Thrive Leads is a fantastic lead generation tool for Authors. Thrive Leads' ability to integrate with email service providers, create beautiful opt-in forms, and facilitate strategic email growth are second to none.
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In this case study I want to share the results and overall experience of implementing Thrive Leads for one of my clients. His name is Mark Cheverton and he's a best-selling author of Minecraft novels.
Mark came to me looking for help with two really important things: (1) Implementing Thrive Leads effectively, and (2) Automating his marketing and lead-gen funnels. Thankfully, Mark was already a very successful author with an enormous library of successful books sold on Amazon. He had readers and sales, but knew he could take his marketing to the next level with Thrive Leads and marketing automation.
I recommended we implement the 3 Step Lead-Gen Automation Plan for Book Authors.
Implementing Thrive Leads
We began by developing lightboxes for his offers. Mark has a MVP club that his readers can join and gain access to lots of benefits including free stories and novels.
As our primary offer, he built a lightbox with exit-intent that comes up on any page that doesn't have an associated and specific offer -- more on that in a bit.
Our secondary offer was for his new book, The Algae Voices of Azule. Using a Thrive Lead Group, we set up this offer to come up on specific pages, thus allowing us to control the experience of the user and which offers they were presented. Mark released a new chapter of this book each week exclusively to his email list -- a great way to keep them engaged!
Tip: Creating beautiful opt-in offers was easy because Mark put in the time (and money!) to create gorgeous images of his characters, renderings of his book, and other art assets for us to use in his offers and emails.
In order to not overwhelm his repeat visitors, we set up all of Mark's offers to stop showing when someone was signed up. Instead of asking one of his MVPs to sign up again, those visitors who were already members simply saw a message reminding them of how they can claim their member benefits.
Integrating Thrive Leads with MailChimp & BookFunnel
We decided to use MailChimp for Mark's email list and email marketing service provider. We needed a service that has drip features, and we wanted the most affordable option. Mark didn't have an email list yet, so it made more sense to go with MailChimp's $15/month plan and grow from there rather than jumping right into ConvertKit (even though it is more robust).
Integrating was seamless because of Thrive's API integrations. We simply logged into MailChimp, copied the API key, and made the connection.
As I mentioned above, Mark has several offers. To keep things organized and efficient, we created segments in MailChimp for his MVP Club and each of his books and offers. Using these segments, we created the aforementioned drip funnels and assigned them to the appropriate segments. Readers only ever receive the offers pertaining to the books they're interested in!
Since Mark's opt-in offers are ebooks in various formats, Mark uses a service called BookFunnel to fulfill the free book offers to his users in whatever ebook format they prefer. We simply inserted the BookFunnel landing page link (where his readers can claim their books) right into the MailChimp emails.
Deploying Future Automated Funnels
Before we even started building lightboxes or integrating mailing lists, we mapped out the entire process for each of his offers. Although these funnels were relatively simplistic, visualizing the process can help tremendously when going back to create new funnels in the future.
I provide all of my clients with an educational component. While I certainly create and implement everything for them, I leave them with videos and workflow mockups so that they can be empowered to utilize Thrive Leads and other tools all on their own.
In this particular case, Mark has a new book coming out in 2020 titled, The Giant's Giant. He's already planning a series of free chapters and drip campaigns for his readers who are excited and ready to engage with his brand.
Tip: Because we integrated each Thrive Lead form with a specific segment, Mark knows which of his readers respond better to free chapters and which prefer to receive a free eBook instead.
The Results
I worked with Mark over a period of about three weeks. We quickly implemented his MVP Club offer in the first week in order to have something up and gathering emails while we crafted the dozens of emails for his drip-chapter campaigns.
I expected a few dozen signups, but after only a week Mark has signed up over 100 people to his MVP Club!
After only a few months, Mark has well over a thousand members of his MVP Club and other email segments.
The best part? The entire process of signing up his readers to be MVPs using Thrive Leads, delivering their free books and chapters using MailChimp, and even sending them future offers is entirely automated. From hereon out, Mark can simply write the books he loves while his readers interact with his website and sign up for his offers.