Do you have a wide variety of content your visitors can explore? Do you need to show offers specific to those areas, rather than generic optins for every visitor? In this case study, we’ll discover how Expat.com uses OptinMonster’s personalization features to grow its community by 30,000 members every month.

Meet Expat.com

Expat.com is the leading multilingual platform dedicated to life abroad. They provide content, networking facilities, tools, and services to help those who are living abroad or who are looking to move abroad. Among the numerous features that are available for free, visitors can have access to a forum, local expat guides, a job & housing section, a business directory, and tools to help develop their network. Severin Guiton, Business Development Manager at Expat.com talked with us about how they’re using OptinMonster to grow their business.

How Expat.com Uses OptinMonster

In June 2017, Expat began using OptinMonster with a goal of simply reminding abandoning visitors to join their free community forums.

They did this using a fullscreen optin using our Exit-Intent technology. Exit-intent triggers an optin only when the visitor’s mouse motioned towards the browser, an indication they’re about to leave the website without taking an action.

The optin also uses our Yes/No feature to replace the traditional optin form with two buttons. Each button can either redirect the visitor to a URL, reveal an optin form, or close the optin. Expat chooses to redirect the visitor to their forum registration page when the Yes button is clicked. The No button closes the optin.

Of course, Expat wouldn’t want to show this optin to visitors who have already registered for their forum, or who are already logged in. Those people don’t need a reminder to join and might find it annoying to see this popup. To prevent logged in users from seeing the optin, Expat uses our powerful Cookie Detection display rule.

With OptinMonster’s Cookie Detection Rule, you can target any browser cookie in a simple rule to easily focus your campaigns and optimize your conversion rate. Since Expat’s forum software has a unique cookie for logged in users, they can choose to only display the optin if that cookie is present. In this case, the cookie name is “logged” and the value is “no.”

This optin converts 2.09% of visitors, adding tens of thousands of visitors to the community each month.

On some pages, like this guide to finding a job in Switzerland, it converts even higher at 33.28%.

These results far exceeded Expat’s expectations. After beginning this campaign, 86% more visitors started the registration process and nearly 50% more completed it.

Now, Expat.com registers nearly 30,000 community members each month compared to only 16,000 on average before using OptinMonster.

How Expat.com Personalizes Optins

Encouraged by the quick success, they’ve since launched a new campaign aimed at promoting an offer with one of their partners. Members can receive a free quote for expatriate insurance when referred by expat.com.

Expat.com uses the optin below to direct members to a landing page where they collect information needed for a quote, then pass it along to their insurance partner. Again using the Cookie Detection display rule, this optin only displays to logged-in members.

Expat personalized the optin using our Dynamic Text Replacement feature, now Smart Tags. Smart Tags lets you use the information you already have from your email marketing or lead management software to personalize the content of your optins.

Let’s take a look at how Expat uses Smart Tags in this optin to increase conversions.

When building the optin, Expat added two merge fields, {{username}} and {{destinationComplete}}. {{username}} references the logged-in user’s name. {{destinationComplete}} references the destination the member previously searched for via the search box on the home page.

The offer in the optin is much more likely to convert when personalized in this way. In this case, it helps the reader see themselves as already moving to their dream destination, and subsequently needing insurance there.

This optin converts 2.45% of visitors, accounting for a full 10% of their partner’s qualified leads.

Thanks to OptinMonster, Expat can reach more people and consequently increase engagement on our platform. As a side effect of that increased engagement, their search engine rankings have improved, too, as more readers share their content.

Severin from Expat said,

It’s like a virtuous cycle, which OptinMonster is fully part of. Clearly, OptinMonster does much more than simply improving conversion rates.

He has big plans for using OptinMonster in the future.

We will be able to display an optin at the right time, in the right place, to the right person. For example, if you’re looking at our Canada Expat Guide or browsing job offers in Spain, you may receive an invitation to attend a webinar dedicated to life in Canada, or try a job placement service in Spain.

Results

Expat.com works hard to personalize their visitor’s journey, and it nets them big results.

• Expat increased member registrations 50% using OptinMonster.
• Expat boosted registrations from 16,000/month to over 30,000/month.
• Expat refers 10% of a partner’s qualified leads using OptinMonster.

Summary

Expat’s success lies in how they customize both the triggers and copy of their optins for the individual visitor. Use OptinMonster’s powerful display rules to create personalized optins that appear at the right time, to the right person, with the right offer and you’ll see conversions increase, too!

Thanks to OptinMonster, we’ve reached the 2 million members threshold months before our projected plans. Clearly, OptinMonster is the most efficient and profitable add-on module we have. Severin Guiton, Business Development Manager, Expat.com