Gary Leland Show Episode 9
This week I interview Tim Paige of leadpages.net and we discuss optimizing leadpages and lead generating pages. – Produced By PodcastRepairman.com
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Gary: Today I have a great interview with Tim Paige of LeadPages.net, which is a great system to help you grow your email list so you can use that list to market your products. Tim, thanks for joining me today. I have a lot of questions about this, but let’s start with a little bit about Leadpages like the history and what it’s all about.
Tim: Thanks so much for having me on; it’s a real honor for me. Leadpages is software that takes what has been tested and proven in the world of marketing and does it for you. Everything we do is based on what is going to get your customers to take action, whether that is to opt in, register for a webinar, purchase your products, or whatever it is. We have opt in pages, sales pages, webinar registration pages, thank you pages, already set up. You can go in there, put in your information, a picture of your product, and much more and it will convert for you. We are always adding new things, for example this past year we created “Leadboxes” which is an opt in form that only appears when someone clicks a button or a link. We are a platform that allows people to do marketing without having to focus their whole lives on it.
Gary: I know there are basically three parts to Leadpages, is that correct? There is a sidebar thing, a box thing, and a delete page, is that correct?
Tim: The three main features you are talking about are Leadpages themselves, which are the templates for the webpages, Leadboxes, which are the opt in forms that only appear if someone clicks a box or link, and Leadlinks, which are links that you can send in an email and when someone clicks on it, it automatically get opted into another list or whatever.
Gary: What does it mean to automatically get opted in?
Tim: Typically if you were going to send an email to invite people to join a webinar, the link you send will take them to another page where they have to enter their email and register for the event. With Leadlinks, if you send them a link and they click on it, they are automatically registered just by clicking.
Gary: That’s really great for webinars!
Tim: It’s also great for affiliate partners or someone else who helps promote your product because they can send an email to their audience with your Leadlink. Then if people on their email list click the link, they are now also on your list automatically. Let’s say you are a product creator and you make a couple of different products in an industry and you get someone gets added to your list for some kind of a light up football. You have a new football that’s coming out that is a specialized kind of ball and you want to know who on your list would be interested in that. You can send your whole email list a link that they can click to get updates and learn more about this new ball.
Gary: The main thing it seems like to me is that Leadpages is the best for signing people up for a mailing list. Am I incorrect on that?
Tim: You are not incorrect. We are mostly known for our landing pages. For me, I am an avid user of the Leadboxes, it is my favorite thing that we have. Definitely we are best known for our pages. You mentioned that opting in is the main thing that people use Leadpages for and we have a narrative that has been around since the beginning and even before that. We were at a point in our business where we were focused on doubling our revenue, getting more sales and doubling revenue. The first way we looked at to do that was to double our traffic, which I think is usually the first thing that is done. There does come a point when you are SEO optimized like we were, we were doing tons of social media like Facebook ads and YouTube. For us, we came to the conclusion that it not the best way to go to double our revenue. The second thing we came up with was double the conversion rate of our sales page; double the conversion rate, double the sales, therefore double the revenue. When we create a sales page we have so much into it. We work with the copywriters; we work with the video producers, and all of those things. We don’t want to do that more than once every six months or so. Honestly looking at it, we couldn’t envision a way of doing that that would double our revenue. The third thing we looked at, which was where the magic happened, was the double the number of people on our website using our email list. The thought was that if everything else held steady like our conversion rates and the value of everyone on our email list, then if we doubled the conversion rate of our landing pages, we would double our revenue that way. The first month we did that, we doubled our revenue. The second month, we doubled our revenue from the first month, which means our revenue increased 4 times in 2 months. The third month we doubled our second month revenue and almost did it in the fourth month as well. What we found is that it was much easier to double the conversion rate on our landing pages instead of doubling the traffic or sales conversion rate. That is what inspired us to focus harder on more opt ins and in doing so it has allowed us to create these awesome tools that help with the generation of opt ins.
Gary: that’s a pretty smart way of looking at it. You’re doubling your list and if all of your metrics stay the same you double your business.
Tim: I think that more people are working on their lists and it’s really important to be doing that. If you don’t have an active list, you can start anywhere and start building that. It should be a focus of your business if you want to sell your product or whatever it is, then you need to build your list. It’s silly not to!
Gary: I can’t believe I have been online since 1996 with a retail store and I just started my list a year ago! I have everything covered, but have the worst list! I should probably have the biggest list of any retail softball store out there and I probably have the worst, which is what got me looking at Leadpages. Now Chris Brogan was on our first show. I was looking at his system of selling, not sure if it is Leadpages or not, and it had a lot of those “click here to buy” and highlighted buttons. I was giving him a hard time about it and he said that he thought the same thing at first, but they really work. The number of people who click on them went up drastically when he had buy buttons everywhere. That was very interesting because I had no concept of that. I noticed that a lot of your pages have that same progression. Is that the standard way of operating these?
Tim: The reality is that the more opportunities you give people to take an action; the more likely they are to do that. It’s interesting because we have found that you can’t take it too far when it comes to opt ins because the more opportunities we had for someone to opt in, the higher our conversion rate was. It can however hurt your perception in the marketplace if you have too many calls to action because it can make you look spammy or like you are out there to just take stuff. One way we have combatted that is by our featured Leadboxes. We have a podcast called “Conversion Cast” which can be found at conversioncast.com. If you go to the website, there are 19 opportunities to opt in by the time you get to the bottom of the second blog post. If that were a bunch of visible opt in forms, that would be the ugliest, spammiest website of all time. If you look at it now, it is beautifully designed, it doesn’t look like a site to just take your stuff, it has great images. The opt in forms are all hidden behind buttons, links, and images. The only way they would see those opt in forms is if they click that, meaning they were hoping to get whatever you were offering with their opt in. There are three reasons why we found this works really well. The first is that when someone comes to a website, they make an immediate determination whether that page is a giving page or a taking page. When they get to a website and the first thing they see is a form to fill out to opt in, they immediately see your page as a “taking page”. When you only give them the opt in form when they ask for it, you are seen as a “giving page”. The second reason is that the two-step opt in, meaning you have to click to get to the form, you are forcing them to make a decision. I get asked a lot what the first goal in business should be. My answer is to get people to make a decision, not to get people to buy or opt in. The reality is that 100% of people, who don’t make a decision about whether or not to opt in or register for a webinar, will not do that. Some percentage of the people who do make the decision to buy will actually do it. If you can make everyone in the world to make some decision about whether or not to take an action on your site, you could have the world’s worst conversion rate, but have the biggest mailing list or most amounts of sales because you made everyone make a decision.
Gary: I began in in home sales, selling stuff door to door. That same approach is used in in-home sales; get the saying yes to decisions. Once they say yes 10 times, at the end of the sale they are used to saying yes and it’s a lot easier!
Tim: I say that on almost every webinar. Its called behavioral inertia. If you can get someone to keep making a commitment, when you ask them to buy they are more likely to do that. It’s very powerful. People think that because the Internet is so relatively new, all of these marketing things we have to learn have to be new. In reality, human psychology does not change; it still works now, we just have to apply it to the new medium of the Internet.
Gary: I am a novice at Leadpages. I am looking for 19 hidden places on this page that are opt ins. Some of them are obvious to me. Are all of these, the review marketing materials, subscribe now, etc., going to the same place or do they go to different places?
Tim: Some are going to the same place and other are going other places. You can see in the header you will see “case studies”, that is a Leadbox that will go one place. Another is “review your marketing materials”; that will go to a different Leadbox.
Gary: So in this top one, this is a Leadbox, it is a whole page. I expected it to be more of a box.
Tim: Case Studies is a box. If you click on case studies it will just be a box. If you click on free webinar, that will take you to a landing page. If you have ever been to a website and have had something pop up after 10 seconds, we know them as annoying pop ups. We all use them, most marketers use them and that’s fine; but this is similar to that except for it won’t pop up until someone asks for it to appear. The person looking at the page made that happen by clicking on something. Its permission based marketing. I’m not giving you an opt-in form until you say that you want this one thing. All I do from there is say that you can have it if you enter your email in this box and submit it.
Gary: You’re giving them something to make them want to opt in. It made me think the other day that I need to find something to give them to be effective on this. I decided to give them the first chapter of a book that I am doing. Is that a good idea? Should I be giving them the whole book?
Tim: No, that’s a great place to start is the first chapter. I will tell you the most effective lead magnet we have ever had. A lead magnet is the thing you give away in exchange for people opting in. Some people call it an opt in bribe, but we call it a lead magnet. I like it better. The highest converting lead magnet we have ever seen was a one-page pdf that was a list of tools. For example, the landing page said that “a free report reveals the five dirt cheap tools I use to create my videos”, and then in parenthesis it said “including my $80 HD video camera”. We have found that the highest converting thing that you can give away that people will really want is a list of tools or resources, doesn’t have to be literal tools, but resources that will solve a problem. So a lot of your audience is product people, right? They sell a product?
Gary: Right, on this show, but a lot of the stuff I do is relating to my fastpitch business, which is selling softball sporting goods.
Tim: It’s some form of sales or selling product. People will say to me that they are selling a physical product, so there are no tools or resources to give my customers. Let’s say for example you sell a cool watch. Your list of tools and resources can be something along the lines of, “the only four tools you need to keep your jewelry looking great for the next 20 years”.
Gary: So it’s just making them information? I was kind of tunnel vision on this. It doesn’t have to be a lot of information; it just has to be useful information.
Tim: Right, yes-useful information. The fact is, the long information you mentioned like an e-book will not convert as well as that short information because people are so overwhelmed and on information overload. They don’t want something big like that; a list of tools are things that they can buy and solve their problems.
Gary: So like a list of the top 10 bats for fastpitch softball this year would be the right idea?
Tim: I would even encourage it to be the top 5 bats for fastpitch softball this year. It would only take about 20 to 25 minutes to create, you can get your designer to go out and make something, and you can be up and running in 30 to 40 minutes. It will convert really well.
Gary: They sign up for it and you send them a PDF right?
Tim: Yes. If you’re using Leadpages it will send the file automatically. If you’re not, then you can go to your email service provider, set up the welcome email, and make sure that email delivers the PDF.
Gary: You have changed my whole thought on how to go about doing this! I went ahead and bought your 2-year program because it was a great deal. If you’re going to use it, you probably won’t quit using it after you get it all figured out! What is the retention rate on this, I would think it is high on people who use it for over 6 months.
Tim: I’m not 100% sure but I know it’s pretty high. We don’t get a lot of people who leave. The people who usually leave the program are those who buy it and never actually use it. Obviously if you don’t use it, you won’t get any benefit from it. The people who go out and create a couple of pages tend to stick with it because it works.
Gary: You have a bunch of templates in there; I used one of them for all of my Facebook pages. It looks like a Facebook page when you click on my header on Facebook that says “free newsletter” it looks like you are going to another part of Facebook, but it is actually my Leadpages where they sign up for the newsletter. That is pretty cool, and there are many more templates to use. What are your top 3 templates for Leadpages?
Tim: Leadpages is the only landing page software to actually let you sort templates within our builder by conversion rate. If you ever want to know what is converting best at that moment, because it is real time, you can click the box for highest conversion rates and it will show you which ones are converting the best. For all of those people who think that they need these crazy, intense landing pages, the third highest converting template right now is called “basic squeeze page”. All it is is a page with a wooden background with an image of your giveaway and a little bit of copy. That is what converts the third best out of all of Leadpages.
Gary: You can actually take the Leadpages and put them in your site?
Tim: You can put them anywhere that your site is hosted. You can put them on WordPress, add them to Facebook, you can download the HTML and publish them wherever, so I get this question all of the time. Anywhere that you go you can publish them. Leadpages allows you to host the page on Leadpages and they will give you a link so you can send people to that link and never have to worry about putting them on your own site. We are on the Google server so it is absolutely lightning fast.
Gary: That’s pretty cool. So as far as putting it on your own site if you want it to look like it is a part of the site, it almost seems as though the Leadbox would be the way to do that.
Tim: Leadboxes is a pretty amazing feature. There is a rule of thumb we use to suggest this to people: if you have to send people from one page to another, use a Leadbox instead. Don’t use a landing page, just use a Leadbox. If you are going to send them from an email or a tweet, then send them to a landing page.
Gary: Okay that makes sense. So if they are already on my website and I want them to sign up for my newsletter, then a Leadbox would be the way to go.
Tim: It is a better approach. We have seen a 30% improvement in conversion rate when we send them to a Leadbox instead of a landing page.
Gary: That is good to know because it’s one of the first things I need to do. How about on the right hand side of pages. A lot of people have things on the right hand side. Aweber for example provides those templates.
Tim: Two things about that. I love Aweber, I use it in my own business, I do voice over work for podcasters. I use Aweber for that business. Their specialty is in the email list itself, in what happens once the email is collected, it’s not in generating leads. Those Aweber forms, to be blunt, are ugly and don’t convert very well. The second thing is that when you remove that sidebar opt in form and replace it with a Leadbox, that one thing alone on average has resulted in over a 30% improvement in conversion rate.
Gary: So you shouldn’t even have that on your page is what you’re saying.
Tim: Yes, get rid of it, replace it with a little image that says, “Free report reveals xyz” or “get the first chapter of my e-book free”. When people click that a Leadbox will appear.
Gary: That makes a lot of sense. When people use that Leadbox, if they are using Aweber, they still have to use the opt in on that email right?
Tim: Yes, they will still have the opt in regardless, but what Leadbox will be is the front-end part of it, it’s the sales person, it’s what gets people to take action. Aweber is the “customer service” in a sense, it’s the back end, and it controls what happens to that email and how you handle it.
Gary: Is there anything else you want to tell us about Leadpages or anything else we need to know.
Tim: I would just say, as a salesperson, just go try it. See if it works for you. Once you try it, you will see results. If you don’t, we do have a 30-day money back guarantee.
Gary: To be honest, I used that money back guarantee a year ago. I signed up for it, didn’t have time to mess with it, asked for my money back, and I had it back the next day. This year I got back in it again and went with the longer program to get myself committed because I do hear so much about this product. Thank you so much for coming on the show to tell us more about Leadpages, I really learned a lot.
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