Here at VA Partners, we’re always on the hunt for tools that offer new experiences for our clients and site visitors. Recently we’ve begun testing a new traffic conversion tool developed by Aiva Labs, and we’re so excited about the potential of using Aiva Labs for lead generation that we thought we’d write a blog post about it.

What’s the Tool?

Aiva Labs has built a lead generation tool that lets you add popups and slide-ins to your site, in a similar fashion to HubSpot’s Lead Flows or SumoMe. But aside from some of the discussed features, one of the major highlights of their tool is the ability to incorporate video and GIFs right into the popups and slide-ins themselves.
 

How is Aiva Different?

Unlike some of the other tools out there that place more importance on functionality over design, Aiva brings the best of both worlds.
 

Design Features

Described as “Photoshop for the web,” Aiva has a very robust interface that lets you actually match the design of the popups to your brand without requiring any knowledge of coding on the user’s end. Whereas other tools have limited design capabilities, with Aiva you can literally start from scratch with your design or choose from their vast library of templates.
 

 
You can embed auto-playing videos (which even work on mobile), add background images and traditional Photoshop-like elements like button shadows, shapes, and pre-built icons (which include branded icons, which makes adding social buttons to a popup a breeze). They categorize their templates based on the goal of your campaign as well, so it’s easy to find inspiration if you’re looking to collect emails, promote a particular sale, highlight testimonials, etc.
 

 

Functionality

Remember how I said Aiva brings the best of both worlds? Well aside from the profusion of design features, it also has an extensive amount of capabilities from a functional perspective. Like other tools, Aiva has a variety of different options for targeting site visitors such as time-, scroll, and exit intent-based trigger settings, but it also has a variety of options for targeting users based on geography, time of day, traffic location and referring sites, and you can choose to only have a popup displayed to either returning or new visitors as well.
 

 
If you only want to promote your downloadable assets to site visitors from countries where you do the priority of your business, that can be done with Aiva. Promoting a sale that applies to only your Ontario-based stores? Yup, you can set that up too. These types of capabilities make for much better lead qualification from the beginning of the conversion process.
 
Another cool feature built into the tool is the ability to A/B test popup variants. This makes it very simple to see whether popups convert better whether the form is built into the overlay or if it leads to a separate landing page, whether video works better than imagery, etc. Aiva can also be integrated with WordPress, Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Zapier, with integrations for Salesforce, Shopify, GetResponse, Marketo, and AWeber coming soon.
 

Use Cases

Testimonials

Let’s say your organization hosts a variety of online classes or workshops. You can use the popup to add testimonials from past registrants as slide-ins to the particular course pages.
 

Events

Using the same example of an organization hosting classes or workshops, you could also use the overlays to promote your events on particular site pages that are related to specific course topics.
 

Call Buttons

Do you run a 9-5 business? I mentioned earlier that you can target overlays to only run during specific times of the day, so you could use the tool to create a “Call now” popup that you can target to run only during your regular office hours.
 

 
Aiva lets you set specific actions when users click buttons within the popup, so you can set the action of a “call now” button to actually call a specific number, which is hugely beneficial for mobile users. You could also create a second “message now” overlay that runs when your business is closed that will let them send you an email, and you can set the button action to “Open Email App” so they can compose you an email right away.
 

Downloadable Assets

One cool feature I really like that separates Aiva from the competition is click-based triggers, which will display the popup or slide-in when a user has clicked on a link or element on the page. So say you have a landing page that promotes all of your different white papers, where the “download” button under each particular white paper leads to a separate registration page (the traditional ‘landing page’ ‘registration form’ ‘thank you page’ workflow). With Aiva you could use click-based settings so that when users click the “download” button the registration form opens directly on the landing page, effectively eliminating the “registration form” step from the earlier workflow, and we all know that fewer clicks for the user to complete typically translates into higher conversion rates. As opposed to other tools, Aiva also allows you to set multiple actions to a single button in the popup. So when they hit the “download” button within the popup, you can set the actions to “submit inputs” (which captures the users email, etc.), direct the user to a link (such as sending them to a thank you page), and “download a file,” which is a pretty self-explanatory option.
 

Newsletter Signups

Aiva connects directly to MailChimp so you can easily build your email list, and if you don’t use MailChimp you can also integrate with a variety of different service providers through Zapier.
 
Aside from designing and setting up the functionality of the particular site overlays, Aiva also has a very extensive Analytics section to their platform and it also provides you with data on emails collected and the traffic for sites where the tool is installed. We hope to continue using Aiva not only with ourselves but also with our clients, and we hope you start trying it out too.
 
Each year we ask industry and thought leaders about their favorite new tools. While Aiva will definitely make this year’s list, check out last year’s list for some additional tools that are worth investigating. Our Twitter feed also has lots of valuable resources in it for the modern marketer and sales professional.