94 - Tip Tuesday - Secrets to Opt-In Pages That Convert with Tim Paige
Building your list is everything when you're building your business, and in order to do that you need to have an opt-in page and offer that converts.
Tim Paige of Leadpages came by to break down what makes a great offer, the things you should and shouldn't do, and how to bring in more customers with less effort.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became the fact of lead pages. With a vast background in sales and the face to face close the deal style he made his mark in sales. The reason for the sales profession was because he was doing it while trying to cover expenses for the band that he was in and traveling the country with very little. When the band would come back into town they would rush to work their jobs to cover expenses and Tim knew that he could cover his by working a sales job. As time went on he found himself needing to find a way to make the sales part not so time intensive. Although at one time he was making six-figures he was working eighteen hour days, six to seven days a week. With a family he just could not keep the lifestyle of the hours. He found Pat Flynn, from Smart Passive Income and started working with online marketing and meeting anyone that he could. However it is all down to one person John Lee Dumas, from Entrepreneur on Fire, he was a guest on his very first podcast and now a very personal friend that he started a show together.
On their show John interviewed Clay Collins, who is the CEO of Leadpages and one thing lead to another and Tim landed a show doing podcast for Clay and Leadpages. As things progressed with the podcast both Clay and Tim realized that they could do more with the podcast and Leadpages. Clay was doing all the webinars and gave Tim the task of learning all there was to learn about conversion rates, data and becoming the go to guy with the end result being doing webinars and live events. He did 200+ live webinars in 2014 to over 50, 000 people who watched them. So that people can see results with their business.
Let’s talk about MUST –Do’s for Opt-in Pages to make the great. Leadpages is great about continually generating fresh data. The biggest mistake that people make is that we as business owners thing everything is about US and that sells people on my business. When at the end of the day people don’t care about your business and that is a harsh reality. As much as people want to do business with others but at the end of the day we all are trying to figure out the W.I.I.F.M (what’s in it for me?) If you can remember that and think about that all the time and use that in your business, then you can see great results. Many opt-in pages are always stating “what we” can give to you as the consumer when you really need to focus on them the ideal customer. So in order to reach the ideal customer you need to create lead magnets which is just the item that you create to get your customer to give you their e-mail address. One of the highest converting lead magnets that they have seen only takes about twenty-five minutes to create and it is a one page PDF list of tools. However many times people create these long video courses that take months to create and they have tested opt in that have taken months to create and put them up against the one page PDF and it absolutely dominated over any other types of documents that they have created for testing. Focus on your audience and what you can do to solve their needs and start out with something simple such as a list of a few tools and resources that can easily solve their problems.
How do you draw the line between the get them in vs. letting them get to know you first and then getting them in? It is interesting and it is very important for people to get to know the business and you; to establish the know, like and trust of your brand, but there is a certain time and place for that. Right now people keep talking about the funnel, when really all the funnel is, is the process that somebody takes when they first find you to when they become a customer and beyond. But it is mistakenly being referred to as a funnel in which a couple of landing pages are strung together and that is not a funnel. The very top of the funnel is when someone first finds you and that is when you need to get them to opt in, that is the only goal in that point of the funnel. At this point a person that has just found you does not know you so you are just trying to get them on to your e-mail list so that you can communicate with them. So give them something simple that will easily and quickly solves their problem and then catches their attention; and now they are in your captive audience. Then you can introduce them to you and show them why you are the person to solve their problem. That very beginning of the funnel is not the right time to start building that relationship. By giving them something that will solve their problems you have already begun to build that relationship without having to do anything about you. You are just showing them look I know how to solve your problems and here are the tools to do just that. That is the first step in the relationship.
On opt-ins, how much copy do you really need to get them to sign up? It varies from business model to business model. If you are trying to build a relationship with a high-end firm that is going to spend millions with you it is going to be different to get them to opt-in and you may have to spend a little more time. Generally for the majority of people not a lot of copy is needed. The highest converting landing page that Leadpages has is called a basic squeeze page. The template is very simple with a small box with very simple text, an opt in button and the privacy statement. The amount of time that you spend creating your lead magnet does not equal your conversion rate. And the amount of value that you put into your lead magnet does not equal your conversion rate. These same rules apply to landing pages. So simply put speak to your audience and their pain and the problem that they have; that can be solved by some resources and give them those resources.
Let’s talk about conversion, what is incredible, what should you be shooting for and what should you keep trying to optimize? So when it comes to individual landing pages it is pretty impossible to give a range because you need to keep in mind where the traffic is coming from. If it is warm traffic, from people who know you then your conversion rate is going to be higher and if it is a Facebook at to an untargeted group then the rate is going be to be bad. However, for the average website out there right now that is not really focused on marketing, may have a opt in page and a lead magnet is ranging from 0.5% to 2% conversion site-wide. The 2% conversion is a website that has done some studying on marketing, has a couple of lead magnets and is maybe doing webinars. A very well optimized website is the person that is has multiple lead magnets, using software like Leadpages and is giving away custom content upgrade for each blog post, that person is going to average around a 10% conversion opt in rate. So if you are hovering anywhere in between 2 – 10% then you are doing a pretty good job. If you are below that and somewhere in the average range you can bump that up fairly quickly. Something that they tested at Leadpages in the early days was using content upgrades. A content upgrade is a custom lead magnet for each blog post that you do. For an example, if you are doing a podcast do an opt in for a download of the transcription of the podcast. People love to posse’s things, they want to feel like it’s there’s. You can give checklists, recipes, resource guides or whatever is going to help your audience and solves a specific problem you will see amazing conversion rates.
When it comes to variations, where do you the draw the line with too much testing and what is good and bad? Tim believes that you should be testing right away not waiting for a certain amount of followers because for no other reason then it gets you in the habit of testing. Also, you can still get insights about what your audience likes even if you don’t have a lot of traffic because you can see what does convert. However, as your traffic increases things that did not work when you had low traffic may work with greater traffic flow so don’t always think that what you have established does not work. However, keep testing. When you are testing you need to test one element at a time. For button copy you should always have a split test going for button copy. You can test the image, either a picture or the image of what you are giving away. You can test the headline. But only test one thing at a time so that you can narrow in on what that one thing is that works. Once you get more comfortable and once you feel you are ready then you can start multi-testing and comparing two landing pages against each other, for example.
For more information about Tim Paige, join him on a webinar every Thursday or Friday, they are absolutely free. Topics such as the ones that he discussed on this podcast but really in-depth and you can join that if you go to leadpages.net and use the link to register at the top of the page.