How ConversionLab Used Email Automation to Convert Lost Traffic into $120,000

Have you ever looked at your website analytics and been disappointed by the number of people who leave your site without converting?

You’re not alone. In fact, according to ReTargeter, only 2% of website visitors convert on their first visit and 98% of visitors to your website will leave and potentially never return.

Luckily, you don’t have to just let these visitors go.

In this post, we’ll show you how Campaign Monitor customer ConversionLab used email automation to convert their lost website visitors into $120,000 in revenue, and how you can too.

Who is ConversionLab?

ConversionLab is a small consulting company that provides conversion rate optimization services from their home base in Trondheim, Norway. They help businesses generate more leads by building and optimizing advertising campaigns, landing pages, and email campaigns.

ConversionLab was founded by Rolf Inge Holden, who in a previous life was globally responsible for digital marketing at DHL Express. He built DHL’s global optimization team and optimized thousands of landing pages that drove millions in revenue for DHL.

After several years, Rolf decided to start his own consulting business. However, like all new business owners, he had a problem. He had lots of experience and knowledge, but no customers.

Being an online marketing expert, Rolf setup a website, started blogging to attract traffic, and in just a short time he was getting hundreds of visitors to his website each week.

However, Rolf suffered the same problem nearly all small business websites suffer: Even though he’s a conversion rate optimization expert and had a highly optimized site, a large portion of his traffic still wasn’t converting.

So Rolf came up with a plan to get them back.

How ConversionLab uses email automation to convert lost website visitors into customers

In order to recapture some of his lost website traffic and convert them into leads, Rolf and the team at ConversionLab devised a system that uses email automation and retargeting together to bring people back to his site and convert them into customers.

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Potential customers visit the ConversionLab website but leave without converting

Being a digital marketing expert, Rolf uses a number of channels to drive traffic to the ConversionLab website. He regularly publishes content on his blog, is active on social media, and his site is well optimized to appear in search engine rankings.

This drives several hundred people to the ConversionLab website each week and generates a handful of leads through a standard contact form.

However, the majority of people who visit the site leave without converting.

Step 2: ConversionLab uses retargeting to bring these potential customers back to the site and convert them into leads

Each person who lands on the ConversionLab website gets a small piece of code placed in their browser known as a cookie. This specific cookie is like a little signal that tells ad networks that this person has visited the ConversionLab website before and has shown interest in ConversionLab’s services.

Then, as that person browses around the web, the different advertising networks that serve ads on websites recognise that cookie and serve up ConversionLab’s advertisements.

Here’s an example of a ConversionLab advertisement on Facebook:

And here’s an example of their banner ad that showed on various websites:

Rather than just advertising ConversionLab’s services and trying to drive people back to the main site, these retargeting advertisements drove people to a 7-part conversion optimization course delivered via email.

ConversionLab knows that if their company didn’t manage to convert these prospects from the existing messages & testimonials on the website, bringing them back to the same site again isn’t likely to change that.

So instead, ConversionLab drives people to a landing page where they can subscribe to the 7-part conversion rate optimization course.

It’s much easier to convince someone to take advantage of free education than it is to convince someone to make a purchase. As a result, the email course has a significantly higher conversion rate and drives more leads.

Step 3: ConversionLab uses email automation to deliver an educational email course that converts leads into customers

Once a person enters their email address to receive the optimization tips, they are automatically added to a list in Campaign Monitor through Unbounce’s direct integration with Campaign Monitor (ConversionLab uses Unbounce to build their landing pages).

Once in the list, the prospect receives a series of 8 emails that go out over 2 weeks. These emails are automatically sent to recipients using Campaign Monitor’s email automation feature.

Want to learn more about how email automation can boost your ROI? Read on.

If you want to see all the emails, head on over to the landing page and sign up for the course. For now, here are a few of our favorites:

The welcome email

The welcome email goes out to subscribers as soon as they subscribe to the course. It clearly states the frequency of emails they can expect to receive and gets people excited for the content to come.

It also includes a clever little ask to get people to add “[email protected]” to their address book. This helps keep the emails out of people’s spam folders and ensures ConversionLab get great deliverability and open rates throughout the series.

The tips emails

Each of the 7 tips comes in a separate email over the next 14 days.

The email is optimized for click-throughs and features a prominent, well-contrasted call to action button.

The emails are built using Campaign Monitor’s drag-and-drop email builder and customized with ConversionLab’s unique colors and branding. The emails look great and instill a sense of trust that each tip will be as high-quality as the email delivering it.

The call to action email

Once each of the 7 tips emails have been sent, a final email goes out thanking people for their time and presenting a call to action to inquire about ConversionLab’s services.

Aside from being beautifully designed and well optimized for conversion (with a testimonial from a prominent client), the email is also impeccably timed.

Throughout the previous 7 emails, ConversionLab demonstrates their expertise and knowledge in the area of conversion rate optimization. By giving away free advice and educating readers on best practices, they have developed a level of authority that makes people believe Rolf and his team are experts in the field.

It’s only once they’ve built that authority and trust that they include a promotion for their services, at which point people are much more likely to convert.

If you want a step-by-step guide to email automation, read this guide.

The results

ConversionLab has seen amazing results from their automated email series, and have been kind enough to share their statistics and information.

To date, there have been 1,196 people sign up for the course and they are adding about 20 new subscribers each week. They have sent over 12,000 emails with open rates hovering at an average of 56.34%.

They’ve also seen great click-through rates, with an average CTR of 43.96% across all emails in the series. This has driven a total of 5,100 unique page views to the articles that contain the full tips.

Most importantly, however, are the leads and revenue being driven from this campaign.

To date, ConversionLab has generated high-quality leads from the campaign and have added an amazing $120,000 in revenue due to this campaign.

Considering these people had previously left the ConversionLab website likely to never return, this is essentially extra revenue ConversionLab has been able to add to their bottom line simply by writing a few emails and setting up an automated workflow to send them out.

Discover other automated series you can use to bring in even more revenue for your business.

Wrap up

When used strategically, email automation is an amazing tool that you can set up once and then passively drive in revenue for your business for years to come.

Modern email marketing tools like Campaign Monitor make this easy for marketers of any skill level, so there’s no reason why you can’t set up an automated email campaign for your business today.