Drive Conversions Through Sniply: A Cloud-Hosted Tool for Adding a Call-to-Action to Every Shared Link

TL; DR: Sniply is a unique link shortener that helps marketers boost conversion rates via call-to-action (CTA) messaging on every shared link. The cloud-hosted tool empowers users to share third-party content without disengaging users — the key is embedding a button on shared posts that links back to your own site. With tools to monitor customer engagement and track results, Sniply helps marketers measure their effectiveness, discover best practices, and calculate ROI on social media investments. Sniply can be found on Facebook and Twitter.

It may seem counterintuitive for a brand to share other people’s social media content online, but there are compelling reasons to jump on the content curation bandwagon.

As a marketer, sharing or retweeting a link to a third-party blog or website builds trust with readers, proving that you’re interested in providing valuable content, not just self-serving messages.

The strategy also keeps your audience engaged by supplementing your own content lineup, particularly during dry spells. What’s more, sharing others’ content helps you build relationships with thought leaders in your industry, who may then share your content in return.

And now, by using Sniply, marketers can leverage content curation as an entirely new communications channel. The cloud-hosted tool, a supercharged URL shortener, allows users to create a call-to-action (CTA) on each link they share. Instead of driving clients away, Sniply makes it simple for marketers to both share content and redirect traffic back to their sites — delivering the best of both worlds.

“There’s so much encapsulated in the process of adding a CTA to a link you share — you’re getting a new marketing channel, a new form of business, a new way to reach customers, and a new way to track things,” said Dan Hollister, Senior Marketing Strategist at Sniply. “At the end of the day, that helps boost conversions.”

Customizations, analytics, and a link management dashboard are the icing on the cake, making it easy to track conversion rates, identify successful strategies, and demonstrate ROI.

Sniply was launched in 2014 by Mike Cheng, a young entrepreneur and innovator who has founded several other ventures, including Lumen5, WittyCookie, and TEDxSFU, among others.

“Mike was looking into how to measure social media efforts,” Dan said. “We all spend so much time, effort, energy, and resources sharing and promoting content, focusing on engagement metrics, and trying to interact with audiences.”

In his quest to determine how to measure ROI, Mike came up with the idea to create an online marketing tool to drive conversion through content curation. It would also allow users to track conversion rates, link clicks, and other metrics.

“There was no tool on the market that did this very well — especially when you’re measuring social media ROI,” Dan said. “With Sniply, you’re able to track not just engagement metrics, but also conversions, which is totally new in our space.”

Today, Sniply supports more than 25,000 active users. The company has shortened over 85 million URLs and is responsible for more than 268 million clicks and redirects in its history.

It remains a distinctive offering in the marketing space, with few, if any, direct competitors.

“At one point, there was a competitor that now is defunct, so the closest competitor we have now is a provider of branded links,” Dan said. “That provider doesn’t offer CTAs. We were pretty unique back when Sniply started, and we remain that way today.”

Not only does Sniply offer CTAs, but the company also provides various options, called Snips, for leveraging the tool. For example, Sniply provides Snips for adding CTAs with buttons, forms, text, and images.

“There are so many different ways of utilizing the tool — you can do something very basic where you don’t need any background technology, or you can do something very advanced,” Dan said. “We have several interesting features like A/B testing and retargeting with conversion pixels. So we do have the whole gamut.”

Because the platform is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment, users can access it anywhere, anytime from a simple web browser. Because the software is hosted in the cloud, there’s no need to download or install any applications.

Sniply truly does offer a wide range of solutions, from a customizable CTA URL shortener to link management analytics and APIs for developers.

“What makes it a comprehensive product suite is that ability to make a unique CTA that matches your brand seamlessly,” he said. “Our different levels of plans allow you to customize your CTAs to different extents.”

Sniply offers four plans with varying allowance for clicks per month: Basic (5,000 clicks per month), Pro (20,000), Business (50,000), and Agency (250,000). With increased functionality comes higher prices among the plans.

The Basic tier allows one team member to manage two brand profiles and match CTA colors with their brand colors. The Pro provides access for three team members and six brand profiles, plus the ability to optimize your CTAs by testing multiple versions simultaneously.

The Business plan delivers access to five team members and 10 brand profiles. It also includes the option to remove the Sniply logo and use a custom domain. Finally, the Agency plan provides access to 10 team members and 15 brand profiles. With this plan, users can add custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to CTAs and receive expert support via phone and email.

“It adds an entirely new dimension to your marketing because you can go into the Sniply tool and play around a range of CTA variations and analytics tools to measure progress. “As a marketer, it’s a great way to explain to the C-suite, “Look, we created these social shares or calls-to-action, and this is what that quantitative result looks like.”

Ultimately, Dan said Sniply’s goal is to bridge the gap between the intangible benefits of social media (improved branding, an increased web footprint, etc.) and the hard data in terms of followers and engagement rates.”

“If you’re going to put extra time into social media, you have to determine if your efforts will matter to your boss at the end of the day,” he said. “The intangible things are a lot harder to sell to your boss than the numbers — it’s all about the numbers to a CEO.”

On January 15, 2020, Tim Schumacher of SaaS.group announced that his company had acquired Sniply, intending to take the tool to the next level. As a Software-as-a-Service portfolio company, SaaS.group’s goal is to invest in established small to mid-sized companies with solutions hosted in the cloud.

The acquisition has made way for a revamped Sniply.io that better highlights free, informative content and tools and integrations to improve sales funnels, connect web apps, and attract visitors, among other applications.

“Previously, it was a pretty sparse website,” Dan said. “We were able to flesh it out with material that’s useful for our target audience, so it’s more than a place to buy a product — it’s an informative space.”

The company’s domain name has changed from Snip.ly to Sniply.io.

“Snip.ly still exists — that’s where our tool remains hosted, so when you’re using the Sniply tool, you’ll still be on Snip.ly,” Dan said. “But everything front-facing is now on Sniply.io.”

The Sniply team has been building up informative content for the new site for months.

“We have a huge content library that is going to be posted to the blog and help center over the next couple of weeks and months — so expect to see new content regularly.”