Kevin Kessler

7 Conversion Strategies Reply.io Uses to Drive Sales [Case Study]

You might have a trailblazing product and a growing online presence. But, could you be squeezing out more conversions from your website?

Social media likes, traffic increases, new email subscribers—all these mean nothing if you aren't converting visitors into leads, and leads into customers.

One well-known company that lives and breathes this philosophy is Reply.io.

In this post, we look at the ingenious arsenal of conversion strategies they use to turn leads into sales. We cover:

  • How Reply found and shows off its unique value proposition
  • The effect "social proof" has on their home page conversions
  • How they optimize for hyper-relevant, intent-focused organic keywords
  • The key to creating solution-based content that converts

So, read on to see what's behind Reply.io becoming a leading B2B SaaS sales solution all over the world.

A brief overview of Reply.io

Reply.io is a top sales engagement platform. It helps companies discover new leads by automating email, LinkedIn, and phone call outreach. 

The software has exploded into the sales sector, netting an impressive share of the market with killer growth tactics and conversion strategies driven by next-generation tools. 

Thanks to the conversion strategies outlined in this article, Reply.io has reached:

  • Estimated annual revenue of $7.5 million
  • 220,000+ monthly visitors
  • 21,000+ backlinks
  • 12,000+ organic keywords
  • A Domain Authority score of 73

Sources: Growjo, SimilarWeb & Ahrefs

Broadly speaking, a lot of Reply’s marketing success lies in its marketing consistency. Go to their website, social, or email campaigns and you’ll notice they have consistent branding and messaging everywhere.

For example, check out the coherency between Reply’s social media profiles.

Take a look at Facebook first:

Reply.io Facebook page header image

Now see how it's replicated on Twitter. Reply uses the same social proof stamp (being recognized in the G2 Top 50), with identical branding:

Reply.io Twitter header image

This may seem like a small and really simple tactic. Yet it's crucial to keep driving their messaging into people's minds with each little touchpoint.

But what's behind that messaging? And how does Reply use it to actually convert visitors on their website?

Here, we’ll present the top eight marketing techniques that Reply uses to increase organic visitors and lead to a higher conversion rate.

7 ingenious Reply.io conversion strategies

Reply is smart about its conversion marketing strategy. Attacking the problem from all angles, it excels at conversion optimization, using clever web design tactics, innovative social media marketing, solutions-focused content, and much more.

Read on to discover the creative ways Reply drives more traffic for a higher conversion rate.

1. UVP + CTA = Conversions

Your unique value proposition (UVP) should tell your target customers the value you bring in under five seconds.

Reply does it front and center right on the home page hero. It clearly states its purpose by solving a huge B2B problem head-on:

Reply homepage hero

Crafting a strong UVP with supporting messaging like this can be huge for conversions. So, make sure yours is straight-to-the-point with an obvious next course of action.

See how Reply teams its UVP with a killer call-to-action (CTA), giving customers two clear, commonly used options to proceed down the same path.

Also:

Notice how the CTAs are designed like buttons? Using a button (rather than plain text) makes your CTA stand out more, making it more likely to be clicked. So team these web design elements with your UVP for higher engagement. 

Barcode software, InFlow, is another great example of a crystal clear CTA button:

InFlow homepage button

You'll also notice how both websites indicate that no credit card is required. By promoting fee-free access directly below the CTA, customers are more likely to click.

PRO TIP:

You can easily create high-converting buttons via an embedded form in ConvertFlow. This allows greater insights into your conversions, as well as the ability to target visitors differently as part of a wider conversion marketing funnel:

2. Home page social proof

Consumers will always look for and be swayed by product reviews on a brand’s website. There are a whole bunch of stats backing this up in one way or another.

In this sense, social proof is one of the top conversion strategies to make use of.

According to Brian Greenberg of True Blue Life Insurance: “Social proof helps you establish instant credibility. You can’t have a home page that converts without establishing social proof.” 

Look at how Reply uses customer success stories as reviews on its home page:

Reply social proof

The simple sub-header indicates Reply’s trusted reach. A scrolling gallery of reviews proves this further with detailed testimonials from existing customers.

Language tutor platform, Preply, uses the same conversion tactic on its home page:

Social proof gallery

As you can see, using testimonials and reviews as social proof is a tactic used by many highly successful brands.

Switching back to Reply, you'll also notice how they use trust badges and client logos as another method of social proof on its home page:

Reply trust badges

3. Well-branded, solutions-focused content library

It’s not enough to simply bang out rambling content anymore. For your content to be successful at engaging your target audience and driving conversions, it needs to be strategic.

This means your content library needs to offer solutions-focused content.

And a "pillar and cluster" content strategy is a great, scalable way of doing this.

Long pillar articles describe a subject area in detail. These articles include links to subsidiary content that extensively explains sub-topics. All these articles are peppered with internal links back and forth, updated frequently as content changes.

By doing this, you create a sophisticated link-structure within your website that makes it easy for Google to explore your content and rank it for relevant search terms.

Equally, you show expertise in your industry, boosting your authority with your audience, increasing trust with potential customer audiences. All this leads to higher visibility, more clicks, and a higher conversion rate. 

Reply uses a blog, use cases, and a wealth of resources to do this. It’s how they’ve achieved 4.55% monthly growth in organic visitors.

Let's look at the company blog.

Notice how each post helps solve a different problem for the target audience:

Reply.io blog

Each blog post explains the steps to tackle a problem, with Reply’s solution at the center—showing the software's value.

Take a look at how popular sleep guide, sleepjunkie, uses the same tactic, just in a different industry:

Sleepjunkie blog screenshot

Like Reply, the simple custom hero images are engaging while giving you a brief insight into what the content is about. They capture attention, increasing the chances that customers will click.

When you head into the articles, you can see that the content is primed for conversions–because it's solution-focused, and leans on using the Reply product as one of those solutions. Like this post.

4. Landing page product video

Research recently found that 83% of marketers say video has helped them generate leads. And that 84% of consumers were persuaded to purchase a product after watching a brand’s video.

This makes video one of the top conversion strategies to use on web and landing pages in your marketing toolbox.

On Reply’s home page, you’ll see a quick product video that silently runs through some of the functionalities of the products:

Reply home page video gif

The video doesn’t disturb users, but it does quickly give them a feel for what the product offers. A tactic replicated by capsule filler specialists, LFA Capsule Fillers on their home page too.

This repetitive manufacturing video not only shows what the company does, but the repeated motion is pleasing and captivating.

PRO TIP:

With ConvertFlow's landing page builder, you can embed video anywhere on the page and run automations in order to use it as part of your marketing funnel:

5. Offer free value

Free pricing tiers, trials, demos, and complimentary guides are a great way to demonstrate product value and generate leads via forms.

But you can also go further than this by building specific free tools that your audience can use.

Reply offers a free LinkedIn email finder tool that searches for prospect emails in seconds. Super handy for sales teams scratching around for leads:

Reply LinkedIn email finder

The comprehensive free tool provides instant value and shows off the high-caliber of Reply’s software.

Super simple to use, customers simply install the extension on Chrome and sign up to use Reply’s free tool.

In addition to showing off what Reply can do, this generates leads and conversions for the company. Every new account provides an email lead for future email marketing campaigns. Plus, Reply has more than just this tool too—they have an entire grouping of free content they organize in a digital asset library

So far, the extension has had 7,000+ downloads, adding 7,000 more leads to the conversion funnel. From here, Reply can schedule calendar meetings with leads and convert them to big accounts, analyzing their meetings to see which lead magnets drive the highest returns.

6. Answer common questions

People are heading to your website to answer questions. Your job is to answer those questions by showing the value your product brings.

FAQ sections are the traditional way to answer all the nuts and bolts questions in a simplified format.

While this used to work (and sometimes still does work) for simple services, complex products, like SaaS, can’t always be broken down into a handful of questions.

Instead, knowledge libraries and help centers have now become the norm. And Reply has a high-quality one:

Reply help center

At this point, you might be wondering: "Help centers are for people who are already a customer. How is this a conversion strategy?"

Two ways:

  1. By ranking in search engines for certain product-related queries
  2. By answering granular questions prospects have about your product

This is particularly key if you operate on a freemium and/or free trial business model (i.e. like most SaaS companies). When prospects are testing out your software in this way, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find instructions and answers on learning how to use it.

If they do, they're much more likely to convert from free plan/trial into a paying customer.

You’ll notice that Reply’s help center has a search bar at the top. If your help center has over 100 articles, it’s best practice to add a search functionality.

It's then nicely organized into sections, with each help article usually including a video and detailed instructions.

7. High-intent SEO

SEO is the art of optimizing your web pages to rank highly in search engines for relevant searches.

To push your web pages up search rankings, you need to enhance both your content SEO (what people see, read, and experience) and your technical SEO (the technical organization on the back-end), as well as backlink optimization

But it's not just about ranking any keyword.

High-intent keywords are the most valuable to your business—because these are phrases people are typing into search engines with a high purchase or conversion intent. And Reply does a great job optimizing for these.

First off, they've managed to reach the #1 spot on Google for "Reply"—something that's more difficult than it sounds, given their brand name is just a single, regular word. But they also rank well for terms around "sales tools":

Reply SEO audit

These keywords are super high-intent. People typing them into search engines are specifically looking for either sales tools, or Reply's website directly. Meaning they're likely further along the buyer's journey than people who are searching for lower-intent keywords.

This is a great conversion strategy to ensure your SEO work actually drives leads and sales, instead of just page views.

Invest in deepening your understanding of SEO and digital marketing. Perform an SEO audit of your site to understand the top-performing content, and the intent of the keywords you do and don't rank for.

Final thoughts

As you can see, Reply harnesses a wealth of conversion strategies to drive leads and sales across their website.

From super-optimized SEO to landing page videos, Reply has pinpointed the highest converting marketing tactics and deployed them to capture their target audience and direct them to relevant, personalized content.

About the author
Kevin Kessler
Content Strategist, Wordable
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Kevin is a content specialist at Wordable, a tool that helps you export Google Docs to WordPress, formatting and all.