Featured Case Study

Executive Summary

Archive Systems was successfully driving customers to their webinars and blog posts via an AdWords campaign, but the challenge was getting those customers to sign up for further webinars, and engage with more blog content.

A campaign of A/B testing campaigns focused around priming the audience and providing clear Calls to Action (CTA) allowed them to increase lead generation.

Client Profile

Archive Systems started out providing permanent, physical storage for business documents, such as lawyers’ paperwork or medical cases. All of this material was required to be kept for a long term, archived and kept in climate-controlled warehouses. Because physically retrieving such documents was complicated and time consuming for their clients, they began to offer digitization, so that any document could be reviewed from a computer.

Additionally, they provided the secure storage and workflow management of Human Resources materials, including drivers’ licenses, Social Security Numbers and other private employee information.

Business Challenge

Historically, visitors landed on either a stand-alone blog posting or a single-page webinar sign up page.

This client’s main challenge was a high bounce rate. While they were providing high-quality blog posts and webinars, most visitors to their offerings were not sticking around to view more content or signing up for a webinar. They needed to discover the best way to keep people in their pipeline and get them to sign up for a webinars or contract Archive Systems for their services.

Solution

A campaign of A/B testing helped the client discover the best way to increase customer engagement. Impel Digital (then TechKnowSys) ran a series of tests with various calls to action. Each post either had no CTA (to serve as a control), a CTA to read the next blog post, or a CTA to sign up for a webinar. Over time, it became clear which content users enjoyed the most and which style of CTA lead to the most engagement and webinar sign-ups.

Outcomes

This testing increased webinar registration in a noticeable way. Two tactics proved to be the most effective.

First, rather than sending visitors directly to a webinar sign-up page, a blog post would introduce and “tease” the topic of the webinar. These blog posts with a call to action such as “Interested in learning more about XXX? Join us next Wednesday.” After the live webinar was held, this CTA changed to an offer to register to see the archived webinar.

Second, it became clear that covering a topic more thoroughly resulted in more engagement. Specifically, a series of blog posts that covered different facets of a topic in each post were very successful. The most successful example was an eight-part series on human resources document management technology.

These CTAs and improved blog content lead to noticeable results:

In May 2015, there were 137 webinar registrants (without blog) vs 221 in August & 275 in September (with blog)
In June 2016, there were 144 webinar registrants (without blog) and in July there were 161 webinar registrants (without blog) vs 298 webinar registrants (with the blog) in August and 309 webinar registrants (with the blog) in September
When the CTA was another blog, website engagement went up as visitors felt compelled to read more of the excellent content.

Conclusion

Increased webinar registration and blog engagement contributed to Archive Systems’ growth and success. By becoming a thought leader in their field, as well as providing top-notch services, they attracted the attention of a Berkshire Hathaway company, who acquired them in 2016.