This guest blog has been written by Tim Watson
In the last quarter LinkedIn earned $33.3 million from Premium membership subscriptions. That’s 20% of LinkedIn revenues and its grown 87% in the last year.
Persuading more of the 90% of free members to upgrade is a major revenue opportunity for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn are using email to convert members, sending a free one month trial offer. I am a LinkedIn member and after many years still on the free package. As an early adopter of LinkedIn this makes me a target for Premium membership upgrade.
Just as I was putting the finishing touches to a new email copy & creative training deck of 87 slides a LinkedIn upgrade offer dropped into my inbox. It demonstrates several of the principles I’d just covered in the slide deck.
LinkedIn have optimised
What happened next was even better. I found a copy of the same offer from last November in one of my email folders (LinkedIn have tried a few times to convert me).
The difference between the email now and from last November is an excellent case study in email optimisation, so let me share the key elements of what changed and why.
Before
After
Another smart move
Not only is LinkedIn (a social network) smart enough to use email to drive revenue but they also send an urgency based reminder email shortly before the offer is due to expire. A second urgency based email to follow-up on an original offer always improves conversion.
The author is Tim Watson. His Twitter handle is @tawatson
You can read more of his blog posts here. The original article was published in Smart Insights.
