How Podia grow their account sign-ups effortlessly

The concept of gated content has been around for quite a while. Hubspot is perhaps one of the more famous proponents of the inbound marketing strategy and evangelised content creation as the ideal route to customer acquisition.

The general idea is create different types of content to attract people initially to your website, and then further down the funnel towards giving up their email so that you can start to nurture them – most likely with an email newsletter sent out periodically. A strategy of growing MQL’s which many companies have successfully built on.

Podia have taken this concept and tweaked it into a more powerful conversion tool.

I recently came across @mattragland offering a free email marketing masterclass. I’m already a big fan of Podia – their blog and marketing content are always top notch – however, I’ve never taken a leap to open an account with them.

However, Matt’s tweet changed that.

It wasn’t the above tweet per se that converted me though. Yes, it’s a nice engaging tweet. Great design as ever from the team at Podia. And it’s a topic I love to learn about (although its been done to death) – sales emails. However, the team at Podia have enough credibility with me, based on their previous content, that I’m pretty confident there will be some cool new shit to learn here. And there’s no shortcut to that.

But as far as I’m concerned we’re still in gated content territory. I’m interested in the content, not interested in signing up for an account.

You want my email in exchange for access. Sure, no problem:

Seamless sign-up complete. Or so I thought.

And this is where Podia are able to create viral growth around their content.

They add on one more popup – with 3 additional data points. And if I’ve given away my email already, the psychology suggests I won’t mind giving up my first name, last name and making up a password (actually my password manager already does that for me).

And the result, a brand new account with Podia:

The beauty of this is that the content itself is a Podia class, so rather than relying on traditional gated content such as ebooks or webinars, they can leverage their own platform and entice you into create an account to view the content.

Great for their metrics and a great seamless experience for me in creating an account. 🎉🎉

The end result of this is that now if I’m looking for an online platform that lets me create and sell online courses, memberships and digital downloads … Podia have already drawn me in and my account is already setup. 👏👏