TAM 056: Lead Capture With The Thrive Themes Suite
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Everybody needs lead capture on their website. Thrive Themes offers some great tools to make this process easy and effective.
I have been getting a lot of questions lately about Thrive Leads, the Thrive Content Builder and Thrive Themes. So, in episode 56 I break down all of the Thrive Themes products and how they all fit together and how they can help you with your lead capture.
There are several different products in the Thrive Themes suite and several different ways to purchase, as one off plugin purchases or as a bundle on a yearly subscription.
In this podcast I break down each of the components, what they do and how you might use them to up your lead capture and conversions.
We Chat About:
- Thrive WordPress Themes
- Thrive Content Builder and Landing Pages
- Thrive Leads
- Thrive Headline Optimizer
- Thrive Clever Widgets
If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.
If you have any questions or just need a tip from the ninjas, join us in the Automation Nation private Facebook group.
Links Mentioned In The Show
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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast! Where we talk about how to design, automate and scale you're business to the next level using sales and marketing automation. You can find out all the tips, tactics and techniques you need to get more customers and sell more stuff over at theactivemarkerter.com. Now, here's your host, Barry Moore.
Barry : Welcome to the Active Marketer Podcast! The podcast that's all about sales funnels and marketing automation. I'm your host, Barry Moore, and this week we're gonna talk a little bit about lead capture using the thrive themes suite. I get asked about this a lot and there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding out there. So we're gonna talk a little bit about why I think it's so good and all the things it can do for you which is the thing that most people haven't taken the time to dig in a little bit and find out. So I think it's a super powerful lead capture tool and also a great tool for creating landing pages and sales pages and thank you pages etc. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what it can do for you, how it all works, how the ecosystem all fits together.
But before we do that, of course, the shameless social proof segment. This is where I read out your reviews from iTunes and Stitcher. This week we've got a five star review from the Australian iTunes store from Mel Telly. She says, "Five stars, informative and helpful. I find this podcast very helpful in understanding the capability of sales and marketing automation as well as the guest suggestions for ways to do things. I find Barry's tips equally helpful. Well done on a great show." Well thank you very much, Mel! I appreciate you taking the time to leave us a review. And if you'd like me to read out your review on the next show head over to iTunes or Stitcher and leave us a review and I will read it out on a future show.
And now, just before we get into the main part of the show I also wanted to highlight a bit of news. Recently Active Campaign has released a Chrome extension for Gmail that allows you to hook your Active Campaign account up to your Gmail account so that when you're within Gmail a little side window will pop open, you hover over someone's email address a little side window will pop open. It will interrogate Active Campaign and bring back all the Active Campaign information about that person. So what deals they have, what tags they have, what lists they're on, what automations they're in. And you can update that information straight from within Gmail. Pretty cool. Pretty powerful. So if you want to download that extension for Gmail, head over to the show notes at theactivemarketer.com/56 and the links will be there in the show notes, take you straight to the Chrome extension. You can just whack it straight into your Gmail account. It's a pretty powerful tool.
All right, so let's get into this week's episode. All about lead capture with the thrive themes suite.
Lead capture obviously plays a very big part in your marketing mix. Growing your list which is easily one of the most valuable assets in your business and we want to be able to do that in the easiest and most efficient manner possible, which explains the popularity of a number of tools out there for lead capture, like Lead Pages, InstaPage, Unbounce, OptInMus, etc. SumoMe is another popular one. Those all make it easy for you to create dedicate opt in opportunities on your website, whether that's a side bar widget, or in some cases a dedicate landing page, or a sales page, or even a thank you page, webinar registration pages, etc.
So there's a lot of tools out there, but I want to talk about one suite of tools in particular because I get a lot of questions on this and there seems to be a lot of misconceptions around what it can and can't do, so we're going to talk a little bit about the thrive of Leads Suite. Now, what it is, what it can do, what it can't do, how it compares to those other products out in the market and you can put it to work in your business as well.
So Thrive Themes is a company that creates a number of different products for WordPress. As the name implies, they create WordPress themes, so part of their product offering is, I believe as the time of recording, there's about ten different WordPress themes that you can use to create your website. So, as everybody knows, who's been using WordPress for more than a few minutes, you download WordPress and then to customise it to make it look nice for how you want to run your website or your business, you need a theme. There's lots of different places you can go and get themes, some popular ones like Genesis, Elegant Themes, really create nice looking themes for your WordPress set up. But what you're going to find is, as soon as you put those in, you're going to need a bunch of other ... if you're in the marketing game, you're marketing your products, you're going to need a bunch of other marketing plugins that go along with that. Social sharing buttons, for example, that kind of groovy stuff. You might want to do content upgrades, where you have a blog post, and then to unlock and extra asset, they have to put their name and email address in. So, you're going to get a theme and then you're going to start adding plugin after plugin after plugin to make it kind of do what you want in a marketing environment.
The great thing about the Thrive Themes is that they have all that marketing stuff built in to the theme itself, so, social sharing buttons, social media images, when someone shares ... all that kind of groovy stuff. So I remember when I switched over to Thrive Themes for my website, I was able to kill of maybe five or ten other plugins that I also had installed in my WordPress theme because they were rolled straight into the themes as well. So the themes are very marketing biassed. So if you're in the marketing game, information marketing, or product marketing, whatever that is. Those themes are specifically set up to market. So they have a lot of the marketing goodness roll baked right into the theme. So, even if you like your theme right now, it might be worth checking out the themes that are available from Thrive Themes.
But the two things that I really want to talk about that they create, as well as the themes, are some lead capture tools. So, if you're familiar with Lead Pages at all, you know, Lead Pages, Unbounce, InstaPage, they're all services that allow you log into their service, use their little template builder to create a landing page of some description or use one of their prebuilt templates. And then you obviously publish that page or drive traffic to that page and there's a lead capture opportunity on that page. So you know, "Sign up for my [inaudible 00:07:01]!" "Sign up for this free video series," or "Sign up for my webinar." Put their name and their email address in and that name and email address gets added to your auto responder, marketing automation platform.
Now those are third party services and obviously you have to pay for those third party services, I can't remember the exact price of Lead Pages off the top of my head, but it isn't cheap to run Lead Pages every month. So, Thrive has a similar sort of offering that has some benefits and a couple of drawbacks. It has a plugin called Thrive Content Builder, which is also sometimes called Thrive Landing Pages. And what Thrive Content Builder allows you to do is create those dedicated opt in pages.
So you can create your landing page for your lead magnet for example, or you can create a webinar registration page, or a thank you page, when someone signs up to your email list. Or one of those email confirmation pages that says, "Hey, thank you for signing up. Go check your inbox in the next five minutes and confirm your double opt in subscription." Right? So all those kind of pages that have to do with lead generation that you might do in something like Lead Pages or InstaPage for example, you can do with this plug in. They've got, I think it's about 150-160 prebuilt templates all ready to go and the good thing about their templates is they have families of templates, right? So they'll have the landing page, the thank you page, the email confirmation page, the video sales letter page and they're all themed the same. So they all look like they're the same family of pages so not only can you create a one off landing page, but you can create the whole sequence of those pages and they all look the same, they all look like they belong to the same family. They belong on your site. Together. Which is a nice little time saver there.
The other groovy this about the Thrive landing page, or the Thrive Content Builder is that it's a visual drag and drop interface. If you've ever something else, like Divvy for example, they just give you a big grid and you've got to drop your little contents into the different parts of the grid and then save and then refresh. With the Thrive Content Builder it's all real time drag and drop interface. So, if you want a pricing grid here on this particular part of the page, you just drag it in, it's there, you can see it, you can click on it, you can edit it. So, any part of that Thrive Landing page is going to be completely customizable so you can make it look exactly how you want it to look, whereas sometimes with Lead Pages you're kind of stuck with their templates, and there's five different things or ten different things on the page you can change, but if you want to move some element to the top, to the bottom, you can't really do that.
Some other groovy things you can do with their Page Builder Tool, is you can clone elements. For example, so if you want a pricing grid ... you've probably seen on a number of product pages ... it's a long sales page, you might scroll from the top to the bottom and there might be a pricing grid and a "Buy Now" button at the top and another pricing grid and a "Buy Now" button down at the bottom. You can just create that pricing grid once and clone and then just drag it to the bottom of the page, and drag it the middle of the page, wherever you want it. So you don't have to rebuild it every time you want that element on the page, you can just clone it and move it. The other cool thing is you can save those elements as part of your own template library. So if you have a pricing grid, for example, and you might want to use that on a number of different pages, you create the pricing grid once and you save the pricing grid element as a little group and it's available to ... so if you create a new page tomorrow, you can say, "I want my pricing grid." Boop. On the page. And there it is on the page, you just pull it straight from your component library, if you will.
And speaking of a component library, so it's basically a drag and drop interface. I'll have some examples at the show notes. But over on the right hand side, you've got like a little tool bar with all the different components you're ever going to want, right? So, images, paragraphs, headlines, pricing grids, tables, buttons, call to actions, opt in form, testimonials, all that kind of stuff you always see on all the marketing pages. They're all elements that exist in a toolbar and all you got to do is click and drag them wherever you want to drag them. Drop them on the page- some of those elements might have properties in them that you might have to fill out. So for an example, an opt in form that's taking someone's email address will obviously you've got to fill out where you want that email address to end up. So, in this particular case, inside active campaign, for example, you just got to fill out the elements of that box to say, "take this person's email address, send it to my active campaign account." All very groovy.
And then the other cool thing is, once you've got your page how you want it to look, you can actually save that entire page as a template as well, right? So if you've got a number of different products and you've created a landing page for product one and you decide, hey, I like the look of this landing page, you can save that landing page as a template and then next when you want to create a landing page for product two all you gotta do is pull up your own templated landing page and change a little bit about it. So again you create a number of pages in a theme that all match your site. So it's not some jarring transition from what my website looks like to some lead pages or some InstaPage that doesn't really match my site. So you can make it look exactly how you want to look and make the experience congruent for the user as well.
So, they have the Thrive Content Builder, that's one of their other things that you can buy that is on offer and the Thrive Content Builder, or the landing page builder can also build normal webpages right. So you can build your entire website with just a content builder. So, if you see someone's homepage that you like, you can just kind of hack it and you can say, "right, ribbon bar across the top, and then there's a pricing grid, and then there's a big image." And you can just drag and create, or emulate that design with the Content Builder and that can be your homepage, for example. So it's not just for dedicated landing pages, it's not just for dedicated sales pages. You can build any webpage that you want, right? So my individual website is a combination of one of the Thrive themes. I use the Thrive Ignition theme and then for other pages like the homepage, I've just built that from scratch using the Content Builder, and the podcast page I just built from scratch using the Content Builder.
You can actually drop in other elements like posts, and podcasts and stuff using the Page Builder as well which is pretty groovy. So those are kind of the pluses for the Content Builder, that you can get families of pages that all look congruent, you can create your own pages, you can save elements, so like pricing grids for example, you can create it once and save it in template library. You can create your landing page once, save that whole landing page into your library as well.
One of the downsides though, one of this things that Lead Page is really kind of pushed early on in the day, they don't kind of really emphasise too much anymore is that they're watching the conversions across all page types that they have and they know which designs convert better so they're offering you designs that have proven conversion rights. So, yes, people complain about not being able to change the templates in Lead Pages, but that's kind of the whole idea. The whole idea is that they have a template that converts, so why would you go and change it all right? So you don't have the same kind of conversion statistics inside of Thrive Landing Pages. You don't get the same conversion statistics that you would get form Lead Pages. So you can measure it in other ways, but they don't have that nice little grid that they have in Landing Pages, so that's kind of one of the small drawbacks.
However, you can just look at Lead Pages or InstaPage or Optumus, or whatever and find a page, a high converting page that you like, and then backward engineer that design inside Content Builder. So you could say, "Oh, ribbon bar across the top, then there's a picture, then there's a countdown timer, then there's and opt in box." So you could just create that. So you could take what's a known, proven, high-converting design, and then just recreate it and save it as a template inside Thrive Content Builder.
So so far we've talked about Thrive Themes, they've got a number of WordPress themes that are all marketing focused, which will help you or allow you to get rid of a lot of other plug ins that you may already have, which will theoretically speed up your website installed because you don't have as many plug ins. And we've talked about the Thrive Content Builder. Now the Thrive Content Builder is available as a stand alone product, so you can buy it as a plug in. So even if you are using someone else's theme, for example, using the Genesis theme perhaps, you can still buy the Thrive Content Builder and use it with any normal WordPress theme that you may already be using. So you don't necessarily have to have the Thrive themes to use the Thrive Content Builders, it's separate plug in and it's available for sale separately or as a part of a bundle, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Right, so now we've talked about themes and we've talked about pages: thank you pages, landing pages, etc. Let's talk about one of their other components, which is Thrive Leads. So Thrive Leads creates opt-in opportunities on your website. And what I mean by that, you've probably seen this all over the internet, where you go to someone's website and a little light box pops up and says, "Hey, opt in for our free report." Or you might scroll to the end of their blog post and there's and opt in opportunity, "Hey don't miss any upcoming blog posts- never miss a blog post, never miss a podcast, sign up here." And it's at the bottom of every post, or at the bottom of every page.
You've probably also seen things like ribbon bars or hello bars across the top. Side bar widgets, you know, where you can download a free report, or download or free PDF. All that kind of stuff. All those different opt-in opportunities that you might have within your site that are not dedicated pages, right, they're just kind of woven inside the pages you already have, inside your blog post, inside your pages, across the top, in the sidebar, which is etc. So that's what Thrive Leads does. It allows you to create these opt in opportunities that are woven throughout your site. So, it is also available as a separate plug in that you can buy and use with any theme you want, or again you can get it as part of the overall bundle of Thrive Themes.
Some of the really cool things about Thrive Leads is that it can create a number of these opt-in opportunities for you. I think they've got eight different types of opt-in opportunities. So you've got the ribbon bar across the top or often called a hello bar across the top. You've got your standard kind of light box that pops up, you've got your standard kind of sidebar widget that you see on the right or left hand side of the site when you opt in from a PDF here. You've got a post footer opt in, which will automatically appear at the bottom of every blog post. And you've got a slide in pop up, so you've probably seen these too where you just scroll down a page, maybe halfway down a page, or 75% the way down the page and a little toaster pop up will slide in from the bottom right hand corner or something like that. So they've got slide in boxes, they also have in- content boxes which are similar to post footer boxes, but an in-content box will appear in the middle of a blog post as opposed to the end of a blog post.
So you can specify the number of paragraphs, you can say, "Right, I would like this opt in opportunity to appear after the fourth paragraph in my blog post, right." So if someone's reading through your blog post, they get to that fourth paragraph and there's an opt in box for them to put their name and email address in.
Then they've got a screen filler light box, right. So a light box, you've probably all seen these, they pop up, they might take up 50% of the screen real estate or something like that. Normally they're kind of tied to an exit intent or a timing trigger where someone's been on your page for 10 seconds, the light box will pop up, or someone moves their mouse cursor to the upper right hand corner to close off the window, that's called and Exit Intent. An exit box will pop up once it senses your exit intent, try and save that person from leaving. So that's what a light box will do, but a screen filler light box will do the same thing, but will take up the entire screen. So, whatever page you happen to be on, boom, the entire page gets filled up with this light box so that's all you can see, you can't see any of the conte underneath, which you know, does have it's pros and cons to it right.
And then the last type, the eighth type of opt in opportunity that you can create is a scroll mat. And what a scroll mat does is, when someone visits your page, the first thing they see is an opt in opportunity, but then they can scroll down- it takes up the whole browser- then they can scroll down and get to your content. So it's not an overlay as such, it exists at the top of the page, which is obviously the part that loads first, the above the fold part. And then, people can just download. It's not like a light box you close. It just appears at the top of the page.
So there's eight different opt in opportunities, or eight different types of opt ins you can create, which is pretty cool. But the really cool thing is you can actually split test those against each other. So you can create an opt in opportunity for my free PDF, and then you can have a ribbon bar across the top that offers the PDF, a widget on the right that offers the PDF, and let's say a post footer, a blog post footer that offers the PDF as well. And then you can split test, you'll get reports that say, "Right, the ribbon bar converted at eight percent, the widget on the side was six percent, and the blog post opt in was four percent." So you can see which modality, which type of opt in is actually working the best and then you can kind of tweak your offer.
The other way you can split test as well is what the form says, or what the form looks like. So you might have a ribbon bar with Version A, that you know is in blue and says "Get this for your report" and you might have Version B, which might be orange and it has different wording and a different call to action on it. So, not only can you split test the individual forms that are being displayed for the opt in, but the modality as well. I want to split test a ribbon bar against a light box, or a slide in versus a post footer and you can split test all that kind of stuff. And you'll get pretty comprehensive statistics on which of those modalities and which of those forms are working the best, then you can turn off the bad ones and double down on the good ones.
So, really powerful plug in for creating opt in opportunities. It also will put those names and email addresses, you might expect, put those straight into your marketing automation platform or auto responder. So you just set up a connexion to Mail Chimp, whatever, Active Campaign, Fusion Soft, wherever you want that information to end up and Thrive will push it straight across into your system of choice. And the good thing about Active Campaign is you can also specify tags as people opt in. So they an go onto your main list with whatever tags you want to give them as they download particularly[inaudible 00:22:38] who take up particular offers. So pretty well integrated. One of the better integration with Active Campaign that I've seen out there.
All right. So those are the three major elements of this suite of products. You've got the themes, you've got the Page Builder tool, Thrive Content Builder, you've got the Opt In opportunity tool which is Thrive Leads. And then there's a couple of other ones. There's Thrive Headline Optimizer, which allows you to create multiple headlines for your blog post and then you can split test those headlines against each other and dynamically or manually turn off the lower converting headlines and leave the higher converting headlines as well. And then they also have as part of this suite, Thrive Clever Widgets, which allow you to basically just specify which pages ... that your widget shows up right. So you have a widget with this particular opt in, I want it to show on these five pages, or this particular type of blog post. So an easy way to specify you want widgets to show up, WordPress widgets to show up, on some pages but not other pages, right.
And just looping back to that subject, for Thrive Leads, we talked about those different opt in opportunities. The other cool thing about Thrive Leads is you can specify where those lead boxes show up, right, they don't just show up site wide. So, let's say for example, you create a post footer opt in box with Thrive Leads that says, right, I want this to show up at the bottom of every blog post. However, most people will blog about a number of different categories so you might want to have lead magnets ... one lead magnet for Category A, one lead magnet for Category B, one lead magnet for Category C because those category specifically magnets are going to convert much much better than a generic site wide lead magnet. So what Thrive Leads will allow you to do is create three separate post footer opt in boxes and you can say, "I want this post footer opt in box to show up on every blog post that's marked as Category A, or has tag 'Category A' and I want this form to show up on Category B, and this form to show up on Category C." So whenever I go, tomorrow, if I create a blog post in Category B, it's automatically going to suck in the most appropriate lead magnet form for that particular category of post which is a huge huge time saver.
The other thing you can do with Thrive Leads, if you are familiar with Lead Pages, is they have Lead Links, or Lead Boxes. You can create those very similar sort of things. Where if there's a text link, someone clicks on it, and opt in box pops up. So all that stuff that you can do with Lead Pages, you can also do with Thrive Leads. And then the good bit, the thing we haven't really talked about is the price. They offer either quarterly or annual memberships, like I said, you can buy Thrive Content Builder, you can buy Thrive Leads as separate products or you can buy the whole suite of products together right. So you get the whole suite of the themes, the Content Builder, Thrive Leads, you can also get the clever widgets and the headline optimizer, you can get it all for a subscription price and if you buy the annual one it's ... it comes out to $19 a month if you buy an annual subscription.
So you can buy them as one off products, or you can buy them all as a suite and there's two different kind of licencing schemes. There's one where you can use them across all the sites that you own, all your own sites. So, you got 10 sites you can use all those plug ins and tools across ten sites. Then they have an agency licence as well So if you're doing work for other people and you want to include Thrive Leads or Thrive Content Builder, or Thrive Themes, you can get an agency licencee which basically allows you to - to use it across any websites that you happen to be working on. And it's an annual subscription, you can either buy annual or quarterly subscriptions.
So that's a little bit about Thrive themes, and the Thrive themes suite. I get asked about it a lot, people don't know, a little but unclear about how it all ties together, so there's themes, there's the Content Builder for building pages, there's Thrive leads for creating opt in boxes throughout your site and then they've got the headline optimizer and then the clever widget thing as well as part of the suite. They're also coming out with killer content, so if you're not subscribed to the Thrive themes blogs, it's well worth your time to read their content if you're an online marketer as well.
So hope that explains it a little bit better, you can head over to the show notes at theactivemarketer.com/56. We'll have a few demonstration points there, some links you can use to get to some of things we talked about. So leave us a comment in the show notes: if you've been using it or thinking about using it, we'd love to hear from you, what you like about it, what you don't like about it and what other tools you might be using instead.
Thanks for joining me today and I'll see you next week.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode of the Active Marketer podcast, if you want any of the links mentioned in today's show head over to the show notes at theactivemarketer.com/56. And I would love it if you were enjoying this podcast, if you could head over to iTunes or Stitcher and leave us a review and I will read it out on a future show. It really helps up move up the rankings, get more visibility and get his information in the hands of more people. Also, if you're struggling with your sales funnels and your marketing automation, we have a community just for you. It's called The Active Marketer Insiders. Inside that, you'll find a group of like minded entrepreneurs who are all doing the same thing and we have lots of resources in there, we have full on training courses on active campaign, podio, Edwards, SEO, got shared automations, funnel templates, there's a 30 day challenges to get your lead generation flow up and running quickly and a lot of other great information. If you want to know more head over to theactivemarketer.com/membership. We would love to see you on the inside. Until next week, get out there and design, automate, and scale your business to the next level with sales and marketing automation.
See you everybody.
Thanks for listening to The Active Marketer Podcast. You can find the show notes and all the latest marketing automation news over at theactivemarketer.com.
