Editor at University of Alberta, Canada
The University of Alberta in Edmonton is one of Canada's top teaching and research universities, with an international reputation for excellence across the humanities, sciences, creative arts, business, engineering, and health sciences.
This case about the application and results of the Qualaroo Nudge™ was covered in depth in online marketer extraordinaire Neil Patel’s blog, which you can read here.
The news section of the University of Alberta had close to 50,000 unique page views per month, but there was no corresponding subscribership increase via our email newsletter, which had a recap of the news stories published on the site. In one year since its launch, there were fewer than 500 subscribers, despite having an integrated call to action for signing up on the story pages and a few other pages on the website.
The call to action prompted visitors to fill up a short form with name and email address. Our target audience was campus students and staff but we also received traffic in the form of people who were searching for certain research terms or names. Some readers were leaving after reading just one story.
We wanted a simple way to promote our email to engage the readers who were already reading the news and were interested in information about UAlberta or on any topic they read on the website.
We implemented a Qualaroo Nudge™ on the site, which was set to appear to those readers who stayed on a story page for more than 10 seconds. It had the following prompt to ask users if they were interested in signing up for the newsletter:
The response rate increased within nine months:
It took only a few days for more subscribers to start rolling in. Where the rate of subscription was just 1-2 per day, now it had risen to 10, and even 15 on some days. Our subscriber list has grown by almost 500% within the span of just one year. Since the Nudge™ was ‘short and sweet’, the sign-up rate rose to 20% and continues to remain at this level, validating the effectiveness of the Qualaroo Nudge™.
The simpler the Nudge™, the quicker it is to implement it, investing very little development time, because of Qualaroo’s no-code deployment. Trying something new increases the chances of attaining your goals, if the old ways don’t work.
The mobile version of your Nudge™ needs to be created. A large portion of visitors to our responsive site are via mobile now, even though desktop views still remain high. Implementing a mobile-friendly feature to the mobile-origin audience can deliver big results and help to shape future marketing plans.
Speaking of future marketing plans, explore other subscription and lead capture cases as time goes by after the first implementation of the Nudge™. Some may work, others won’t, and some might need a little tweaking. It’s a learning experience for you as well as your target audiences, who may not know what they like unless it appears in front of them. Trial and error can get you gold.
“It can be difficult at a content-rich organization or company to identify and pinpoint the right business goal with a client.” That’s why even small tweaks to content like Nudge™, sidebar popups, or other calls to action for guiding the visitor towards a bigger goal can vastly improve conversion rates.