How I Added 6,489 Email Subscribers in 2 Months with Qualaroo Mobile

Note: This is a contributed post from Casey Armstrong. Casey Armstrong is a full stack marketer who focuses on customer acquisition and revenue growth for startups. Along with his own projects, he leads customer growth at Connectifier and has worked with startups, such as Pivotal Tracker, Mavenlink, and Pantheon. You can connect with Casey on Twitter here.

Qualaroo Mobile is Sean Ellis’ best kept growth hack secret. [TWEET THIS]

Or something like that.

So, how about adding 38,934 email subscribers this year…from your current traffic?

I was driving. Or flying. No, maybe it was a solo walking meeting.

Who am I kidding? I was probably staring at my ceiling. The pitch black. The infinite abyss. 2:17am. When your mind is racing and your best ideas sprout. All I know is I was alone. Thinking.

We have all been there.

“Up and to the right.”

“How can I grow our email list trajectory when we already get millions of visitors each month?”

“more, More, MORE!”

It was nothing mind-blowing. Nothing TechCrunch would write about. Nothing Marc Andreesen would TweetStorm about.

But I was stoked.

How about a turnkey mobile popup survey used as an email capture form utilizing my 500,000+ untapped mobile visitors I get each month on PaleoHacks from a product I already use, which was created by a company of growth hackers whom I greatly respect?

Ok.

Enter: Qualaroo Mobile

In less than 5 minutes, I was able to create and deploy my mobile survey, which has netted me 6,489 new email subscribers (arguably, our #1 KPI) from my existing mobile traffic in only 2 months. That is a pace of nearly 40,000 this year!

All I did was simplify our web popup language and used our free cookbook as the carrot, an asset I had ready to go. I already had the Qualaroo code live on PaleoHacks (a side project, brain child of Patrick Vlaskovits), but all you need to do is add the code once on your site and you can create a myriad of surveys that all act differently.

[Sidenote #1: While giving away something for “free” seems almost par for the course these days, our reasoning was influenced by the Reciprocity Principle from Robert Cialdini’s Influence, a book that Sean Ellis recommended I read years ago, which obviously helped him craft Freemium. We sell quite a few ebooks and other products, so we want our community to be familiar with these products we sell immediately. By the way, when somebody like Sean offers you gold, you take it.]

How To Create Qualaroo Mobile Surveys

I guess we should get our hands dirty, which in this case, you don’t even need to wash them afterwards. This only takes a few minutes.

First, you obviously need a Qualaroo account.

When logged into your Dashboard, click the green “Create New Survey” button, then select “Create Mobile Survey” from the popup.

I put my call-to-action (CTA) in the “Question text” and my marketing copy in the “Description” – This is personal preference and you can see my example below, but I like how the CTA is in bold and I can fit more text in the Description. Also, I use the “Text-based answer (single line)” for the email capture.

Then, have it continue to your “Thank You” page. I keep it pretty simple here with “Thank you. Please check your email and enjoy PaleoHacks!” but would love to hear your suggestions.

[Sidenote #2: While I would love to be able to push people to additional conversion points (Facebook, products pages, etc.) with Qualaroo Mobile, I currently can only provide a Thank You message on the conversion page. I’ll keep that on my Qualaroo wish list.]

Target Survey 

Start by adding the URL where you want your survey to appear. You can have it run across your entire site, only on a subdomain, or specific pages. You can also use regular expressions. I have done all of the above. Different fit for different messages. Find what works best for you.

In this case, I am targeting 100% of my visitors, displaying the survey after 8 seconds (that way, they get some value before I ask for something), and only show once per visitor.

These are my preferences for this scenario, and again, test and optimize.

Design Survey

I’ll keep this extremely short. I unchecked the “Display a screener” option. Seemed to add another step in the funnel. No bueno for me.

Preview Survey

Here you can preview and test your survey, and view it on both portrait and landscape. Last step, click “Activate This Nudge Now” and you are live (barring you added your code).

I recommend testing your popup several times (as everything you ever launch), but you should be good to start reaping the rewards.

Final Words

While I understand that not everybody can add thousands of new email addresses (or whatever your desired action/KPI is) per month, I do know many people are not utilizing their mobile traffic in our “mobile first” world. This is the low-hanging fruit those annoying internet marketers are always blabbering about. Take advantage of this!

This “growth hack” or whatever you want to call it, can be launched, tested, optimized (or even killed), in less than a few hours of your time and only running for a few days or weeks. Hopefully, you find success and look for ways to deploy elsewhere on your sites.

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Have you experimented with Qualaroo Mobile? What are your thoughts? And any questions on the above? Feel free to hit me up on Twitter at @CaseyA about this, too.