What is a Lead Generation Agency?

Why Work with a Lead Generation Agency?

How to Choose the Right Agency

Experience and Expertise

Services Offered

Pricing

Communication and Reporting

Culture Fit

Conclusion

The post The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Right Lead Generation Agency – Boost Your Sales Today! appeared first on Done For You.

If you’re looking for how to create a landing page that converts, you’ve got a lot more options than were available even a few years ago.  And the good news?  They’re all pretty easy to roll out!

As an email marketer, there is one page on your website that is at the epicenter of your entire business, your landing page.  Single handedly, your landing pages predict your success or failure when it comes to sales and conversion.

You want to make sure you’ve got sales pages that convert, of course.  Generating revenue is important to grow your business!  Having lead capture pages that convert though runs a close second…

It’s not your home page.  It’s certainly not your contact or support pages…  Nor is it your blog or the countless articles that you spent hours putting together.

Now, your landing page goes by many different names, depending on who you’re talking to.  It might be a ‘squeeze page’ or a ‘lead capture page,’ or even an ‘optin page.’  Regardless, the point is that the landing page’s purpose is to take a visitor and turn them into a bonafide lead (or sale) for your business!

Today, I’m going to walk you through what you’ll need to do to get a landing page set up, with or without a website…

You’ll also want to reference this article on email marketing software to make sure you’ve got what you need to tie your landing page with your email list, to get your drip email and email automation rocking further down the page as well…

Do You Need A Landing Page?

Now, you may be asking yourself, “Do I really need a landing page?  I’ve got an optin box in my sidebar – that should be enough…”

Collecting leads in the sidebar of your website or at the bottom of your post is effective, but it’s going to be hard to build a huge list that way unless you have hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.

Let me put it this way.

When you put your lead optin box in your sidebar, it’s easy to miss.  A reader will check out your content and unless they really want to hear from you again, just leave.  If your content is stellar, then they might sign up if you give them an incentive.

That means that your ‘conversion’ rates are going to be really low!  So let’s start with that…

Understanding Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are pretty easy to understand when it comes to landing pages.

Very simply, your landing page conversion is the number of people who SEE your optin form compared the the number of people who FILL IT OUT.

So, if 100 visitors see your optin box and 50 fill it out, you’re conversion rate is 50%.

If 100 visitors see your optin box and 5 fill it out, you’re conversion rate is 5%.

Well, typically when you put your email optin box in the sidebar, you’ll get less than a 1% conversion rate; meaning that less than 1 person out of 100 want to hear from you again!  That’s pretty dismal considering that we use a landing page that gets 52% conversion on average (available inside the Axis Page Builder).

With landing pages, there are really very few places to go if you don’t enter your email address…  That’s the idea.  If the person wants the information on their other side, they have to give up an email address!

That begs the next question, “Jason, what can I give someone to make them sign up?”

I’m so glad you asked :0)  We’re getting to that…  But first, let’s talk about landing page psychology.

Landing Page Psychology

Landing pages (or squeeze pages as they’re called) do something very simple – they collect email addresses from people who may or may not be willing to spend money with you in the future.

They give you their email address with the express consent that you can contact them in the future through email…

You give them some kind of something that incentivizes the prospect to sign up.  That ‘something’ is called a Lead Magnet.

Lead Magnets can be:

• A special report that talks about something they’d be interested in.
• A free video or a series of videos that are related to a problem that they’re facing…
• A mini-course or tutorial series delivered through email helping them overcome some of the roadblocks they’re facing.
• Answers to a question that they’re struggling with…

It goes a little deeper though.  If you read the book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Robert Cialdini, you start to see something else at work…

That something is reciprocity.

Basically, the Law of Reciprocity says that if you do something for someone else, they are morally committed to doing something for you.  They feel like they have to…

So, by giving you a free download, you are committing them to read a report, watch a video, or otherwise spend money with you.

That, my friends, is the biggest key behind why squeeze pages convert visitors to prospects.  Sure, you have the person’s name and email address…  But the true power lies in the Law of Reciprocity.

Landing Page Setup

If you went through the email marketing software article that we linked to above or you know how to get your ‘lead form’ code from your email marketing platform or autoresponder platform, then it’s time to create a landing page!

There are quite a few ways of doing it from custom code to WordPress plugins to standalone landing page tools like Axis’s Page Builder, but I’ll keep this simple.

If you want one piece of software that you can use for all of your landing pages and your marketing automation CRM, sign up for Axis.  Not only do the landing pages, sales pages and webinar registration pages convert really well; Scriptly’s also got other apps for writing email autoresponders and webinars.

If you’d rather work with WordPress, there is a Page Builder plugin that you can add to your website so all of your pages look like their hosted right on your website!

You can of course code up your own if you know HTML and have Photoshop!  I’m sure not that ambitious though…

Self-Hosted vs. Landing Page Hosting

There are two different ways to set up a landing page – on your own domain with your own web hosting (AKA. self-hosted)…  Or with a landing page hosting service that is run by the landing page provider.  In other words, it’s a function of the landing page software to host your pages for you.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each, and you’ll have to decide for yourself which you’re more comfortable with.  After all, the leads that you get will be going into your own email marketing software, so those are yours for good…

First, let’s talk about self-hosted landing pages, or setting up and maintaining your own website….

Self-Hosted Landing Page Builder

To create and host your own website, you absolutely need two things:

• A domain name
• Website hosting

Website hosting and having your own domain answers the question about where to host landing pages…

The easiest and fastest way to get set up is to go through HostGator.  Choose the domain that you want for your website, pick a hosting package, and then install WordPress.

Now, once you have WordPress installed, adding landing pages is as simple as activating your free Scriptly account, setting up your landing pages and installing a plugin!

Click here to download the SCR Page Plugin >>

There are other landing page builder scripts like OptimizePress, which we use on occasion.  ThriveThemes has some lead generation plugins as well.

That brings me to my next point…  App-Hosted Landing Pages.

Landing Page Hosting

At the end of the day, we know that setting up and maintaining a website is difficult (albeit a very valuable skill if you take the time to learn it!)…  Not to mention all the issues with backups, corrupted databases, faulty code, and poorly constructed themes…

We’ve worked with a number of clients who run into issues either in terms of compatibility of plugins, or the simple fact that a theme can’t do what it needs to do to convert traffic into leads.

So, what we did is create software inside Axis that makes setting up landing pages and sales pages that convert much easier and way more effective.  And, of course, the landing page hosting is done for you if you’d like…  You can also install the landing page on your own website.

Click here to learn about Axis’s Page Builder >>

To put it simply, it’s squeeze page builder software or lead capture page software that’ll make lead generation easier.

Here’s how simple setting up a converting landing pages is…

Other Necessities For Landing Pages…

Once you start building an email list, there are some things that you need to do to take care of it…

Not many people do ‘email list management’ justice.  Just because someone opted into your newsletter doesn’t mean that they want to hear from you three times a day!  Here are a few things you’ll need to pay attention to make sure your emails get delivered, make you money, and keep you out of the doghouse.

• A/B Testing – Do split testing on your landing pages and make sure to always be improving your landing page optimization.
• Double optin – make sure that people click a verification link in their email to actually optin to your list.  This is BIG when it comes to spam complaints.
• Non active subscribers – In OfficeAutoPilot we have it set up so that after 120 days of not taking action, subscribers are automatically deleted off of our lists.  We do this for two reasons: it keeps our costs down and only people who care about our content actually read our stuff!
• Relevant subject lines – Make sure the subject line of the email is relevant to what’s in the email (and stay away from ‘Notification of Payment Received’ subjects’)
• Advertisement announcement – Include somewhere in the email, preferably the extreme bottom, that the email message is an advertisement, and for the reader to assume that you are somehow making money from anything that they do.
• Email frequency – take note of how often you email, and what your responses are from your list.  Some lists mail daily.  Others a few times a week.  We’ve found that it’s best to take breaks, and then follow that up with a 3 or 4 day sequence of emails.

What To Give Away To Get The Lead

The next thing need to talk about is what we need to give someone in exchange for their email address…  In other words, we’re going to need a lead magnet.   So, we need to talk about how to create them, distribute them, and find an interested group of folks who will sign up for them.

You can read all about that here >>

The idea with a lead magnet is to give something (of value!) away for free in exchange for their email address.  And yes, this strategy has been around for ever.

Think about the last infomercial or commercial you watched that offered a ‘Free DVD’ or ‘Free Brochure’ for signing up?

Guess what?

That’s a lead magnet.

Recap: How To Create A Landing Page That Converts

To recap, the number one page on your website is not your homepage.  Nor is it your about page, your contacts page, or even a blog post.

The number one most important page on your website is your landing page. And the reason being, your landing page is really the gateway into your digital world. When somebody hits your website, clicks an ad, hits a button, or follows an in-post link; they should be directed to a landing page where they have the opportunity to download something for free.

That, my friend, is a lead magnet.

Lead generation in most industries is the number one marketing activity. Your sales pages are important because your sales pages and webinars are what generates revenue. More than anything though, you want to be able to reach out to folks whenever you want to release something new.  You want to be able to send an email out to your list, engaging them in whatever new offer you have to sell.

That’s why your landing page is so important.

3 Options For Landing Pages That Convert

Now, when it comes to landing pages, there are a few ways you can go about creating landing pages that convert.

• Self-hosted landing page. Your self-hosted landing page is really the page that you have on your website kind of natively. You can install WordPress, install a landing page plug-in, and get it built out.  That landing page will be hosted by you and native to WordPress.
• You can also go the more complicated route and you can hire a developer or a designer, or both in some cases. And they will put together the pages for you. It’s more expensive. It’s a lot longer process. It’s much slower to test it.
• (BEST OPTION) Creating landing pages with a landing page builder sofware, like Axis.  The Page Builder app inside Axis creates marketing pages, landing pages, confirmation pages, sales pages, and webinar registration pages. It even has an automated webinar function to it.

Any of those three options are very good solutions for building sales pages and marketing pages that convert.

Why Landing Page Software Is The Best Option

The big thing with landing page builder software is that it hosts the landing page for you, as part of the service. The same as Axis.  The Axis Page Builder hosts the landing page for you. So you have a page that you can just link right to and it’s already set up for your business, ready to accept leads from the traffic you’re driving. From there, it all ties into marketing automation.

Now, with a landing page builder that has hosted landing pages, you don’t have to worry about the technology or the tech setup. Nor do you have to worry about the page design. All that stuff is done for you. You’ve just got to go in and you change the text, images, the opt-in box and all the other stuff that you want to make it a little more personal to you. As soon as you hit publish, it is live on the internet, ready to start accepting leads.

So that’s the beauty of a landing page builder. You can deploy more quickly, so you can test stuff more rapidly.

You don’t necessarily need to go and learn a new plug-in, mess around with themes, get your own graphics, or any of that stuff because all of it is already built into the landing page builder itself. That’s really the big difference between self-hosted landing pages versus landing pages that are hosted by the software company themselves.

What We Use For DFY Clients

98% of the time, we use a landing page builder, especially when we’re deploying campaigns at first.  We don’t just deploy one landing page. We deploy four or five and then we test them against each other. Usually, it’s easier to create those on a landing page builder, alter them slightly, and roll them out with paid traffic.

With the landing page building software, it’s equally easy to install the pages on a client’s website or our own website, as opposed to creating brand new landing pages from scratch every time.

The most prominent landing page inside the Axis Page Builder, we have actually done over 45 split tests on.  We’ve spent over $50,000 just testing that one page, and we cannot find a page that actually converts better… Including any other landing page builders or pages that we have designed! That page just rocks when it comes to a PDF lead magnet. It tests better than anything else we can find.

So that’s why it is in our page builder, and it’s always the control that we launch clients with. It’s always the first page that we put out there. We might test some other pages, depending on the niche or the vertical or the category, but that is the one that ends up converting the best, most often.

In terms of building landing pages that convert, your choice of self-hosted landing pages or using landing page software is totally up to you.

For now though, go ahead and grab a Scriptly account and get your first landing page set up.  And when you’re doing with that, it’s time to get cracking on your lead magnet!

The post How To Create A Landing Page That Converts [Updated] appeared first on Done For You.

Once you are all set with the basic task of setting up landing and other funnel pages, you’ll then move on to creating advertising campaigns and email marketing autoresponder sequences. Then, you’ll have the ongoing task of landing page optimization, A/B testing, and making tweaks to ensure that all parts of the funnel are contributing towards higher conversions.

By the way, a prerequisite for sales funnel optimization is having sufficient and meaningful data. If you don’t track your sales funnels the right way, you won’t be able to extract all the important information you need. Statly is an advances analytics app that helps you track every visitor moving through your sales funnel and website while it delivers customized alerts to increase conversions, reduce bottlenecks and capitalize on hidden opportunities! Would you like to try Statly for free?

Part of that ongoing optimization work you have to do revolves around trying to achieve the maximum conversion rate of your landing pages.

But how do you do that? What can you possibly increase your landing page conversions even more?

Here’s what you can do:

Remove distractions

We are so used to designing landing pages the way we design websites that we think landing pages work exactly like websites do. Partly yes, but mostly no.

Elements that might look and feel naturally at home on a website are an absolute no-no on landing pages.

For instance, you’d use live chat or a Facebook Messenger prompt on your website – and that’s fine.

The same prompts on your landing page would probably distract your visitors from taking that all-too-important action that your CTA is working hard to accomplish.

Navigation menus, links, social media buttons, or any other element that is clickable (everything except the call to action) shouldn’t be used on landing pages – period.

Often, you’d design your landing page and sales funnels without these distractions in the first place, right from the go, even before you launch your campaigns.

But if you did, it’s time to start removing these distractions one by one.

Keep testing

Split testing is not a one-time thing; it’s an ongoing process to pit one variant against another to reach a point when you arrive at a collection of ads, landing pages, and email marketing sequences that get you the best possible results.

To get to that point, however, you’d have to continuously and diligently work with your split testing process.

You can’t stop. You can’t sit back and relax if you want the best results.

Split test your ads, your landing pages, the subject line of your email autoresponders, and all applicable parts of your sales funnels to get the best possible results. You’d need sufficient data, enough time, and an ongoing effort to make your split tests work.

Add geo-targeting

About 74% of online customers get fed up and frustrated when they land on web pages that are irrelevant to them or when the information they see doesn’t pertain to their interests. More than 84% of online shoppers claim that personalization impacts their purchase decisions.

Geo-targeting helps resolve these issues by making it possible to show more relevant content to your visitors while helping you personalize their user experience and content.

You can also use Geo-targeting to hyper-personalize your pop-ups or slide ins, launch hyper-local promotions to boost in-store revenue, launch local events, and more.

Utilize dynamic text replacement

One of the most important aspects of matching your ad with a message-matching landing page is relevance and continuity. It so happens that most ads don’t “connect”. If an ad says something or promises something, that story doesn’t extend to the landing page where your potential visitors are bound to arrive.

That’s the basics, anyway.

You could take this to another level with dynamic text replacement where a certain keyword automatically shows up on the landing page making it more relevant. You could use dynamic text replacement to dynamically show location names, specific keywords, or any other items you’d specify such as Pin codes, for instance.

In essence, DTR (Dynamic Text Replacement) swaps out a piece of text on your landing page with whatever keyword (or another valid element) your prospect might have searched for before arriving on your page.

Does DTR really work? You bet.

In a simple A/B test, Campaign Monitor found that using DTR helped with 31.4% lift in conversions.

How do you plan to optimize your landing pages?

What kind of ongoing work do you foresee with your landing pages and funnels? What are you trying to do continuously to inch towards better conversions?

If you need help designing high-converting landing pages and funnels or if you’d like to discuss your marketing strategy, please don’t hesitate to get on a scheduled call with us.

The post CRO: How To Make The Most Of Your Landing Pages (When You Thought You Couldn’t) appeared first on Done For You.

That applies to the audiences exposed to your campaigns, sales, and landing pages too.

Just like banner blindness is a reality, your landing pages could begin to look old, outdated, and maybe just lose a little shine.

As a part of ongoing work you’d have to do to keep your sales funnels going, landing page makeover is one of those things you just have to do.

Periodically, your landing pages and sales funnels will call for a makeover, a redesign, or an overhaul.

Note: None of these are mandatory if your landing pages and sales funnels are already pushing you into the profit zone. These landing page makeover tips are for those pages and funnels that really need a makeover.

Also, it isn’t proven if landing pages or sales funnels with good looks actually convert any better than ugly ones.

With that out of the way, here are a few tips to add some spice to your landing pages when the time comes for a makeover:

Don’t mess with what works

When you are this stage of a makeover for your landing pages, chances are that your landing page has already been used for your existing campaigns.

Maybe your landing pages worked, and there could also be other variants of the same page competing in your regular A/B tests.

Don’t mess too much with your landing page makeover if they are already working great. The point of the makeover isn’t to throw a monkey wrench into the lead generation machine that you’ve worked so hard to build.

If everything is working great and your continuous A/B testing is helping you improve your overall conversions sure and gradually, you should actually stop reading at this point.

Experiment with backgrounds

The simplest and the most effective background in the world is: solid color backgrounds. You just can’t go wrong with a background using simple and solid colors such as white or blue.

But if you were feeling adventurous, your landing page has some sort of a background which isn’t just white or blue.

Try to tweak the page so that it has a solid color. You can also experiment with a pattern, or a beautiful gradient.

Play with colors

Colors go a long way to not only enhance user experience on your landing pages but also help in the ultimate act of persuasion (which is exactly what your landing pages are built out to do).

Your choice of colors will directly affect your ability to trigger actions on the part of your visitors. Colors are so powerful that they can also induce physiological reactions such as increase blood pressure, metabolism, or “good” (or negative) feelings.

Guido Jansen writes that your potential customers — knowingly or unknowingly — interact with colors. Red is festive and bold. Blue is cool, trustworthy, and friendly. Yellow is all about positivity. Grey is understated elegance. Green is a symbol of wealth.

See how colors affect our moods? Build out your color palette and use them on your landing page.

No animations? Add them

Animations on your landing page add a special layer of interactivity (and maybe even fun) taking the user experience to another level altogether.

All this without actually changing, editing, removing, or adding any element that’s already working on your landing page.

For instance, your background, headlines, sub headings, copy, images — they all remain in place. Except that you could animate and change the way your elements display depending on user interactions (such as hover, scroll, or click).

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

Your landing page makeover exercise gives you a chance to simplify your pages.

Look out the usual mistakes most businesses do when they build landing pages such as adding extra clickable links on the page, adding too much information that’s not required, adding social media buttons (with links), adding a navigation bar, or using extra images or graphics that don’t need to be there on the page.

Remove clutter. Seek opportunities to simplify. Keep your landing pages minimalistic and still effective.

Are you working on a landing page makeover or are you planning to? If you need help with landing pages and sales funnels, get on a scheduled call with us. We’ll help you up your game and help you generate more leads (and hence more revenue).

The post Same Page, Different Game: Top Landing Page Makeover Tips appeared first on Done For You.

You see websites full of content. Some of them are designed beautifully. Heck, check out any website featured on Awwwards, and we guarantee that you’ll love the designs.

The problem is this: “Likeability” and “pretty-looking” isn’t anywhere close to what a business really wants: profitability. Of course, high-performance websites need to come with a beautiful design, but that’s not what will make them profitable.

So you have the most beautiful website in the world but that’s not enough. Good design is important for branding and grabbing the user’s interest. What’s more important though is high performance. Here’s what that means:

• How many leads do you generate from your website every month?
• What volume of annual sales can you attribute to your website?
• Do you have at least one sales funnel in place working for you 24/7?
• Does your website load fast, ideally within 3 seconds or less?

Funny thing is that most businesses don’t have answers to these questions at all. If they do, the answers are vague. All that is because the entire approach to website design and set up has been wrong from the start.

Businesses focus on design, structure and content but they neglect elements and systems that would make a website perform best in turning traffic into buyers.

The right way to go about creating high-performance websites is this:

High-performance websites are built to convert

It doesn’t matter if you use a pure HTML/CSS or if you use WordPress to build your website. When you launch an e-commerce site, it won’t matter if you use Shopify or Magento. What really matters is whether or not your website gets you the results you seek.

For common types of business websites, the sought after results can look like this:

• Blog or online publication? Number of regular readers and email subscribers.
• Company blog? Number of leads generated and then sales attributed to those leads.
• SaaS application website: Number of free trials leading to monthly paid users with MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).

It’s possible to generate results for any level of traffic that’s coming to your website. Even if you’re attracting only a couple of hundreds of visitors per month, you should be able to convert at least a small number of them into customers.

When you develop a website, develop it from a marketing angle. If not, don’t even bother building a website, only to have a web presence.

No matter the type of website, you need to have at least one sales funnel in place. In other words, you need to push random incoming visitors towards a path of actions, that you have planned in advance, with the ultimate goal of turning some of those random visitors into paying customers.

See the difference? Instead of just counting on luck, wishing website visitors would buy more of your product, you come prepared; You create a well-thought sales strategy, and all of the pages, elements and systems behind it, to facilitate sales on auto-pilot. This is just another way to describe a digital sales funnel.

Use lead-generation elements on web pages

In the short time that you have to make that good first impression to your visitors, it’s hard to get your visitors to give you a vote of confidence, to build trust, or to convince them to buy.

To enable sales you need more time. The only way to have more time with your web visitors is to get them to engage with your brand long-term. The best way to achieve that is to use email marketing. Using one or several sets of well-written autoresponder messages, you can nurture leads and convert them into sales.

But how do you even get email subscribers in the first place? You do that by creating lead-generation elements such as pop-ups, slide-ins, welcome gates, in-line opt-in forms, or opt-in forms on your blog’s sidebar. The purpose of these lead-generation elements is to grab the user’s email address, so you can contact them again.

How do you attract more email subscribers? Make a valuable offer. Give away something of value to help your visitors go one level up on your relationship, and further convince them that you have the solution to their problems.

Websites are hubs; Landing pages are for focused lead generation

Your website is a central hub with oodles of information to keep your visitors informed, engaged, and to help them make well-informed decisions. Websites can work as knowledge hubs where you offer content, blogs, resources, tools, and access to your primary products and services.

Make a sitewide, all-purpose offer on your website for all your visitors to see. This offer is usually your flagship offer and also an evergreen one so that you don’t have to keep making changes to that offer.

However, you need to use landing pages to present specific offers based on different criteria, such as:

• a person’s location or country,
• important referral sources, like Facebook, or
• topic-specific or interest-based offers for particular audiences.

Landing pages are focused and specific, and visitors dig that sort of relevance.

High-performance websites: Use analytics, for everything

Use Google Analytics to ensure that you have a way to track visitors to your website (and every single page within, including each of your blog posts).

When you track visitors, you also get a glimpse of their behavior, along with several other data points such as locations, devices, countries, bounce rates, time spent on your site, and website page loading time, etc.

Click here to register for an upcoming webinar where we’ll learn:

• how you can track visitor behavior and visualize web paths with the click of a button,
• what metrics you need to analyze and how you can get instant access to them, and
• how you can learn how to fix and optimize sales funnels using one dashboard.

One of the most popular tools, Google Analytics, gives you a wealth of data to let you know what digital marketing efforts contribute to acquiring leads and ultimately to generating sales. If you need more handy features, consider using Statly for bringing in very specific numbers pertaining to your sales funnels. Statly allows you to visualize complete sales funnels, and find funnel pages or elements that facilitate conversions.

Plus, you can use Hotjar or Mouseflow to also get access to video sessions of users, heatmaps, form analytics, and click behavior on your website and landing pages.

While you are at it, be sure to keep track of the right metrics, the ones that help reach informed business decisions.

Your website should be built for a reason. Whatever your reasons are, it’s certainly not for “looking good” or for satiating your ego. Make your website work!

If you need help setting up the right strategy for high-performance websites, if you need to get on a profitable path to digital marketing, sales funnels, and lead generation, get on a scheduled strategy session with us.

The post 4 Requirements For High-performance Websites appeared first on Done For You.

Sadly, most businesses aren’t anywhere close to creating landing pages and using them for their campaigns. Those businesses that actually use landing pages don’t seem to get it right by leaving out crucial work that goes into making high-performing landing pages.

Here are a few mistakes businesses and marketers do when it comes to landing pages, and we are hoping that you’ll avoid these.

Mistake #1: Hiring developers

Way too many businesses still do landing pages the old fashioned way by using HTML/CSS or by employing PHP developers to help create landing pages. There are plenty of problems with this approach:

• Developers don’t know about conversion-centric design, copywriting and calls to action.
• It takes a ridiculous amount of time to get a single PHP-based or HTML-based landing page designed. When you are launching campaigns and when you need multiple landing pages for testing, waiting on the developer (even for making changes slight changes) just won’t work.
• It’s difficult to do split testing for your landing pages to know which one performs better. Your best options if you use HTML pages is to use Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer — both of which are expensive to begin with.

Given that this is the age of software and the availability of DIY landing page building tools, you don’t need to depend on your IT staff to get your landing pages ready.

Just in case you need help to plan your landing page strategy, get on a scheduled call with us to see how we can be of help to you.

Mistake #2: One page won’t do

You can’t just send traffic to a single landing page and hope to get conversions. Even if you got conversions

(or leads), you’d never know if that’s the absolute best your landing page can perform.

Almost any business might have multiple offers to make or multiple products or services to promote. Creating a single landing page can rarely do any good for a business, regardless of the size.

Prepare to create multiple landing pages for each service, product, or other offers that you have. In fact, the more landing pages you have, the higher the volume of leads you’ll generate, according to Pamela Vaughan of Hubspot.

Mistake #3: No tests, no progress

If you had 1,000 visitors to a specific landing page and if your conversion rate was 20% (which means you’d get 200 leads), is that the best you could do given the exact same budget spend?

The answer: You wouldn’t know until you split test your landing pages.

Landing pages, especially when you use DIY landing page builders or when you hire us, lend themselves well for A/B testing and optimization on a continuous basis. When one variant performs better than the other (and you’d know that after you have enough data), you can pit the champion against a new variant and run a new test altogether.

Eventually, you’ll arrive at the best possible combinations of ads, landing pages, and email autoresponder sequences, i.e. the best possible funnel.

Mistake #4: No nurturing sequences

It’s not all well with the average Joe who did put up funnels and funnel pages but nothing ever happens for a person who signed up as a lead. It so happens that generating leads is only half the story. The real magic happens when email marketing autoresponders are triggered or workflows through your chatbots are triggered.

It’s the nurturing that leads to sales, and most businesses miss out on the nurturing aspect of a sales funnel. Learn more about funnels from our Funnel Blueprint Video Series.

Lead nurturing helps your potential customers trust you more and makes your products or services available to them when they are ready to buy.

Connect your landing pages to an email autoresponder of your choice or your Facebook Messenger chatbot, be sure to create your nurturing sequences in a way that your business can attract, engage, and profit from these interactions, and that’s when you can call your funnels complete.

What kind of mistakes are you doing with your funnels, opt-in and sales pages? If you need help figuring out how to create a high-conversion sales funnel, feel free to schedule a call with us.

The post Landing Pages: If You’re Doing This, It’s A Mistake appeared first on Done For You.

Now in this article, we want to get deeper into some technical aspects of creating an optimized landing page.

Some businesses are in a rush to launch paid campaigns or start sending some traffic to landing pages to start generating leads. Other businesses tend to build complicated funnels trying to reach perfection before they start driving traffic to the top of the funnel.

The palpable excitement and rush are understandable. The tendency for perfection as well. But without due diligence and a well-thought-out plan, you are likely yo end up wasting time and money.

While there are a lot of success factors that are out of your control when launching a campaign, it’s inexcusable to be clumsy with the essential aspects of a landing page that you are indeed control of.

To help you build a solid foundation for a successful lead generation campaign, and before you start changing creatives, optimizing, and engaging in on-going split testing), here’s a simple landing page checklist.

Unmissable landing page elements

Be sure to have some of those design best practices, conversion optimization hacks, and insert appropriate landing page elements:

• Use a singular form and a button (one Call to Action per page)
• Have as few form fields as possible.
• Be sure to have a clear and large headline. Learn more about writing headlines that work.
• If possible, put some real faces on the landing page (like team photos, headshots of the founding members, images of previous customers), etc.
• Add social proof in the form of client logos or testimonials or both.
• Ensure that your landing page is mobile responsive (there’s just no excuse for leaving this one out).

Collect and insert tracking tags and scripts

Depending on the traffic source, there are various tracking tags or scripts that you need to inject into your landing page code to facilitate website tracking. Website tracking, by the way, can help you monitor the behavior of the visitors to your site.

Let’s say you choose to run Facebook ads. You’ll need the base Facebook Pixel code to go on every page that visitors are likely to visit. Such pages are: the main landing page, the form lightbox modal, the thank-you page, and interstitial pages if any.

Then, you’ll have to add the “event” code of the Facebook Pixel to your “thank you” page or the page that shows up after leads sign up. this way you’ll be able to track successful conversions (opt-ins in this example).

If you choose to use Google Adwords, you’ll need to insert the Google remarketing tag. With remarketing,  you are able to run campaigns that target people who have already visited your site at least once.

Are you using third-party services such as Adroll or Perfect Audience for retargeting? You’ll then have to add these tracking pixels to your landing page code too, as advised.

For Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, and for third-party services like Adroll, you’d also want to attribute a numerical value to your leads and sales “event codes” so that you have an accurate record of leads and sales.

It also makes sense to add Google Analytics — while using UTM tracking — to track each of your landing pages so you have a holistic view of traffic being sent to your landing pages.

One URL, two versions

If you had only one landing page for your campaign, and let’s say you got a 20% conversion rate at the landing page level, how would you know this is the best result you can get? You couldn’t know.

That’s precisely why you need to run split tests for your landing pages. By doing A/B testing or split testing, you can test and compare two variations of the same page.

Every landing page will have a single URL but this URL will show different content to each visitor at random. For example, 50% of the visitors will see “CTA A” and the rest will see “CTA B.” Then you will be able to tell which CTA (and landing page variation) performed better in terms of conversion.  This is can be accomplished with A/B testing.

Start by testing a single element of your landing page (such as the headline, the CTA button, or the CTA button color, or a background image).

Gather data and make an informed decision to continue with the champion while discarding the losing versions.

Connect with your email service provider

One of the most important aspects of your sales funnels is the series of autoresponders that you’ll send out to new subscribers or segments of your email list.

Your autoresponders trigger immediately after leads sign up, and they continue to nurture your new subscribers with automated messages, like a simple welcome email, a strategic autoresponder created for sales, or a full-fledged customer onboarding series.

To set up and connect your landing pages with your email marketing platform you can either use some integration plugin or a piece of code that the platform will provide. This is a case-based scenario and the difficulty of implementing such an integration depends on the technology you choose. So please think about this factor before you decide on the exact software you will use for building landing pages and sending marketing emails.

Once you connect, sign up on your own landing page to test if everything fires up alright and that if you are receiving your email messages, notifications, etc.

Trace the path from traffic source to email

You’d want a complete picture of everything that happens in your sales funnel for every user that has your cookie in their browser. What you want to track is every aspect of the user behavior throughout their journey from the source of the click all the way to your email autoresponder, and the users’ reactions to your messages.

For instance, after a click on the ad, you’d want to check whether or not your Google Audiences is building up. You’d also want to see if your Facebook Pixel is firing correctly and is recording conversions for your Facebook and Instagram ads.

Is your landing page loading fast enough? Are all the interstitial pages and the final thank you page loading? Are your email marketing workflows triggering correctly?

Get to active optimization, after the campaign goes live

Soon after your campaign launches, you’ll start getting all sorts of feedback. Your landing pages might seem to not convert at all. Is it because have missed one of the steps on this landing page checklist? Revisit the tips we listed in this post, go right into your setup, deep dive, and fix what’s not properly configured.

You’d want to tweak headlines, copy, CTA button copy, replace images, add tracking codes or maybe work on the mobile version of your landing page.

If one of the steps on the landing page checklist is missing altogether, it is advised that you stop your campaigns and go build what’s not there.

If everything is working fine, gather enough data to fine-tune your campaigns; Get busy with optimizing, A/B testing, and using the numbers you have to optimize every stage of your sales funnel.

Taking care of these steps will ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the necessary due diligence.

How are your campaigns performing? If you’d like to talk to us about your funnels, landing pages, marketing campaigns or strategy, get on a strategy call with us. We’ll be happy to discuss how we can put together a Done For You Lead Generation System for you or help deploy a high-converting Done For You Sales Funnel.

The post Landing Page Checklist: Get Your Landing Pages Ready For Lead Generation appeared first on Done For You.

Landing pages can serve different purposes – they are crucial to streamlining your sales funnels and generating revenue for your business.

You might be using a landing page to collect emails from visitors who opt in for a freebie, or you might want to get people to register for an upcoming webinar. Perhaps, in some cases, a landing page can be the sales page where you present your offer and allow visitors to buy your product or service.

No matter the role a particular landing page plays in your business, there’s always the same goal: to entice people to take action, subscribe, register, or buy. To help you accomplish your goal of creating high-converting landing pages, we’ve put together a 27-point landing page checklist that you should go through before you publish your next landing page.

In reality, most landing pages are not optimized for conversions. They’re “pretty,” but they don’t work that well…

A 27-point landing page checklist

1. Use your customer’s language

You want to get your message across using your potential customers’ words. Don’t get lost in professional jargon because you try to demonstrate authority. Use everyday language that resonates with your target audience.

2. Craft a compelling headline

Your headline is the first thing people will read. It’s the fundamental element of your page. Pack it with benefits to make it enticing and convincing. Don’t be afraid to be bold and blunt with your headline copy.

3. Use a complimentary sub-headline

Your landing page sub-headline is perfect for reinforcing your message and clarifying the benefits. Some marketers use it to call out their ideal customer and even place it above the main headline.

4. Write professional, solid landing page copy

As with all things in life, practice makes perfect. But before you get to a point where you can write compelling web copy, consider hiring a professional copywriter.

5. Attention-grabbing hero image

If you want your landing page to follow the AIDA model (Attention – Interest – Desire – Action), you need to draw attention with an image.

6. Your hero image needs to direct people towards the registration form

Place it strategically to draw the user’s eyes to your call to action, usually a sign-up form.

7. Keep the number of required form fields to the minimum

Your sign-up form doesn’t need more than a user will give up. If possible, eliminate all fields and keep the email address field only. People are much more willing to sign up if it takes less time and energy.

8. Only one call to action (CTA) per page

You want visitors to do one thing – not many different things. Eliminate all unnecessary CTAs that don’t serve your primary CTA. If you want people to subscribe to your list, stick to that and avoid throwing other offers at them.

9. Benefit-driven CTA text

When you ask people to take action, such as subscribing to your list, it’s always the best practice to be clear about what’s in it for them. Help them understand the benefits they will enjoy in exchange for giving up their email.

10. Above-the-fold CTA

Your CTA elements (usually an opt-in form and a button) should be visible without the user having to scroll down. Test your mobile page to make sure it is visible on smaller screens.

11. Striking CTA button

Beneath your form (or next to it, if it’s a horizontal one), there will be a button. That CTA button must have a vivid color, an easy-to-read font, and a maximum of five words.

12. Stripped out navigation

In most cases, landing pages will perform better without the main navigation bar. As mentioned above, you want to entice the user to take an action. Why throw in irrelevant information?

13. Avoid content clutter

The same goes for all extra information about you and your company unrelated to the message you want to get across on the landing page. For example, if you’re selling a product on that page, you don’t want to showcase all the other products you may have. Take the minimalist approach to the content you include on your landing pages.

14. Clear offer and benefit

We need to stress that your landing page copy, including your headline and everything above the fold, should describe a clear offer and the benefit of claiming that offer. If the random user has to go through your whole page to understand what it is about, you probably lose them.

15. The landing page copy should be a continuation of the ad copy

The landing page is not a standalone marketing element; it’s part of your sales funnel. That is why you need to keep consistent messages throughout your funnel. For example, when you drive traffic to your sales page from Facebook, the ad copy needs to prepare the user for what they may expect to see when they click through.

16. Understand buyers’ emotions that drive sales

High-converting pages always pay attention to the psychological elements of buyers’ behavior. A professional copywriter should be able to utilize those elements (scarcity, the need to feel included, or the fear of missing out) to drive more conversions.

17. Social proof

Testimonials and other social proof (such as a large social media following) are essential when the landing page visitor is nearly ready to buy. Social proof helps strengthen the feeling of security when making a purchase decision. It makes people feel that they’re in good hands and bolsters their feeling of having made the right decision.

18. Trust elements

Accordingly, trust elements, like an SSL certificate and site seals (or trust badges), will increase the user’s eagerness to buy. Trust elements may not be needed when you want people to subscribe to your list, but they’re essential to an ecommerce website and any checkout or sales page.

19. Links to “privacy policy” and “terms of service”

If you’re driving traffic from paid media, you need to have these pages in place. Also, a privacy policy and your terms of service are essential legal documents that your web visitors should be able to access with one click. Here’s a free tool to generate your business agreements and policies, but it’s always a good idea to consult a lawyer if possible.

20. Eliminate risk

Risk avoidance is a significant reason some visitors leave your page without action. When it comes to sales pages, most marketers and online business owners tend to eliminate risk by offering a 30-day money-back guarantee, whether it be a digital or physical product.

21. Give prospects a way to contact you

In the case of sales pages, and as a rule of thumb, you want to provide people with a way to contact you. Suppose you sell a high-end product, like a $4,500 coaching program. Although people might be familiar with your brand and services, you still want to allow them to pose questions that they feel are important to them before they hit the buy button.

22. Offer bonuses

Bonuses serve as the finishing touch to your landing page. With bonuses, people feel they get more value for the same amount. Choose bonuses wisely to complement your main offer, and you will get a conversion rate boost.

23. Keep it simple

Marketers often talk about the KISS principle. What does it mean? Keep It Simple, Stupid! We do not need to elaborate on that, do we?

24. Brand congruence

Brand consistency across all channels and on your landing pages is essential. Not only will it make your brand recognizable, but it will also positively affect the emotional state of the potential buyer.

25. First impression and design

Accordingly, your landing page’s layout, colors, and fonts are also essential. There’s a theory about the impact of colors on purchasing decisions, but even if you don’t want to walk the extra mile, make sure your page looks good design-wise. Always have a professional designer create your page or use a pre-made template instead of trying to combine random colors.

26. Mobile responsiveness

Now, let’s briefly discuss a couple of technical elements. Rarely will you find a landing page that is not mobile responsive. Many, if not most, users browse the internet from their mobile devices. That is why you must also test your pages to ensure they look good on smaller screens. Here’s one of the many tools available to test your web pages for responsiveness. Also, here’s Google’s mobile-friendly test.

27. Loading time

Attention span is diminishing for most internet users due to spending a lot of time online and being subjected to constant distractions. Ensure your page loads fast, ideally in 1.5 seconds or less, if you want to reduce the bounce rate. Here’s a popular tool to test loading speed and get recommendations on how to improve it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, mastering the art of creating a high-converting landing page is essential for any digital marketer or business owner looking to enhance their online presence and drive sales. While our 27-point checklist provides a comprehensive guide to optimizing your landing pages, the journey toward digital marketing excellence doesn’t end here.

If you want to delve deeper and elevate your skills, check out DoneWithYou.com.  Whether you’re struggling with crafting compelling copy, designing eye-catching layouts, or understanding the intricate psychology behind consumer behavior, our program provides personalized guidance and expert insights. You’ll gain access to a wealth of knowledge, tools, and resources crucial for navigating the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.

Don’t let your landing pages be merely “pretty”; make them powerful tools that convert visitors into loyal customers. Take the next step in your digital marketing journey by learning more about the Launchpad Accelerator. Transform your approach, refine your strategies, and watch your business soar to new heights. Visit our website now and start your path to becoming a digital marketing maestro.

Conversion rate optimization should be your top concern when building an opt-in, webinar registration, or sales page. Use the landing page checklist in this article to ensure you have considered all the essential elements of a successful landing page.

The post Unlock the Power of High Converting Landing Pages: Get Your Hands on the Essential Checklist Today! appeared first on Done For You.

When it comes to building sales funnels that work, our goals are straightforward and clear: we need relevant top-of-funnel traffic to come through an elaborate content marketing or paid traffic strategy (say Google Adwords or Facebook Ads).

When visitors come to your website, you ideally want them to sign up for a lead magnet, i.e. something free that you give away. When that happens, you can then nurture them using email marketing autoresponders.

Eventually, you’ll make offers to them to allow them to make purchases (when they want to, and when they are ready).

All of that is an elaborate process. It takes time, energy, investment, and plenty of testing to ensure that your funnels work well.

If your funnels have bloat (anything in excess or any sort of complications), you aren’t going to cut it. Your funnels won’t work as well as they should and you’ll miss out on a lot if you allow your funnels to stay fat and lazy.

So, what can you do about fat and lazy funnels? Here are a few tips:

Tip #1: Strive for simplicity

Too much of anything is bad, and that applies to every aspect of your sales funnels.

Designing a landing page like it’s a website; writing copy as if it’s a blog post; creating long landing pages hoping to “hook” your visitors for a $29 product; adding two or three landing pages (or steps) to accomplish something as straightforward as “getting a lead” — all of these are examples of complicating what should have been simple.

To keep your sales funnels simple, it takes work. The kind of work where you cut out three lines of your headline to a single one; deleting half of your subheading, and then deleting another of the half that’s left; using one image instead of three (or six); using a single landing page instead of three (unless you absolutely have to use landing pages that way), etc.

It’s easy to build a mess that you can call a funnel; you’d have to turn the world upside down to build a sales funnel that’s simple and still works.

Tip #2: Avoid multi-step landing pages and funnels

For a few use cases, multi-step landing pages can explode your conversion rate.

Img Credit: Kissmetrics

But for a lot of businesses, it’s not even needed. Just because something exists doesn’t mean you have to use it.

Ever see any of those Clickfunnels or Samcart templates? There’s a landing page. Sign up and then you’ll be sent to a thank you page.

The thank you page won’t just thank you. It also has a one-time cross-sell that you won’t ever see again.

Let’s say you won’t sign up for this “one-time” offer and you decide to avoid it. You click through to see another page with a “Wait! Don’t go Just yet! Here’s an offer you can’t refuse” offer.

You decide to let off that too. Then, you’ll finally get the actual “thank you” page which thankfully “thanks you”. Now, you are told to check your email and confirm your sign up.

It’s only after your leads check email and confirm sign up (also called as double opt-in), will they receive anything you promised.

That’s a long, complicated process. There is a time and place for upsells and cross-selling. You don’t have to do it with someone who just happened to land on your landing pages for the first time.

Stop complicating your sales funnels! This has to stop!

Tip #3: Revert back to a single offer

You’ve heard about content upgrades and they are a great way to generate leads. Content upgrades — for the uninitiated — is a downloadable piece of content that holds a lot more information about the topic that your readers just happened to read.

For instance, if your visitor just read a blog post on facebook ads, your content upgrade could be a simple checklist to ensure flawless campaign launch.

But the trouble with content upgrades (no one tells you this) is that it’s just way too complicated strategy to manage and execute.

Many bloggers, marketers, and businesses that try the content upgrade strategy or multiple offer strategy usually fail to make the best of all the leads pouring in (each for a different type of content suggesting that their interests are relevant to that piece of content that they downloaded).

Most businesses don’t need the complication that content upgrades bring.

All you need is:

• A strong offer,
• A landing page that converts,
• And an autoresponder sequence that’s strategically sent to each lead.

Are you complicating your sales funnels at a time when it’s only getting harder to generate leads online?

If you’d like to have us look at your sales funnel to optimize conversions OR design and build one from scratch, click here to book a free Action Plan call with us!

The post 3 Tips To Make Your Sales Funnels Less Complicated appeared first on Done For You.

1. You have a lot of inner pages ranking on Google for long-tail keywords
2. You run paid ads to drive traffic to specific landing pages.

Either way, ranked pages or landing pages will be the most popular ones compared to your homepage.

A landing page is a standalone page designed for one specific objective. To attract interest to an offer. You should consider such a page as your online storefront. This means that the first impression is so important that it will determine whether the visitor will leave or stay and convert into a lead.

In reality, most landing pages are not optimized for conversions. They’re “pretty,” but they don’t work that well…  That’s why we built Scriptly’s Page Builder.  Conversion rate optimization (CRO) should be your top concern, after you’ve finished building a page.

Now, if you’re not satisfied with the number of leads you are converting you might be victim of one or more of the following “CRO crimes.” Here are the top 7 reasons why your landing page does not convert well.

Let’s take a look at them.

1) Content clutter

Business owners are usually so excited about their business or product that want to include everything on one page. Well, that’s a major mistake.

You need to keep your focus on your visitor, their needs, and their situation.

Avoid using too much text because not only does it require a lot of time to read but it also distracts the visitor from the action you want them to take.

For optimal results, you’ll want to remove irrelevant elements, like navigation and additional offers. For each element on your page, think: does this add to the result I want to achieve?” If not, remove that element without second thoughts. Keep your visitor’s focus on the offer at hand.

Your landing page should have one simple purpose: Get someone excited enough about your offer so that they’re willing to hand over their information.
If you’re wondering what exactly you should include on a page and what’s the best layout to place elements, Scriptly’s page builder will make building landing pages a piece of cake. With its pre-built templates and drag-and-drop functionality, you can create landing pages layouts in two seconds flat.

2) There’s no congruence between the ad and the landing page

When visitors read the ad copy and click, they immediately establish some expectations of what they would like to see on the page that follows the click. If your landing page headline is NOT a continuation of the ad, the user experience is disrupted and the visitor is more likely to abandon the page.

The more consistent an ad is with your headline the less likely you are to shoot yourself in the foot! The only way you can gain your customers’ attention is to be relevant. See the landing page as the continuation of the visitors’ journey to becoming a business lead.

Let’s see an example:

The ad intends to attract people looking for bluetooth earbuds. If you look at the two landing page screenshots, only the first one is optimized to match the customers’ expectations, thus have the potential to convert well. The second one has a product title that will most probably be confusing to the potential buyer.

Take the next step an learn how to turn cold traffic into leads and buyers with the Proven Lead Generation Template which an editable Photoshop Ad Template. It’s free to download here. A special bonus is also included. When you get access, you’ll also receive a video presentation walking you through the entire system!

3) Headline

The headline is the most important part of your landing page. It is the first piece of text that will attract your visitors’ attention. If you must do one thing right, that is your headline.

Psychologists have known all along that first impressions count. Headlines and a good sales message are no exceptions.

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” ~ David Ogilvy

Put simply, a headline is the most important part of a sales message. It’s so important that newspaper outlets often have a different person, other than the writer, construct the headlines.

A frequently used headline formula that is proven to be effective in converting cold traffic to lead is like this:

The Only [Product or Freebie Name] Made Exclusively to [Highly Desirable Outcome or Benefit] [Short Time Frame]

E.g. The Only SEO Guide Made Exclusively To Increase Your Sales In 30 Days Or Less

Try it out on your pages to see the results it can bring to your business.

4) Unclear offer and benefit

Here’s what you need to keep in mind: A landing page that doesn’t clearly communicate its purpose is a poor-performing landing page.

All of the following are crucial to conversions: Visual elements, like images or videos, headline, body copy and the order in which you place the elements—each of these must support one another to tell a persuasive story about your offer.

Within less than four seconds, a first-time visitor should be able to understand what this page is about and why they would care.

Converting cold traffic to leads or prospects requires a clear message on your page that will entice the reader to opt in. You should always speak the language of the customers to address their most important issues and how your offer will change their current experience.

Of course, we can assume that different page copy works for different goals. However, there are some fundamental guidelines that you must follow on your landing pages:

Be specific – Focus on communicating your message
Be clear – Write exactly what you mean
Be brief – Remove unneeded words
Focus on the one thing that your prospects desire (that you provide)
Match the expectations of the visitors

5) You get too greedy on your landing page forms

Lead capture forms are the page element that is most likely to create the most friction on your landers. This is simply because no one is thrilled about giving up their contact information on the internet, particularly if it’s to somebody they don’t know yet.

Now, you can be your own worst enemy if you also put up a long optin form. A lot of business owners commit the mistake to ask all the information they want in one single form, which of course won’t work.

Your optin form length should be proportional to the value of the offer that you’re presenting to your visitors. So, if you’re giving away a short pdf report, asking just an email address or a first name and email address would do.

After you capture the lead, you can use additional tactics, like email marketing, to get the person’s full name, telephone number, country, gender or whatever makes sense to your business strategy.

In conclusion, it’s when you get too greedy that you misjudge, so don’t go asking people too much while you are offering too little.

6) Many calls to actions

One landing page should serve one purpose. Period.

That means one goal for you, and one goal for the people that land on your page. Most frequently your goal will be to convert them into leads (get their email), and their goal will be to solve their problem (grab your offer).

Between your goal and theirs, there is a lead magnet, i.e. some kind of a freebie. The only call to action (CTA) you need is the one that will make people give their email to download the freebie.

When designing a landing page you want to avoid giving people a lot of options. If your goal is to get their email address by giving them a free report as an ethical bribe, then you must just ask for their email.

Ask visitors to do a lot of things, and what happens instead is that users leave doing nothing.

7) CTA is in the wrong place

Another frequent problem that lowers conversion rates is the CTA button placement.

Your CTA, e.g. the button that writes “Download the ebook”, shouldn’t be hidden somewhere at the bottom of the page. It should be placed right there where the users can see it.

You might have heard marketers say “Place the CTA above the fold.” “Above the fold” is a way to describe the part of the page that you see without having to scroll down. While most people do scroll below the fold, it makes sense that the first thing they see will catch their attention.

Additionally, your CTA button should be just below the optin form–or right next to it if it’s a horizontal form.

You might be wondering how will that work on a mobile device where the screen size is much smaller. In that case, you should also try to place the headline, form, and CTA within the visible area of the screen.

Here’s a good example that Neil Patel presented on his blog:

And another example from Jeff Bullas’s site:

In both cases, all the important elements of the landing page are in the visible part of the screen.

Top reasons why your landing page does not convert

So, those were the top ways you can undermine your landing page conversion rates. Increasing conversions is both an art and a science—and you are in control of both.  Colors, typefaces, layout, copy all of them play a role. The science part comes when you acquire the right mindset and put systems in place to run tests.

You can, of course, jump into Scriptly’s Page Builder for free and start working with pages that you already know convert!

Even if you follow the best practices and take care of all of the CRO issues that were addressed in this article, it is when you actually run a campaign that you will see whether your landing page converts as expected. No matter what the results are, using variations of the page will help you test out each element and optimize for even higher conversion rates.

The post 7 Reasons Why Your Landing Page Does Not Convert appeared first on Done For You.

Whatever your reason may be, you’ll need to edit those landing pages if you wish to unlock their full potential and increase your conversion rate. There’s an endless variety of landing pages goals but you should focus on having one goal for one landing page.

Creating a landing page that has a high conversion rate is every marketer’s dream but how one would create such a website page and would he need to take into consideration before making it a live part of his online business? If you’re planning to create a high-converting landing page for your product, make sure you follow these 7 steps to unlock their full potential.

1. Focus on landing page design

If you’re working with a big online business, they will have a web design team to create landing pages. As a marketer, your purpose will be to analyze those landing pages and apply the best design practices. For example, you will need to keep the landing page’s design light. Stacking up CTAs and visual content won’t help your visitors to get to the product you’re selling.

Keep things light and focus on page responsiveness. Test if the page works properly on multiple devices (PC, laptop, smartphones, tablets – they all have different display sizes). If your landing page has a simple but effective design it will help mobile visitors to save up mobile bandwidth.

2. Separate your landing page from the rest of your website

Your landing page has to attract visitors and make them buy your product. You need to distract them as little as possible so try to keep your landing page’s design similar to your website, but at the same time, make it different so it won’t load every website JavaScript or CSS file.

3. Choose one CTA and make it count

The landing page should have one goal that you can reach through the usage of CTAs. Call-to-actions can be in text form, audio, video, and images. It’s up to you to come up with a strong CTA that brings you a lot of conversions but as a rule of thumb, your landing page shouldn’t have more than on call to action.

In this case, more is not better. Having more than one CTA on your landing page will confuse your visitors. Keep it simple and limit their options, you don’t need to list all 10 pricing plans you may have or the 14 eBooks you’re selling.

4. Make your landing page content stand out

You don’t need walls of text on landing pages. While this tactic has its benefits (for some types of landing pages), you’re probably better off with less but strong content. Here are some things you need to check off your to-do list when you’re creating the content for your landing page:

• Make your CTA visible. You can do this by using strong contrast, making it stand out from the rest of the page content.
• Add some sense of urgency. Adding timers to your landing page is a great way to encourage visitors to make a decision. These timers can be cookie-based so they display the right time interval for returning visitors.
• Use trust signals. Having elements that give out a strong vibe will increase your landing page conversion rate. These trust signals can be testimonials or logos of companies with whom you’ve worked with.
• Create content for real people. Many marketers prefer to choose already created landing page templates but are these the best option? You should create the landing page content on your own and address it to real people, not search engines.

5. Provide real value

If you want to have a high-converting landing page, you’ll also need to offer the visitors a good product. You’ll never have a high conversion rate for landing pages that feature shady products. Another way to add some sense of value for visitors is to offer them discounts or provide them with something they can use “right now”.

6. Test it out (before launch)

While this should come without asking, some people forget to test what they create and end up with broken landing pages. After you create your landing page, you’ll need to do the following if you want to unlock their full potential:

• Proofread the text.
• Test the page design for various screen resolutions.
• Test the links (sign-up forms, affiliate links, buy options).
• Make the page ready for high traffic.

7. Test it out (after launch) and follow-up with other valuable content

It’s recommended to have more than one landing page design and use A/B testing to check for conversion rates. If you see one of the designs is having a higher conversion rate then see how you can upgrade your less-performing ones.

Also, after you’ve convinced your visitors to sign-up for email lists or buy products, start sending them other valuable content to keep them close. Our recommendation would be to add the people who signed-up on your landing page to specific email lists and test out email sequences. You can use Scriptly to find out high-selling email sequences that allow you to push other sales after the original action.

You can use Scriptly to apply high-selling email sequences that allow you to push other sales after the original action. After you sign up on Scriptly, you can customize our proven-to-sell email sequences and use them on A/B test email lists.

The post 7 Steps To Unlock The Full Potential Of Landing Pages appeared first on Done For You.

What your list does is insulate you from a lot of the changes that happen online, from ad networks not playing nice to Google deciding to update and algorithm and stop sending all that traffic to you.

By learning how to get folks to raise their hands and say, “I want to learn more from you,” you’re adopting one of the most tried and true business building strategies online, and you can market to them anytime you like!

That means, you can send out product promotions, webinar promotions, and flash sales…  All, at the drop of a hat!

Take a few minutes and really go through these 5 insights.  They’ll be key in really scaling your business.

1: 6 Steps to Your First 100 Email Subscribers (The Easy Way)

If you want to maximize your business’ profit, there’s one thing you need to know: email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) that beats any alternative—by a lot. I mention it fairly often, so you might already know that. But then why haven’t you started?

Click here to read more about generating your first 100 subscribers >>

2: 13 Tantalizing Incentives that Will Build Your Email List

Need a quick way to entice someone to join your email list or register for your website? Give away something for free. By giving away something site visitors can download or access instantly, you can break through your readers’ hesitations about handing over their email addresses.

Click here to read more about which lead magnets you should be giving away >>

3: How to Use the Word “Free” in Your Marketing Without Losing Credibility

Marketers use the word “free” so often that it has nearly lost its power. Free is a word that has enormous psychological appeal. But when it’s overused or used incorrectly, it can ruin your marketing efforts. Here’s how to use the word free for conversion power, marketing advantage, and increased revenue.

Click here to read more about using the word ‘free’ >>

4: 10 Design Principles That Will Increase Your Email Newsletter Conversions

Seven years ago, Seth Godin introduced a groundbreaking, yet startlingly obvious concept called “permission marketing.” “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.” Nowhere is this concept more apparent than in email marketing.

Click here to learn how design influences conversions >>

5: 7 Insightful Questions to Boost Your Conversions

Do you struggle with writing features and benefits?  Things that are really telling about what you’re offering or what you want someone to opt-in for?  Here’s your inspiration, in the form of questions that you should be asking yourself…

Click here to learn more about the 7 questions >>

The post 5 Powerful Insights On Why Your Traffic Isn’t Converting appeared first on Done For You.

In the next few days, count the number of times you hear the word “test” or “testing” as it related to marketing, and it’ll shock you! I know I say it all that time and I hear it from a lot of different people in their podcasts, webinars and blog posts…

The thing about A/B testing is, by being diligent about the pages that you include in your tests, you can test to a winning campaign if you have the patience and a traffic source.

What I mean by that is most marketing fails.  It’s a fact of business.  Product offers, startups, ad campaigns; the deck is stacked against us most of the time…  But, byA/B testing your marketing and sales material, you can make iterative improvements on the messaging, target markets, images and design, all adding up to a dramatically improved campaign over time.

That’s the trick to landing page optimization…  It’s not one test – oftentimes it’s multiple!

What I want to share with you today is what I call the “Split Test Evolution.”

In this iterative A/B testing process, you’ll see how we test one thing first, find the winner, and then start a second test based on that one control.

After Test 2, Test 3, and so on; you start to truly zero in on your ideal conversion because your landing pages are as closed to optimized as possible…

Most of the time when you get started with A/B testing, you put up a few variations of a page and figure out which one converts best…  Maybe there’s a method to your madness – maybe there isn’t.  But then what?  What happens after you find a winner?

What you DO with the results is what matters in your hunt for landing page optimization.

First, let’s establish some ground rules:

• Split testing takes patience and practice.  You should only be testing out ONE thing per page, per test.  That might be colors, buttons, headlines or images.
• For every additional variation you add, you need to send that much MORE traffic!  If you're testing 2 variations, you might need 200 clicks.  3 variations, 300 clicks.  8 variations, 800 or 1000 clicks.
• Disable the losers when you think they're losing - not when the software tells you they are.  You can always re-enable variations as the apparent winners start to drop (and they always do!)
• Expect pretty high conversions right after you start a campaign.  The true test of your variations is what they do when you start to scale them...  From 20 clicks to 200 and 500 clicks or more!

Now, to do split testing, you need to have split testing software.  My pick is Visual Website Optimizer because you can test any page you have online, and it’s super easy to use.

Click here to check out VWO >>

Now, let’s look at some tests…

Here’s a landing page optimization campaign that we’ve been running for quite a while.  The traffic source is Facebook Ads driven directly to an opt-in page.  From Facebook Ads Manager, this is a website clicks campaign to a cold audience.

As you can see, Variation 2 is the clear winner with 37.74% conversions after we finished the test.  We discovered that pretty early so the majority of traffic went to that page…

This is actually where the A/B testing started out though…

Our very first test, we were getting 24.47% conversions from cold, paid traffic.

Here’s what that page looked like:

From there, we tested different headlines to see which one resonated with our audience…

The headlines were:

• 100 "Plug & Play" Subject Lines
• 100 "Most-Opened" Subject Lines
• "Tested For You" Subject Lines
• Subject Lines That Get Your Emails Opened

And as a refresher, here were our stats at the beginning of the A/B testing:

As you can see, Version 1 was our winner.  The one that said “100 Most-Opened Subject Lines.”

Now, a 2% bump doesn’t sound like a lot (and it’s not!), but it did give us some very valuable intel…

We knew which headline to use on our next test!

For Test 2, we used the winning variation, Variation 2, and changed the look of the landing page itself.  Now, if you’re familiar with our Scriptly Page Builder, one of these examples is inside Scriptly for you to use…  Largely because of this A/B test!

The text is the same – the headline, body copy, book image and top headline.

What we changed were the colors of the background, the button and the button location.

• In Control and Variation 1 - the difference is the primary background color.
• In Variation 2 and Variation 3 - we moved the button to the other side of the page.
• And in Variation 3, we changed the button color.

Here are the results:

As you can see, Variation 2 was the HUGE winner of the A/B test, at 37.74%!

Here’s the winning landing page:

That’s a 13% bump in optin conversions and landing page optimization that rivals most other landing pages out there, consider this traffic was cold Facebook Ads…  All from two simple tests…

That’s some pretty impressive performance testing for only a few weeks worth of time!  Please take notice too – a 13% bump in conversions means 13 MORE people out of 100 who hit that page optin for the lead magnet…  Meaning, my lead cost dropped and my ad budget is going further for building our list.

Now, the next thing I need to do after this A/B test is test subheadlines to see if there’s a noticeable bump in conversion from them.  I’m guessing that there isn’t, but I’ve been wrong in the past :0)

At the end of the day, make small changes, see what’s working, and use that data to keep improving your conversions!  If you need help with performance testing and landing page optimization, make sure to book a call with us here!

The post A/B Testing: Performance Testing And Landing Page Optimization appeared first on Done For You.