up email was - but that's a post for another day I hope :) </p> <p>In terms of our brand already being recognized as a Moz partner - while that's true, we've used the same system in email outreach for our clients who don't have the same authoritative brand and you'd be surprised to see that they also have massive response rates. While authority is important, what is really impressive in a cold outreach is how personalized your offer is. </p> <p>But authority and name dropping always helps!<br /></p>

<p>Hi there Igor, </p> <p>Those are some awesome stats! We use Pitchbox in tandem with Growbots ourselves. Our 34% reply rate was actually before I automated or scaled up the process. I was sending about 20 emails per segmented vertical (so almost 160 total) and was maintaining my 34% reply rate. But once we automated and scaled up our email outreach our reply rate actually kept climbing!<br /></p>

<p> Any other psychological tricks or innovative tactics you use to get more responses? I'd love to hear them :)</p>