We’ve outlined the main takeaways and included video clips below. To watch the full video, join our ONTRAPORT Facebook User Community

Tip #1 Offering a Recurring Option at Checkout

You can provide customers/donors with the recurring payment option directly on the checkout page or on a separate product option page. The latter means creating a separate page with both the one-time payment option and recurring option, each linked to separate checkout pages. Both options are available within ONTRAPORT, and you’d want to test which garners a better response for your audience.

In Molly’s case, her primary goal is bringing users to the donate page and ultimately maximizing her donations. Molly has set up a page with three buttons indicating a different monthly donation amount, each button click leads to a different ONTRAform.

To learn more about recurring products on checkout forms and pages, check out this knowledge base article.

Tip #2 Incentivize Recurring Payments

If your business falls in the category of services and coaching, examples of incentives are:

• Continued education programs with new training on a membership site(s)
• Weekly/monthly/quarterly group or individual calls

In Molly’s case, the Global Autism Project is a non-profit that is funded through donations. There is no direct product or value in exchange for donations; however, there are methods to incentivize donors. Sending out a monthly newsletter with updates on the non-profit’s work can be an effective way to show donors how their contributions are helping people. Another incentive for donors could be to create an online community for supporters, such as a Facebook group.

Molly mentions she could incentivize the longevity of membership by establishing a reward event for those who have been members for six months or longer.

For more information on setting up a membership site through ONTRAPORT, check out this knowledge base article.

Tip #3 Upsell Continuity

In Molly’s case of single-donation order forms, Molly could prompt the donor with the option to purchase membership for $10/month with the first month free after they donate. This is a great way for donors to learn about membership and facilitate the subscription process because the donor has already entered their payment information from the previous donation.

To learn more about upsells in ONTRAPORT, check out this knowledge base article.

Tip #4 Post-Purchase Donation

After an individual has donated, it is important to follow up with them and deliver valuable content. This may be in the form of an ebook, video, or any other type of bonus content. Once you have sent valuable content to the donor and built that trust, you could ask again, this time for a recurring donation.  Sam recommends that organizations send three pieces of bonus content before asking for a donation.

Once three pieces of bonus content are delivered, you might send five offer emails. If these five offer emails do not prompt a purchase/donation, the offer emails sent to this user should cease.

It is imperative to measure the effectiveness of your offer emails. Set yourself up for success by implementing a tracking system at the beginning. Sending the offer and bonus content emails is an important part of the post-donation process, but it is also necessary to measure the opens/clicks, page visits, and purchases so you can understand which offers were effective.

Molly reflects on using ONTRAPORT and says she is now able to make simple changes to her system and then measure results for optimization.

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The post How to Successfully Improve Your Recurring Revenue Model With ONTRAPORT appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Welcome to Customer Insights, where one of our experts meets with an ONTRAPORT user to answer his or her questions about strategy, how-to, design and automation techniques. The conversation is streamed live in the ONTRAPORT User Community on Facebook for all our users to learn from. Check out the recap and video clips here in case you missed them.Our first guest is Andrea Featherstone, founder of Project Self, who joined ONTRAPORT’s Campaign Director Sam Flegal. In an hour they went over email performance best practices, tracking repeat clients, and finding out which of her marketing efforts were working best.

Email Performance: Where to Look

Setting up an email campaign is one thing, but how do you correctly set it up to also view email engagement? When Andrea asked this question she was asking about email opens, sends and clicks. To view this data and build the campaign, we looked at the messages collection and Performance Mode.

Performance Mode shows you an overlay of data directly on your campaign map. To see email engagement metrics from the campaign view there’s a little more set-up work involved. You’ll need to build in “goal” elements with specific settings.

Setting Up Goals Correctly

A goal allows you to see who has taken a specific action. In this case the action is opening an email or clicking on a link within an email. While setting up the goal to show this data, Sam went over the importance of goal settings.

In every goal you set up, you will see a menu populate on the left of the screen. Within this menu you have two questions:

• Who can achieve this goal
• If the contact is already on the map, then…

Anytime you are utilizing a goal for anything, you want to make sure you are setting these menu options up correctly.

In Andrea’s case, she wants to know how many times an email is opened, so under “Who can achieve this goal” she would choose “any contact in account.” By choosing these settings, she ensures that her numbers are not restricted to only those people on this map or on the previous step and that she will capture anyone who opens the email again later.

Similarly, for the “if the contact is already on the map” selection, she would want to have them “added here again” to capture the data. Selecting these options guarantees that contacts will be added to this goal with numbers updating appropriately, while also continuing on the other paths they are on within the campaign.

A best practice is to use a fork prior to the goal. A fork sends contacts down two paths at once, which means you can separate your actions and reporting into two clear paths. One path includes any further automation, such as email sends, tags and tasks, while the other path has only the engagement goal outlined above. Goals that are created within one path prevent contacts from progressing to these next steps until they have achieved the goal (in this case, until they have opened the email).

To learn more about goals, check out this knowledge base article.

Tracking Repeat Buyers

Who is buying multiple items from your brand and what do they buy first? The transaction log will show you this data. Much like the messages collection, the spreadsheet view allows you to see who bought what and when, by each transaction. If your business has thousands of products and buyers, consider creating a campaign to clearly report on this data by creating what our team calls a reporting campaign.

To set up this map, you start with a trigger of a product purchase for each product you sell. You will have a line of triggers at the top of your map, one for each product. Within each trigger you’ll dictate the settings to be “any contact in account,” and “add here again.” Then below each trigger, you will add every other product using goals. Use the goal of “purchases product” with the settings “contacts on any upstream element” and “add here again.” Continue doing this for each of your products. The idea of this map is not only to find repeat buyers but also see trends in buying habits.

To see more about the transaction log, check out this knowledge base article.

Finding out Which Marketing Efforts Are Working

How do I know which of my ads are working? To find out which of your marketing efforts are working, we must first explore UTM parameters, which add text to your URLs so that you can track the traffic from each ad or other lead source. You can set up these links from within an ONTRAPORT Pro account or higher, or use any google UTM builder. Either way, ONTRAPORT will automatically capture these variables and place them within the contact record.

Once this is done our system will capture the data necessary to answer the overarching question about which marketing efforts are working. You can view this data within Performance Mode by clicking on Tracking. From there you will be able to click between different elements and lead sources and watch as the numbers change on the map. You could click on your Facebook ad and see that it might bring the most leads into your account but has the lowest conversion rate, whereas Instagram brings in fewer leads but of higher quality.

You can also create groups based around the different variables from within the contacts collection. Much like the examples above, this will give you a spreadsheet view of the contacts. The benefit of doing it this way is you are able to drill down into the contact directly from this screen and answer questions such as what else are these contacts clicking on, downloading or visiting?

To learn more about UTM’s check out this usecase.

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The post How to Set Up and Find Your Engagement Metrics appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.