Chapter 5: How To Convert Your Instagram Traffic Into Email Leads

Bonus Material: Instagram Marketing Swipe File

Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Free Swipe File

You’ve been busy over the last little while. You’ve:

That’s a lot of work you’ve been grinding out to make Instagram marketing effective for your business.

Yet there’s no point in doing all this work to drive traffic from Instagram if you’re not going to capture that traffic.

Say it with me, folks: "traffic is useless if it doesn’t convert".

After all, you don’t want your followers to just visit your website once and then leave. If they do that, chances are they won’t come back.

By growing your email list, you can create an automated traffic machine. Instead of relying on strangers to come to your website, engage with your content, and buy your products and services, with the click of a single "send" button, you can drive hundreds or thousands of your highly engaged email subscribers to any page you want on your website.

And luckily, Instagram traffic has the potential to be highly engaged, and many businesses and bloggers have grown their email lists and even sales substantially through Instagram.

For example:

  • We’ve collected hundreds of emails from Instagram, and we don’t even send our traffic back to an opt-in offer.
  • Nathan Chan from Foundr Magazine had such success with using Instagram to generate leads that he created a whole course on how to do so.
  • Daniel DiPiazza uses Instagram to grow his email list by tens of thousands of people each month.

So in this section, I’m going to show you exactly how to convert that traffic you’ve worked so hard to generate so you can start growing your email list and therefore your income in your business.

Meta/header image

Step #1: Create an Enticing Offer for Your Instagram Visitors

It used to be that the promise of new content via email was enough to get visitors to subscribe to your email list.

But I’ve got some bad news for you:

That’s no longer enough.

Your visitors (and you, and me, and probably even the office dog, BamBam) are getting greedy.

Picture showing Scrooge McDuck

Dozens of websites are vying for their attention every day, and almost all of them are asking for their email addresses.

And you don’t want to be one of those websites, right? The takers, rather than the givers?

That’s what I thought.

So you need to set yourself apart. And you do that by triggering your Instagram followers’ reciprocity instinct.

This is where you create an "opt-in offer" (sometimes called “lead magnet”, “bribe to subscribe” or - if it’s attached to a piece of content - “content upgrade”), and give it away for free in exchange for the email addresses of your visitors.

Now, of course this has to be something that your visitors truly want. Otherwise, it’s not a very good trade, is it?

I mean, would you exchange your favorite t-shirt for a slobbery tennis ball the dog was just playing with? Probably not.

So if you’re posting Call to Action posts to pieces of your content on Instagram, create a content upgrade that your visitors won’t be able to resist.

Maybe that’s a:

  • Checklist
  • Discount
  • Cheatsheet
  • Infographic
  • Email course
  • Swipe file
  • Additional piece of content

But remember - this is traffic coming from Instagram. That means that these visitors are coming from a highly visual platform. What do you think would do better as a freebie for an Instagram user - a white paper, or an infographic?

That’s what I thought.

Ok, so once you’ve nailed down a content upgrade or an opt-in offer specifically for your Instagram visitors, you need to ... well, actually offer it to them. Here’s how.

Step #2: Create Opt-In Opportunities Specific To Your Instagram Followers

Okay, so we’ve already established that Instagram is a highly unique social platform based around visuals.

Because it’s different from most platforms, you want to cater your opt-in offers and opportunities specifically to those visitors.

Think of it this way: a visitor coming from a link within an article on another blog is in an entirely different headspace than a visitor coming from Instagram, where they were browsing and stumbled across your Call to Action post.

So that’s why you want to create custom opt-in opportunities specific to those followers. You have your offer, and now you just have to get it in front of just your Instagram traffic.

We’ve done this with our Welcome Mats and pop-ups, like this Welcome Mat we displayed to our Instagram traffic from our Sumo-Sized Guide: 85 Ways to Build Your Email List:

Screenshot showing a Sumo welcome mat

This Mat converts at nearly 12%, which is a very solid conversion rate (the average is 1.76%, with the top 10% of users converting at 6.90%).

Because Instagram is a visual platform, we decided to use a Mat with a visual component, rather than a template with a blank background:

Screenshot showing a Sumo welcome mat being created

The image in the background of our Instagram Welcome Mat is actually a gif, so there’s motion incorporated as well.

Instead of using a generic image, post an image of the offer you’re giving away. In our example, we posted a gif of scrolling through spreadsheet we were offering, ranking the 85 list-building strategies.

This is a visual cue for our audience, who clearly likes visual elements.

Once we set the image targeted Instagrammers specifically, we had to make sure that the Welcome Mat only displayed for those specific visitors.

We did so in Display Rules, by making it so the Mat shows only "On URL paths" containing the UTM tag we created for Instagram. You learned how to do this in Chapter 2.

Screenshot showing Sumo dashboard

You can do the same for your pop-ups, Smart Bars, or any opt-in opportunity as long as you have a simple tracking code.

BONUS Step 3: Create Call to Action Posts for Your Opt-Ins

So far, I’ve taught you how to create Call to Action posts for your content, products, and services.

So right now, you’re going from:

Instagram > Content > Opt-in Offer/Content Upgrade > Email List

But if you decide that traffic isn't as important to you as email subscribers, you can cut out the middle man - which is the content. That way, your visitor’s trajectory will look like this:

Instagram > Opt-in Offer > Email List.

You do this by creating a Call to Action post on Instagram to drive traffic directly to your opt-in offer instead of your content, product, or service.

Take a look at how Foundr does this with a free masterclass:

Screenshot showing an instagram profile

This drives your audience directly to the freebie instead of content - so while they have fewer eyes on the content they’re creating, they are increasing their email list directly from Instagram.

This is the difference between email marketing and content marketing.

Whether you’re interested in getting more eyes on your content or just generally increasing traffic back to your website, it’s important that you actually convert the traffic that you’ve worked so hard to generate from Instagram.

Make sure you’re capturing their email addresses by creating opt-in offers specifically for your Instagram visitors so you can continue to communicate with them.

Start Generating Massive Traffic with Instagram Marketing

Most people overlook Instagram as a marketing channel because of the lack of linking opportunities, but that’s a mistake.

Instagram is still one of the most underused and little-known methods of driving massive traffic back to your website.

Since 28% of people on the internet use Instagram - and that number is only going up, by the way - if you’re ignoring Instagram, you’re giving up a ton of traffic.

I gave you a ton of information in this guide. So if you’re a bit overwhelmed, here’s where to start:

  1. Determine whether Instagram is right for your audience. Use Chapter 1 for this.
  2. Set up your Instagram profile, marketing plan, and tracking systems so you can figure out whether your efforts are paying off. Chapter 2 will show you how to do this.
  3. Grow your Instagram following with the 6 foolproof methods I laid out in Chapter 3.
  4. Send those new followers to your content, products, or offers through call to action posts. I showed you exactly how in Chapter 4.
  5. Convert that traffic you worked so hard to generate into email subscribers, so you can continue to communicate with them (and increase your traffic and sales in the process).
  6. Profit.

If that sounds like a lot and you’re running short on time, don’t worry! You can download this entire guide for keeps - as well as get our Instagram standard operating procedures, marketing plan, AND tracking spreadsheets for FREE.

Click here to download the FREE swipe file .