I’ve been experimenting with a suite of marketing tools called SumoMe and I wanted to share my findings with you.

What Is Sumo Me?

Think of SumoMe as a series of small apps for your website that do a number of marketing and analytic tasks for you.

You can install as few or as many of the apps as you like.

You install the sumo me plugin, then very quickly you can create an account from inside WordPress (hat tip to the Sumo team this is one of the most seamless  SaaS sign-ups I have ever experienced).

The apps can be classified into three sections email collection, analytics and sharing.

Email Collection

Sumo me comes with four ways to entice people to leave their emails

• List builder – an email popup with some clever intent code so it pops up when people leave
• Scroll box – a popup that shows when people are reading your content and are actually engaged.  So it shows when people scroll down 80 % of a post for example
• Smart Bar – an email request bar along the top of your site
• Welcome Mat – a full screen pop down that appears after 60 seconds (this is the feature I’m currently experimenting with).

All methods have a series of pre-made templates that look great so it’s a very simple matter to get your opt-ins setup very quickly.

All of these apps connect very easily to a huge number of mail apps. I’m linking it to Mailchimp.

Analytics

Sumo me also has a series of analytics tools so you can see how people are interacting with your site.

• Google analytics – as you can imagine this just pulls your GA details into WordPress so you can see them rather than going to Google.  My thought was Meh! so what.
• Content analytics – this is a good one, it allows you to measure how far into your content people are going, are they truly engaging or clicking away after a few paragraphs, powerful stuff.
• Heat Maps – see where people are clicking on your site.  It provides a visual representation of what people are clicking.

Sharing

Sumo Me comes with a couple of apps to share content and images.

• Share – this imaginatively named tool is a share bar, it  adds a floating share bar to your site, you should see that to your left if you area reading this from our site.
• Image Share – allows site visitors to share your images with their peeps.  I’m not into pInterest but I imagine this will work well with that crowd.
• Highlighter – allows site visitors to highlight text from your site and share that.

I’ve only lightly touched on the share tools so I’ve not much to report on how effective they are.

Free & Premium

Sumo Me comes with free versions of all it’s apps and premium versions with added bells and whistles, I’m running with the free versions during my experiment.

My Results

In a word I’m impressed.  Here are the things that stood out for me:

Sumo Me doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of functionality, there are any number of popup and sharing tools out there, but what it does win with is its analytics.

The heat map tool is great, it is giving me real insight into what people are clicking and where I need to focus my attentions.  I can see redudant links and areas of my site I can removed.

The graphs I get to show number of popups shown versus signups are great.

To get a feel for how far down a page (in particular my sales page) people go is useful, and a new area for me. I’m thinking about putting contact forms at the top rather than at the bottom so people don’t abandon so quickly.

I have had an increase in signups on both wpdude.com and webpolyglot.com. Webpolyglot.com has had better results but I think that is due to a better lead magnet on that site over wpdude.  I’m planning to split test wpdude with a different free offer to see if I can get more signups.

It works well with paid facebook ads, I’ve been testing paid ads from Facebook (more about that in later posts) and Sumo Me works well with people clicking over from

There are a lot of apps so I suggest testing one at a time so you don’t bombard your visitors with welcome mat popups, normal popups and sweep ins.

The A/B testing is really really good too, I can see what works and what does not.

A very neat thing is I can switch off double optin, so no need for the site visitor to click on a confirmation email, once they signup they are on your list.

Wrap Up

If you want more insight into your marketing efforts I would give Sumo Me a go.

Photo Credit: hitthatswitch via Compfight cc