the company
An accounting giant
With over 13 000 team members supporting millions of entrepreneurs across 23 countries, Sage is a giant in the markets of integrated accounting, payroll and payment systems.
Over the last few years, we've been working with them to build on the launch of their Sage Advice platform which offers guidance & direction on financial matters for small & medium enterprises across the world.
The Sage team invested heavily in a content platform to support its wider sales strategy and needed to generate enough subscribers and leads for the investment to be a success. They knew that visitors who subscribed and downloaded lead magnets were significantly more likely to become customers but getting them into that first engagement with the brand was critical.
the challenge
Generating growth through content
Constant optimisation through targeted testing was a cornerstone of the Sage Advice content strategy from the outset.
There was a clear requirement to increase visitors’ propensity to subscribe and download content but this needed to be achieved without being unnecessarily intrusive.
What we did
What seems to be the problem?
There were multiple calls-to-action to subscribe that were visibly dominant in green, but the interaction rates with them were worryingly low.
This method of lead generation relied heavily on visitors to actively break their reading patterns to engage with those CTAs. With content pages often littered with advertising around their margins, modern online readers have become adept at ignoring elements outside of the main reading page & skipping over inline content that is not solely text-based.
In addition, the post content of the Sage Advice platform was critical to establishing its value to a potential subscriber and therefore it needed to remain front and centre for visitors.
So the problem was twofold; how to ensure that readers were consuming the content whilst offering Sage Advice the best possible opportunity to generate subscribers in the process?
Introducing the prompted push
First we established the right types of visitors to receive the prompt.
These visitors needed to have consumed enough content to have seen the value of subscribing & therefore we set a scroll depth trigger, based on a variety of percentage depths of post content.
These were measured from the opening line of the first paragraph to the closing line of the final paragraph to measure the content itself, not just the depth of the page itself.
On reaching that depth, visitors were shown the subscription overlay which required them to make a binary choice - to subscribe or to close. This ensured that Sage were no longer reliant on proactive visitor decisions to subscribe.
We controlled how often the overlay appeared to minimise interruptions for the visitor. No subscribed visitor was asked to subscribe again, nor any single visitor asked more than twice.
.png)
