Social Conversions - The Launch Story of BO.LT

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Nobody in this industry has been in the conversion rate optimization game as long as my brother Jeffrey and me. Yet, brothers Matthew and Jamie Roche are responsible for many organizations beginning to test. They founded Offermatica (which is today’s Adobe Test & Target). So when the Roche brothers started their next project, BO.LT, you assume they’d know something about speaking to their audience and converting them into customers, especially since the product was free.

The Launch Plan

Basic mechanics: When people came to BO.LT, it was a closed beta. People who left their email addresses would receive invite codes. They were told that the code would be sent over in a few days, but it would come faster if the invite was shared. This is a fairly standard, and effective, mechanism to increase viral demand.

What is BO.LT? BO.LT lets you remix pages and share them with people you want to reach. Once you "BO.LT" a url, the tool makes a copy of the page and runs it on very advanced content delivery network tuned for incredibly fast page serving and incredibly fast editing and sharing. When you put a page on BO.LT, it is a copy. Don’t worry, the original page on the original site is still safe. Your page, however, is nimble, changeable, and completely under your control. The service includes fabulous analytics as well. This is a great way to launch new landing pages or make changes to existing pages for A/B testing.

The BO.LT launch twist: You could use the "RED" BO.LT editor to remix the invite prior to retweeting or sharing to increase its odds of being shared.

Social conversions: The results would seem to show us that when it comes to social conversions no one knows their audience better than the members of that audience.

Would you have predicted that this would be one of the best performing pages?

The Darth Vader version was the top invite: http://bo.lt/cqpzs was shared 617 times.

The top converting page was a remix that converted nearly 8x better than the original page designed by BO.LT. Each of the top ten most shared invites were remixes and within the top 100; 60 personalized personalized. About 6 percent of all invites were remixed. At least 700 invites were forwarded at least once.

BO.LT had versions of its page translated into Japanese (at least five versions), Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Tagalog (Phillipines), and more. Translated pages had 2x the conversion rate of un-remixed pages.

Check out some of the other great BO.LT remixes:

• http://bo.lt/1tjei (Magna Carta)
• http://bo.lt/8hlb4 (just look at it...)
• http://bo.lt/aqxao (John Battelle/Jonathan Franzen)
• http://bo.lt/w4z9 (Lucas is inviting!)
• http://bo.lt/7qeai (Experimenting with bolt!)
• http://bo.lt/anv4 (subtle complaint)
• http://bo.lt/hx260 (descriptive)
• http://bo.lt/gq18e
• http://bo.lt/d845g
• http://bo.lt/emyst or http://bo.lt/fpdld (Japanese)
• http://bo.lt/hyh54 or http://bo.lt/izq3x (French)
• http://bo.lt/2slif (Dutch)
• http://bo.lt/92arl (Norwegian)
• http://bo.lt/9z9j9 (Chinese)
• http://bo.lt/5s3g7 (Russian)

Does this have you rethinking your social conversion strategy? I suggest it should.