B2B Marketing: Pop-ups outperform email by 643% to drive survey responses

SUMMARY: Every year, MedReps, an online-recruitment and job-placement site for healthcare sales professionals, publishes a profile of its membership. The goal is to position the brand as the go-to recruitment site for employers. The profile allows employers to see, at a glance, the quality of MedReps candidates. Furthermore, the profile is a means for potential job seekers to qualify themselves.

To create the most accurate profile, hundreds of MedReps members must respond to a survey that is sent out via email. Discover how MedReps placed a pop-up on the site to convince members to take the survey and doubled responses.

by Andrea Johnson, Copywriter

THE CUSTOMER

MedReps serves both the B2B and B2C marketplace. The online job board brings together job seekers who are looking for new healthcare sales positions and potential employers and recruiters in the healthcare sales industry.

THE CHALLENGE

Since 2000, MedReps has used email to send surveys to site members — people who are seeking jobs — that attract hundreds of responses. These responses are compiled into a member profile that provides employers with an overview of job seekers who use the MedReps site. This profile is critical to MedReps’ positioning as the Web’s largest community of medical sales talent:

It provides the sales team data that they can use to convince employers to post jobs on the MedReps site.

It helps job seekers quality themselves.

"We are not an entry-level job board," said Michele Dambach, Digital Marketing Manager, MedReps "Someone who has at least three to five years of sales experience is our sweet spot."

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However, this year the survey responses weren’t as numerous, even though the first email blast sent to 18,000 candidates achieved a 30% open rate. Of those, 3.11% clicked to open the survey. The second blast was sent to 15,800 candidates. The open rate dropped to 27.9% with 1.86% clicking through to the survey.

"Normally, we like to get at least 500 responses and this year we were struggling to reach that mark," she said.

The deadline to begin creating the member profile was fast approaching, and Dambach realized emails alone weren’t going to garner the amount of responses they needed on time. So she decided to use an engagement tool that allowed her to create a highly targeted pop-up without using IT support. When members opened the website, the pop-up would direct them to take the survey.

CAMPAIGN

Dambach took the following steps to ensure that the engagement tool would correctly capture the attention of members, and convince them to provide responses that would produce the most accurate, comprehensive and compelling profile. This required attracting survey respondents who are both high in quality and quantity.

She had a goal of reaching 200 more users with the help of engaging in-app with the pop-up, for a total of 700.

Step #1. Learn from what you’ve done before

Dambach reviewed the lead-scoring platform to determine how the team could tighten their marketing focus and outreach to attract those who:

Most accurately represent their customer base

Will attract the most employers

Are the most engaged and responsive

"We’d like to make sure that we’re getting data from a good cross section or representation of our members," she said. "So it’s really deciding on who do we think will be most likely to engage [and] how we target and reach those people."

By exceeding respondents from the previous year, she added, MedReps can give the sales team actionable data they can use to present the service to B2B job posters. The data they provide includes:

How many members have sales experience in healthcare sales

Average number of resumes received in a month

Average number of jobs being applied to

By bringing in the pop-up, she was hoping to see a lift of 200 respondents from the 500 already accrued from the email campaign. The survey ended up closing at 1,200 respondents, more than doubling what the email campaign had brought in.

Social media isn’t really a worthwhile avenue for MedReps, she said, because the objective is to only have paying job seekers or candidates involved in the surveys.

By reaching out with this pop-up, and engaging people in-app, she was able to execute it quickly, as the survey deadline was approaching, and keep the audience narrowed to the desired users.

Step #2. Determine an incentive

To incentivize people to take the survey, Dambach offered a chance to win one of five Amazon gift cards. The headline on the pop-up — "Win an Amazon Gift Card" — focused on gaining attention with that desirable incentive, while gaining clickthrough and survey responses.

The winners of the gift cards were randomly chosen from survey participants, and is a regular incentive for the company. For instance, it was also used as an incentive in it’s fifth annual survey for "Best Places to Work in Medical Sales."

Step #3. Determine how to present the opportunity

The pop-up platform allowed Dambach to select:

The page where she wanted the survey pop-up to appear

Where it would appear on the page

The background colors of the pop-up, copy and call-to-action

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RESULTS

B2B Marketing: Pop-ups outperform email by 643% to drive survey responses

THE CUSTOMER

THE CHALLENGE

CAMPAIGN

Step #1. Learn from what you’ve done before

Step #2. Determine an incentive

Step #3. Determine how to present the opportunity

RESULTS

Creative Samples

Sources

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