One of the simplest hacks you can use to improve the performance of any marketing channel, is to reduce the number of steps required by your audience. We see this come into play all the time when building landing pages. For example, a few months ago we saw a several percentage bump in conversions by allowing users to register for a free trial on Paperform directly from the homepage, instead of clicking through to a dedicated registration page.
This got us thinking, what if we wanted to have this kind of functionality in our articles? Articles are (or at least should be), engaging and are the perfect opportunity to evoke a response. Obviously, we can embed our forms easily on our own blog, but we love writing and reading on Medium, so we are happy to announce that you can now embed Paperforms in Medium stories!
It’s really easy to do, just copy and paste the URL of your form into the medium editor on a new line and it will auto-magically be transformed into an embedded form. For example, the URL https://dfdgrxqi.paperform.co/ becomes:
<a href="https://medium.com/media/cc64c55e72ccc00821fe29b17b9d11e5/href">https://medium.com/media/cc64c55e72ccc00821fe29b17b9d11e5/href</a>
The possibilities here are endless, you can take payments, event registrations, capture emails for your newsletter, or take submissions for a competition!
We all write on Medium for the simple reason that it comes with an engaged, fantastic readership. To really get the most value out of your audience though, you need to develop and maintain an ongoing relationship. One of the best ways to do this is to capture direct leads with an immediate call to action. Platforms come and go, but no one can take away a freely given email address!
<a href="https://medium.com/media/0d2b79c0ecf8b91d9104493cd0be6fcc/href">https://medium.com/media/0d2b79c0ecf8b91d9104493cd0be6fcc/href</a>
Paperform supports both Stripe and Braintree, which means that you can take payments or sell products and subscriptions from your Medium stories too! Imagine if you’re a craft publication, and you could sell your goods right on page that describes how it’s made. Or take registrations for that masterclass you’re running? This is all easy to do with Paperform in your Medium stories right now.
Enough talk, let’s make a form!
I’m Dean, Co-Founder of Paperform, a super sexy form builder for making beautiful forms online.