Landing Pages to Double Your Business with Clay Collins Part 3 of 3

So step one, trade a lot of opt-in opportunities. You should create a lot of these. So what is it like, HubSpot ground that people who only have one opt-in mechanism get something like a tenth of the leads that someone with 10 to 15 landing pages gets. You should have a lot of landing pages opportunities. A lot of people say, well what’s the best lead magnet? Or what’s the best thing to give away to get people to opt in my list? Well, to answer that the best thing to have is a ton of things that you can opt-in for. At LeadPages you can opt-in to get a free template, you can opt in to get one of our courses, you can opt in to get on a webinar, you can opt in to subscribe to the blog, you can opt in to get a content upgrade, so a better version of one of our posts with a value added…There is probably at least 400 opportunities to opt in on our website.

And so I really encourage that. So here is one of the things to do. I’ve talked about this one a lot probably because I like that picture. But here is something that worked for us. This is the basic concept, is to give away a list of resources. This works out really well. This page, we actually improved on this one since but this is a good example of this. It’s probably more appropriate to use this in one of our older business than our current one. But this thing works really well, this is probably the highest converting page we’ve ever seen.

Okay, so split tests have shown and eye tracking the studies and whatever that when you have someone looking at the thing you want them to do they’re much more likely to do it. So we’ve split tests like that woman looking straight on versus in the thing, she converts better when she is looking into the box. Also both men and women convert higher on pictures with attractive women on them.

Also less copy is generally better if you’re giving something away. Less copy works better than more copy. It’s like when I was in college and unsuccessfully trying to get a date at the bar. If you ask somebody for their number and you’re like, “Let’s go out some time. Can I get your phone number? Because I really know this place and whatever,” and then you talk for five more minutes, you’re probably not going to get the phone number but if you just shut up and say, “Hey can I have your phone number?” it’s probably going to work better.

So we found less copy generally works better than more copy. Here it says free report reveals the five douchy tools I used to create all my videos including my $8 HD video camera. So it’s really simple, you know you’re going to get, you’re going to get five tools and this crushes it for conversion. This is the first part. It took me 15 minutes to create this and three minutes to create this page and we got tens of thousands of opt-ins using this. And it took me, again the whole thing, start to finish, half an hour.

So why is this the best performing evergreen landing page we’ve ever used? It doesn’t require someone to process too much information, they don’t have to listen to you talk for three minutes, which is usually a bonus unless you’re professional video personality. And everyone wants to know the tools that you’re using; everyone wants to know the tools that you’re using. And the reason for this is that we have this belief as humans that if we only have the tools that the pros have then we get the same results that the pros get. And most people would rather acquire a tool than acquire a skill, it’s just a lot more fun and it’s really helpful if you sell real things that you can ship to them. So these do really well.

Here is another thing. The best selling issues of any of these magazines are the gear guides. Not every year, but a lot. Buyer’s guide through 25 tortured, tested products. So you can totally do this with ecommerce. If I were doing this from an ecommerce point of view and I was selling to people who sell services, generally the objection is, “Well, does it work for services?” And then if I’d show the service version now the people think they need something else. But this totally works for ecommerce.

Minimalist shoe buying guide, here is one for RVs. You can do this in any market. If you’re a dentist you can do something like this, “Buyer’s guide to top five electric toothbrushes of this year including the one that I use,” I’d totally opt in for something like that. If you’re a life coach, “app guide the tap for iPhone apps for increasing your productivity.” Fitness experts, “only few pieces of exercise equipment you need at your home hence they all weigh less than five pounds.” That thing is really good.

What kills opt-in rates of people are if people think they know what you’re going to send them? They’re like, “Oh, I totally know what he’s going to send me.” But if you say they all weigh less than five pounds that’s intriguing. You’re probably going to tell them something they’ve never heard before.

So why should you create one of these? If you already have a squeeze page, I guarantee you this is going to probably outperform whatever you’re doing now. And you can set this up in minutes, about 30 minutes and it’s in a testimonial. So step 1a) for getting more opt-ins. Just want to show the results from our landing pages up, we got some 8x improvement over the basic homepage and a 3x improvement over the previous opt-in. I’m barely even using all the features and I’ll show you some proof we got off etcetera. Teramis, “I’ve been using this for a little over a month now, I noticed and by this they mean the standard landing page and I noticed that it is accounting for 71% of my new list of subscribers.” Wow, so that’s cool.

Okay, step 1a) If you take the time to write a blog post please, for the love of everything that is good and holy…this is like emails. If you’re going to write an email, please for the love of everything that is true, split test your subject line. Why do you do that? You spend all the time writing email, you can modify it in a small way and learn something significant, why not do it? Same with a blog post if you’re going to write a blog post, for the love of everything that is true and holy please, please, please offer an opt-in opportunity. Here is one, The Psychology of Waiting, Three Ways to Optimize Customer Wait Time in Your Marketing. Who thought that you’d get better results by waiting? It’s a great blog post, I encourage you read it.

So here we go, “Note, don’t forget to grab your free copy of The Psychology of Waiting workbook.” So you click on that and then boom, this appears. Because it’s important to test, we’re actually sending ads to blog posts like this and getting higher EPCs than we are to some of our landing pages. Awesome, perfect. Pre-selling content. Our opt-in rates across our blog is like, we’re getting the number of views we get. We’re getting a 10% opt-in rate across on a per visitor basis, not on a per-page load basis but on a per-visitor basis. Ten percent of people who land on our blog end up opting in in some form. Which is amazing for a blog. It’s amazing and it’s because we do stuff like this, we don’t publish a blog post anymore without having an opt-in opportunity associated.

So what can you give away? There is so many things you can give away. Checklists, worksheets, if you’re giving a recipe, if you’ve got a health site or if you’re selling blender…I got started with ecommerce. I was selling compost pails and red worms and cordless electric lamps, stuff you would buy. I bet. What?

Yeah, I did that, chicken coops. Anyway, if you’re doing this you can give away some workbook related to chicken coops or how to pick out the best chicken coops to design for your chicken. It’s great. You can always find a way to give something away that people have to opt-in for. This dude is killing it, the remit safety formula check. If you click on that, boom, you get that lead box. James Schramko right? James Schramko does it the easy way, here is the video and you can opt in for a PDF version of it. He needs to align that text by the way, anyway. Ezra, download the PDF transcript. I think that’s still James.

Step two, create a follow-up sequence. Super important is to create a follow-up sequence. So someone opts in on a main page, gets a few report that’s on day zero, on day three send them to video one, send them email one. Day six, I like doing every three days because then you cycle through days; on one week it’s Monday…so yeah, the days never line up. It’s not like every Monday you get an email. And we like sending them at 6:00 a.m., that’s what’s worked really well for us and it’s also consistent with the data I presented earlier. And so we just send them to a video like this or we send them to a landing page like this.

So there is a whole psychology behind this page. There is a whole bunch of reasons why this thing works. The first reason why is we’re telling them what part they are in the course, six or seven. So if you’re emailing people every three days you should probably let them know that at some point you’re not going to email them every three days because they might get really pissed they’re getting an email from you every three days. But if they know that there is an end in sight, part six to seven, they’re much more likely to stay with you.

Next thing, there is a progress bar. Human beings don’t like things that are incomplete. We have the psychological need as humans to complete incomplete things. There is this thing called the Zeigarnik Effect, which actually isn’t exactly this but it’s another reason why people don’t like incomplete things. So free landing page course, we give them that stuff and then there is little buy button below. So here is the format for these videos, for these little content pieces. What we do is in the first four minutes we give people information that’s absolutely valuable in of itself. Four minutes, straight value.

And then the fifth minute we tell people something extra they would get if they bought our thing, right? So if it’s like, say you’re selling the NutriBullet, you might go over three of your favorite recipes and why you like them and then you would talk in the four. And then in the fifth minute you would tell them something extra they’d get if they bought the NutriBullet through you or whatever. So there is lots of ways to do this.

So how this works. After someone opts in they get one of these lessons every three days for about six weeks. And really this is where the money gets made in your list. The fortune is in the follow-up, the money is in the follow-up. Please follow-up. It’s like any other relationship, it needs to be maintained. And when you do something like this it means you make money every single day. We get a huge surge of purchases every day around 6:00 when this goes out and it’s been really good for us.

It means you get paid even when you’re not doing a launch, even when you’re not doing a webinar, even when you’re not doing some hand waving and there is this card closes, down the bonus goes away and all that stuff we talked about earlier. This is evergreen. And so this works really well for us.

So initially, here is what I do with this content. Initially when that first video goes out, you’ve created a video; you’ve created a series of videos but just do this one at a time because you’ll never do this if you just, “Holy crap, I have to create a whole bunch of these,” just do it one at a time. So the first time you create a video or some content you want to send to your list as part of your follow-up sequence, post it to your blog and email everyone on your list, or at least your non-customers. Just email your non-customers the first time it goes up.

And then after you’ve done that take that same content, add it to a landing page and then add it to your follow-up sequence so everyone who opts in after you sent out the initial broadcast gets the content but they get it as part of your follow-up sequence later on. So again, when you send this out, the video goes out to everyone when you mail the first time and then later you put on a landing page like that and people who opt in after you do the initial broadcast get it as part of the follow-up sequence, like that.

Step three, do webinars. Webinars are used a lot for selling high ticket software as a service, packages; they’re good for B2B sales. What’s often missed is that they actually work really, really, really well for ecommerce. So people miss the point of a lot of things, that’s a general statement. Just people miss stuff.

Back in the day when Eben Pagan was talking about moving the free line, everyone misunderstood him or I think a lot of people misunderstood him. They thought the essence of that was that you should just randomly be giving more away and that you would automatically get more sales. And that is not what he was saying; he was saying that if you give more value upfront you can charge more because people have built a relationship with you. And it’s very similar with webinars.

When else in this ADD scattered world do you get, other than a time like this, would you get an hour and a half live with someone with your target market? You don’t usually get that. You don’t usually get the opportunity to answer their questions, to directly speak with them, to have them listening to you in real time, giving the presentation, creating that bond, addressing their questions, being of use. And so when you do webinars and you’re not selling a commodity product, you can generally raise the cost, wouldn’t you say that’s true? You can triple it.

Ezra: It’s like they’re looking at Amazon page, they’re looking at it for a minute. If you’ve got them on a webinar, you’ve got more time to communicate.

Clay: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. So he said the longer you have them on, generally the more you can charge. There is probably some point in diminishing returns after a couple of hours, “This is $1 billion because we’ve been doing this for 20 hours.” Anyway, so you should do webinars. And the first reason why you should do webinars is because you can charge more.

The second reason why you should be doing webinars is because they’re absolutely crushing it in terms of conversion rates. Here is one of our webinar pages that we’re using here at lead pages. It’s getting an average of 47% conversion rate. So if you go to on to LeadPages and you sort by average conversion rate, the first seven of the top nine highest converting landing pages are webinar registration pages because they absolutely, absolutely crush it. And there is an event associated with them. So even if you weren’t going to sell something and even if not one person actually showed up for your webinar you should still do webinars because they’re going to grow your list.

We hired a dude just to do webinars so they’re all live so we can authentically say that it’s a live webinar. He does one to two webinars every single day and he’s added tens upon tens, he’s probably added 45,000 people at least, to our list since he started. And he started pretty recently. So he’s absolutely crushing it. Webinars aren’t dead and we drive a lot of our paid media directly to a live webinar registration page. Not an automated one, a live one.

And that goes back to scale. Why is it that when something works to such a huge degree so many people are stingy to spend more money on it? It’s like, dude if you’re the blog and that blog is getting you 50 sales per day and you’re posting to it once a week, why the hell not hire a second fulltime writer? And if you get double the sales, why not hire a third fulltime writer and a fourth fulltime writer? Why not do these things? I really encourage you to do it. It’s great having a fulltime person who does this thing.

So let’s break down the anatomy of one of our webinar registration pages. So there is a whole bunch of reasons why this works, why this page in particular works. It’s one of our highest converting pages. The first is it has a two-step opt-in. We’ve talked about that. It really has to do with consistency and commitment. If you can get someone to commit at a low level of commitment by clicking this button, the likelihood that they’ll commit at a higher level of commitment by opting in increases. If you can get someone to do micro-commitments or behavioral inertia, if you can get someone to do something little, it’s much more like they’ll do something bigger in terms of commitment. Sales people call it the foot in the door technique. If you can get someone to say yes, a whole bunch of times in a row the likelihood that they’ll say yes to buying your product increases. So that’s one thing.

The next is there is a countdown timer and we’ve just been putting countdown timers on everything now. There is a whole bunch of reasons why countdown timers almost universally increase conversion rates. The first reason is that they’re moving and the human eye is drawn to movement. And all things considered people will stay on a page longer if there is a countdown timer. And if they stay on a page longer they’re much more likely to opt in.

Second, it adds urgency to it. So I know what 17 day, 0 hours, 57 minutes and 17 seconds means. I know what that means. The human brain understands that pretty readily. I don’t know March 11th, if you were like Clay, “What day is it today?” I probably wouldn’t know. But I know what 17 day is, 57 minutes and 17 seconds is. So that’s another thing.

The next thing is this is mobile responsive. I can’t stand these non-responsive webinar registration pages. And the next is countdown timer…oh Ryan Deiss has talked about this. There is a blurred out mind map in the background and people get that when they opt in. And so if you take some information and you blurred out just enough to pique people’s curiosity and tell them they’ll get it when they opt in, it increases curiosity and gets people to opt in. So it’s not unusual for people to get 70%, 80% conversion rates with our webinar pages.

This one? By the way when we switched from our old pages to this one we double the conversion rates

Ezra: Basically you need to get LeadPages, go do that.

Clay: So the process is do one webinar every two weeks. Do them live, they’re going to convert better and you can directly answer to people’s questions. This is one of your few opportunities to talk directly with your customers in live setting. I recommend you do it three, six, not like on the 10th day. Insert that in your follow-up sequence. And it’s really easy to do that when you’re doing them every week, you just drive them to the page that names the two times per week that you’re doing webinars.

All right, so this is my last slide. And this is more motivation or whatnot. So, I really believe that if you’re here today…I hang out in the venture-funded startups base and with B2B selling companies and they’re so behind on marketing. Most large businesses are behind their marketing. Most companies that you’ve heard of and respect just absolutely suck at marketing. And then we have these amazing little community of people doing innovative stuff here, affiliate marketers, people doing math-based marketing, people who are tracking conversions and tracking what’s happening.

And I see way too many people on this space that have literally the most powerful marketing mechanisms at their disposal selling some crappy product they don’t even care about. Or doing something where they’re like they’ve got some deal and they’re hawking some stuff and they’re doing the most advanced marketing in the world selling something crappy that they could care less about.

And so I just want to encourage you to actually do something you care about with your skills. The other day I was talking to someone and he was doing this crazy stuff I’ve never seen before with paper click advertising and I was like, “What are you selling?” He was like, “Well, I had this dude on Fiverr put an e-book together.” I was like, “What is going on with this picture?” There is just way too much of this going on.

And so I would just encourage you to take this stuff and use it on something that could actually change the world. Do something that is commiserate with the power of the tools at your disposal. Anyway, that’s my presentation. Thanks guys.