The next stage of RightMessage: RightCTA

Today we’re thrilled to release the biggest step forward yet for RightMessage: RightCTA.

This is a pretty big shift from our original focus, so we wanted to show you exactly what’s changed, why it’s changed, and what this means for you and your business.

What’s new (the 30 second overview)

When we first launched in January 2018, we described ourselves as a “personalization software.” The idea was you take our script, put it on our site, integrate your account with whatever email marketing platform you use, and then you could change anything you want on your site based on behavior or tag/custom field data you have about someone.

Now we’re focused more on conversion optimization and list growth. We’re still focused on using personalization to help customers make more sales and build their list, but we’re seeing ourselves as being a big upgrade from the one-size-fits-all opt-in and CTA form builder tools out there – rather than a personalization platform.

Therefore, with the introduction of RightCTA, we’re now positioning ourselves as a list building and call-to-action tool, rather than website personalization software.

Why are we making this change?

In the past, we were mostly selling to companies who vaguely knew what personalization was and knew that it was important.

But a number of friction points stood in the way from them both buying and, most importantly, using something like RightMessage:

• They had to first figure out a strategy, and for a lot of prospective customers this meant going through much the same planning work involved in redesigning a website.
• There wasn’t much precedent to work off of. So for many of our early customers, they were left trying to figure out what exactly they should personalize first (change the testimonials on a sales page? headline on the homepage? …)
• Then they had to go to work putting in place a segmentation strategy (because without segmentation you can’t actually personalize.)
• And they had to weigh the effort (and cost) involved in doing all of this against all the other marketing things they know they should be doing. Will it be worth it? Who knows!

It’s easy to think that friction – as it relates to people not being willing to give your software a chance – has to do with things like how good your marketing site is, or how simple your signup form is, or whatever else.

But, often, it comes down to a simple question: can we actually prioritize this? Especially given everything we need to do?

So a lot of prospective customers would see the conference talks, listen to the podcast interviews, read our site, and even see a demo.

And when asked to take that next step, we’d hear: “I get this. I know we need to do this. We’ll revisit it next quarter...”

(It’s easy to write these off as excuses. But, like I mentioned above, there’s a metric ton of friction involved in getting over the hurdles associated with trying something new. I can only imagine that this is what it was like for companies like Constant Contact when they were going - literally! - door-to-door trying to convince companies to email their customers.)

Marketing ourselves as personalization software was hurting our growth, which isn’t ever good for a startup with limited runway. And it was also something that we had to educate people on and then sell, and… that’s a tall order to fill.

So we decided to focus on ways of using the backbone of what we’d built – an incredibly robust segmentation and personalization engine – and apply it to more known and trusted problem spaces.

Introducing RightCTA

Consider this scenario:

• You write blog content
• At the end of each post, you ask people to join your email list
• “Meh, why not?” – you also add exit popups, slide ups, sticky bars, …
• When you write new content, you email it to your list (trust, baby!)
• You have paid products, like a course, and you want your list to buy those products

The real thing you care about (as a marketer who wants to keep your business afloat) is to turn your content marketing effort into sales.

So why is it that when a subscriber receives your latest blog post announcement…

And they click the link in the email to your site…

BAM “What’s your email address?”

“Come on! What’s your email address?!”

“GIVE ME YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS!!!”

You want that subscriber to buy, right? But the thing you’re asking them to do is to… join the newsletter they’re already on.

We’re convinced this is 100% a tooling problem.

It’s not that the existing tools are bad. They’re doing exactly what they promise: delivering nicely designed opt-in widgets to people who are on your website.

But without the ability to synchronize your site with your email database, or the ability to progressively segment visitors in real-time based on their behavior or data you have about someone (like purchases), that’s about the extent of what they can do.

What if we took our segmentation and personalization engine, and developed a suite of widgets and workflow functionality that would allow us to make it so returning subscribers weren’t email opt-ins… but instead seeing a pitch for a product that’s perfect for them?

Or what if we could use our personalization engine to modify the way offers are pitched in real-time, so the person who is binging articles on marketing can see how this particular lead magnet will help them with their marketing… but someone who is reading stuff about starting a business can see how that same lead magnet will help them start?

RightCTA is new feature we’ve introduced to RightMessage that sits on top of our robust segmentation and personalization backbone and allows you to quickly create personalized calls-to-action using our suite of CTA widgets.

Rather than trying to convince you that you should be personalizing your website…

Now we’re just asking you to give the visitors a better experience on your website by swapping out whatever you’re using to build your list or pitch people with RightCTA.

If people are getting pitched on things that directly relate to what they want… and these pitches are described and positioned in a way that directly aligns with exactly what they need from you… they’re more likely to actually engage with that offer.

The result? More subscribers and more sales for your business.

At the core of RightCTA is the Offer Funnel

Most opt-in form or CTA tools have you do something like this:

• Create a new CTA, like a slide-up email opt-in
• Write a headline, maybe add some subtext, change the label of the submit button, and so on
• Optionally add some targeting criteria (for most setups, the default is “show this to everyone on every page.”)

If you want to have any degree of sophistication with your CTAs – maybe you want a certain CTA to only show on these types of blog posts – you end up needing to add a bunch of weird form rules, and what you end up with is a list of “forms” that are pretty difficult to manage.

RightCTA makes both setting up and managing CTAs – especially if you want to show different offers to different people – significantly easier:

1. Create your various offers (e.g. “join our newsletter”, “learn more about our paid community”)
2. Visually map out who should get what offer, and when
3. Create the widgets that display these offers

Tying everything together is the Offer Funnel.

If you’ve ever setup visual automations or workflows within your email marketing app, you’ll feel right at home.

With RightCTA’s visual funnel editor, you can quickly move people to different offers depending on who they are, what they’re doing, or what they told you they’re looking for help with.

Survey your visitors and present the perfect offer

Let’s say you have a relatively simple setup (at least to start), and you want to get anonymous people to join your email list.

Simple enough, right? Chances are, you’re already doing this now.

But what if you could:

1. Get more people on your site to actually join your email list?
2. Better segment your new subscribers so you can send them more targeted email campaigns?

With RightCTA’s built-in surveying, you can show people that you want to help them with whatever it is that they’re hoping you can help with.

Simply ask a question like “What’s the #1 thing you need help with?”, and then show an email opt-in that’s specifically addressing what they just told you they need help with. And once they opt-in, the data they’ve given you will be automatically added to their new contact record in your email marketing database.

Optimized for speed

We wanted to make both creating and managing your offer funnels, your offers, and the widgets you use to display offers as seamless and straightforward as possible.

RightCTA lets you fully manage your entire funnel with minimal headache. From within an Offer Funnel, you have one-click access to managing the offers you’re pitching, the widgets you’re using, and more.

More robust reporting

With RightCTA, we’ve also added real-time (<1 second latency) reporting, so you can get deep insights into who’s on your website, what they need, and how they’re behaving with no delay.

Because we’re tracking data about who’s converting and what we know about them (either by their behavior or what they’ve told you directly), we can give you incredible insights into who’s on your website and what they’re doing.

Things like…

• What % of people on your site are anonymous? Returning subscribers? Customers?
• What kind of content are people reading most on your blog?
• What’s the #1 problem that led people to you?
• What industry do people belong to? Job role? Company size? Demographic?

This is just the beginning…

Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be adding more widget designs, more integrations, and more prescriptive reporting (“these segment combinations are most likely to buy, and are 2.3x more valuable than the average…”)

Convinced? Grab a trial and get started with RightCTA, the smarter way to grow your audience and get more sales.