The “baby steps” principle of marketing that works
Did you ever see the comedy “What About Bob”?
Bill Murray plays Bob Wiley, a guy who’s so paranoid that his fear basically paralyzes him.
He’s afraid to get on elevators… Ride a bus… Or even touch anything out in public because he thinks he’ll get sick and die.
Early in the movie, his shrink reveals the secret to conquering fear:
Baby steps.
Bob realizes that all he has to do is take tiny little steps, and he can overcome his fears:
Bob: “…baby step onto the elevator… baby step into the elevator… I’m in the elevator.”
[doors close]Bob: “AHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Well, almost…
Anyway… This idea is EXTREMELY important when it comes to your email marketing.
What a lot of marketers do is something like this:
They write a blog post about “weight loss for yoga.”
And when people click through to read the article…
BAM!
They hit you with a popup form offering a free instant download for “17 ways to lose 15 pounds in 30 days.”
This is the marketing equivalent of standing on one side of a huge chasm, and their customer is on the other side. And they’re YELLING at them:
“Come on, just jump already! I promise I’ll catch you!”
The disconnect between what they WANTED (“weight loss for yoga”) and the offer (“here’s a PDF with a bunch of other weight loss tips you might like”) is too great.
A few will subscribe—but most won’t.
The solution is:
Baby steps.
Instead of offering a generic weight loss ebook as a lead magnet, create something that helps the reader take the very next small step.
Like a video showing how to perform 3 of the trickier (but most effective) yoga poses.
Then offer THAT in the blog post.
“…baby step… see yoga poses.”
This technique is called a “content upgrade.” And I’ve seen it increase signup conversions 300% to 500% on a single blog post.
It’s more work, for sure. But even if you just do this for your most popular 5-10 blog posts, you’re going to get a TON more email subscribers every month.
Typically, the hardest part of this is getting your email software to send out so many different lead magnets. There are ways to do it, but they’re hacky and make a mess in your autoresponder system.
That’s why I was so excited when I got an email from the creator of Thrive Leads.
Thrive is the best WordPress plugin out there for creating landing pages and email signup pages.
They just added a feature called “Asset Delivery” that makes it super simple to send out these “baby step” content upgrades to your new subscribers.
You just upload the lead magnet to your WordPress site and Thrive sends it out for you.
I’m going to be using this strategy a LOT more often myself now.
Thing is, the pricing on Thrive is about to DOUBLE. (Makes sense—they’ve been undercharging for what this software does.)
Here’s how you can lock in the lower price—and maybe even get Thrive for free:
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Buy Thrive here in the next 24 hours. (Yep, that’s an affiliate link. I’m proud to promote this tool.)
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Enter my Thrive giveaway here and share your “lucky URL” for more chances to win. If your name comes up, I’ll reimburse you for your Thrive license.
Hurry scurry! The clock is ticking…