205 – LeadPages New Features Review With Clay Collins And James Schramko

Podcast: Download (Duration: 28:46 — 26.4MB)

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Topics discussed:

01:15 – All new pay per click friendly LeadPages
04:22 – Reduce bounce rate with error page optimization
06:25 – It only takes three clicks!
07:30 – Which sales page got more conversions?
09:18 – What makes LeadPages so effective?
11:40 – How to use the new advanced feature
17:01 – One big question for Clay
18:48 – Closing notes for LeadPage users
19:59 – Get the recordings from these two places
21:09 – Clay’s prolific content creation secrets revealed
26:08 – Our most popular web development product

Access all the FWF4 recordings inside SuperFastBusiness
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Transcription:

James:                        James Schramko here, welcome to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today’s a special occasion, and I know I say that all the time but it really is today because I’m doing a video with Clay Collins because we have fast enough Internet now. Good day, mate.

Clay:   It’s a miracle.

James:                        I like to see your little Harry Potter staircase there, on your studio loft. Love that.

Clay:   Yeah, I’ve got a dragon tied up there. That’s where I keep the broomsticks and the dragons and all that stuff.

James:                        So you’re well-rested now, you’ve just got back from Australia.

Clay:   Yeah, I’m officially post-jet lag, I think. But I’ve been taking some melatonin. But man, what a great trip. What a great ride, I’m so glad I went on that 14-hour flight. It was well worth it, though.

James:                       Yeah, well the SuperFastBusiness members have been enjoying watching your recording I put up there for them just recently, and I still get a lot of comments about how awesome, like you knocked it out of the park with your presentation, you saved it up to the last minute. We talked a fair bit about the event, about what I was hoping you would deliver, and you exceeded my expectations.

Like really just riffing about conversions and conversions, and I want to talk about – I made a couple of notes here on my desk, I actually draw on my desk – and I want to ask you about some of the things that were mentioned and take it a little further. And also about some of the new innovations for LeadPages, because I think you are my most frequent guest on SuperFastBusiness, so congratulations.

Clay:   That is an honor. Thank you.

Pay-Per-Click LeadPages
James:                        One thing you’ve just announced is the pay-per-click friendly LeadPages. Tell me about that.

Clay:   Yeah, so something that we, personally as a business, don’t have a lot of experience with, but our community does, is pay-per-click. And frankly I don’t know very many people in our space who do as much pay-per-click marketing and buying AdWords traffic as Mindvalley.

And so the CEO of Mindvalley Hispano, Juan Martitegui, who’s just a huge friend of the platform, and just an amazing community member and someone we really trust with the direction of the platform, came to us and said, “Hey, I want to take one of your pages, and I want to add a bunch of things to this, to make this AdWords compliant and to give this the huge, best quality score we can possibly get.”

And so he tweaked it, he tested a bunch of different things, and then he literally – I can’t believe that he did this – I should probably cut him a check or something like that. But he just handed that AdWords-compliant page back to us, with amazing design, and just said, “You’re welcome to include this in LeadPages as a template.”

And in fact what he said was, “I’d really like you to include this in LeadPages as a template because we want to scale this across our organization and we want to be able to just use LeadPages to set these up.” So we have, from the person I would trust the most with pay-per-click marketing, we have one of the templates he used to get an amazing quality score inside of AdWords for pay-per-click traffic.

So Google loves this page, Facebook obviously loves this page. Google standards are a lot higher than Facebook’s. It’s got a good quality score, it’s a proven template, and that’s one of the new additions to LeadPages, and we’re just super thrilled to be able to provide AdWords-compliant pages now, and so that’s one of our new additions.

James:                        Yeah, I think people like to contribute because you can use it over and over again, and sure, other people are using it, but it saves that customization. It’s literally we’ve outsourced our landing page team to your software tool. So it’s great innovation.

So that’s the PPC page. Now I logged in and found a…

Clay:   Literally we’ve outsourced our affiliate program to you, James, so it’s a good trade.

James:                        Well, fair enough, you know. It’s sort of funny because in my other business I’m the supplier for SEO and websites. We supply, and we’ve outsourced our marketing to business service providers. So it’s like I play different roles to different people. But there’s certainly a place for everyone in the market.

Well let’s do the little one first, the error page optimization

Error Page Optimization
Clay:   Yeah, so what we wanted to do was – and I was just thinking about this the other day, because a fairly prominent blogger had linked to us, and he’s got the link wrong, and here I was like, “Oh, this is my moment”, right, and then they mailed their list and people come to our website and they see this 404 page that’s all text, and it’s like oh, there’s nothing here, sorry.

And I was like, what if, during that moment, they had gone to a page that said “Sorry, this page does not exist, but don’t leave empty-handed. Download this free report, or this resource list, that’s going to help you do x, y, and z.” And so what we added to LeadPages was the ability to set your 404 page to be any LeadPages template.

So you can create a page that reduces bounce rate because when people see a blank page that says “Hey, what you’re looking for isn’t found”, they just leave, in most cases. So what this template does is it allows you to say, “Hey, the page that you’re looking for isn’t here. However, don’t leave empty-handed, get this thing”, and so it looks like a real web page, it doesn’t look like a 404 page, although it explains what’s going on.

And it’s not like that’s changing our world. I think we got maybe seven opt-ins yesterday using this form. So it’s not going to change your life, but I think part of business is just plugging every single conceivable hole that could exist and certainly the next time that someone gets the link to us wrong, we’re going to recoup that traffic.

We’ll probably have a higher opt-in rate for the 404 traffic when someone gets it wrong than when someone mails to a specific blog post because those people aren’t going to see opt-in boxes that are, like, front and center. So that’s another thing we added was the ability to turn any landing page template into a 404 page for your WordPress site.

James:                        So how hard is it for someone to set this one up?

Clay:   It takes, if you’re looking at the panel, it takes three clicks. So you pick a page from LeadPages, and you just – normally you set it as being a normal page or it could be your home page, but you can just say that – or a welcome gate – but you just say, “No I don’t want it to be a normal page, I want it to be the 404 page”.

So there’s two things. You decide what page you want to be your 404 page, from your LeadPages account, and then you just click that you want it to be the 404 page. So it’s like three clicks.

James:                        I think that if I’m not mistaken, you can log into your WordPress, for example, and it will actually be there’s a tab where it wasn’t there before.

Clay:   Exactly. Yes, exactly.

James:                        Yeah, so I think that’s where I first saw it, and it’s really clever. So you could actually use one of the pages that’s already in your account.

Clay:   Absolutely, yup.

James:                        Okay.

Clay:   Yeah, and you might want to modify it and say, like, “Hey, the page you’re looking for isn’t here but don’t leave empty handed, get this instead,” or something like that.

Sales Page Template
James:                        Nice. Okay, so I logged into LeadPages and I saw a sales page template. And just before my event, I thought it would be really cool to make a sales page for my event and split test it against my existing sales page. And guess which one got the highest conversions?

Clay:   Unless you’re an a-hole, hopefully you’re going to say that we did well.

James:                        The LeadPages one. Remember I asked you for one modification? Because as usual I used it straight away. And I asked you for the video at the top option, because that’s what was on my existing page, and it did beat the other page.

Clay:   Yeah.

James:                        I don’t think I ever – there wasn’t enough volume, I only had a hundred dollar odd sales, so I don’t know if – it’s not a long-running test, but my initial reaction was that it was pretty cool. But it was so easy to do, and I think a lot of people would get stuck with – I guess the old way was to get a WordPress theme that makes sales pages, but you don’t need to do that any more.

Clay:   Yeah, I mean I think it was a small sample size. It looked like it doubled it, but it wasn’t statistically significant, yeah, but it looked like there was an increase. Yeah, I mean with LeadPages you can – we wanted a long form sales letter, a lot of people had asked for it, and we went ahead and added that, and the funny thing is, I’ve literally never in my life met somebody who implemented it as fast as you.

I think we sent out an email, telling people that this thing had come out, and I think you wrote back like ten minutes later and you were like, “Oh yeah, I got one up”, and I was like – (laughs)

Clay:   And I was split testing it as well. But that’s how easy your stuff is. This is the thing, I have a web development team, there’s half a dozen people full time in there, and up until now, I would send them stuff to do, and then I would wait for it to get done.

But now, it’s simply a case of I just go and make it, and then I’ll just ask them to make changes or whatever. I like to set up split tests, and know exactly what I’m testing and make sure that it’s funneling the traffic properly.

But you’ve made the software so easy to use, and I think that’s what makes LeadPages effective, because a lot of people don’t have a web team, they don’t even have a full time person in their business, and they’re trying to do this from oDesk or eLance or Fiverr, and the time taken to task source is just a killer.

So for just a small fee, you can have all this stuff on tap, like you literally are the outsourced landing page, sales page, error page, welcome gate opt-in king, so that’s what I think makes the software work.

Clay:   Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we wanted to do was like we saw people with amazing products, like just utterly incredible products, that were getting their clocks cleaned by these gurus, or not just gurus but professional marketing organizations. And I remember in one case, I had a friend who created a product, and it was like I thought it was the best product I’d ever seen on something.

But he was getting just utterly destroyed by someone else, who had a full time graphic designer to create the page, and then they had like someone to take that design and turn it into html and someone else to post it and split test it.

And while that was happening, he was just getting technical challenge after technical challenge, hiring someone, trying to like finagle something, and he just got exhausted and quit, and I was like, “That sucks”.

And so one of the reasons why we created LeadPages was we wanted to level the playing field. And interesting story, that person that was like crushing him, now doesn’t have – I mean, he might still have that team anymore, but he’s also a LeadPages customer and is using it on their launches and stuff like that. So I wanted to level the playing field and kind of put, like, the special sauce in everyone’s hands and it’s kind of …

James:                        Yeah, you’re giving them the power. Now one of the new features you’ve got is more of an advanced feature, and that’s the pre-populated field. I want you to tell us what is it, and how would we use that?

Clay:   Yeah, so what we’ve added is the ability to, with any of our landing page templates, to add a little text at the end of the URL, that allows you to pre-populate the email address or the name.

So for example, if you had a page at mydomain.com and it was a LeadPage there, and you added mydomain.com, and then just a little information about the name of the person and the email of the person that’s going to that page, then it would pre-populate the squeeze page or the webinar registration page or whatever, with the name and the email. And that increases conversion rate, right?

If someone doesn’t even have to type in their name and email to opt in, they just have to click Submit or whatever, obviously conversion rates go up. And so here’s how you would use this.

If you have affiliates that are mailing people to your webinar registration pages or to your landing pages, you can have your affiliates go into OfficeAutoPilot or AWeber, Infusionsoft or whatever they’re using and replace, instead of putting like their name in it they could replace it with the name of who’s ever receiving that email.

So if they have a thousand people they’re mailing to, it’s very easy, it’s just like a field merge, you can just say that, you know, replace this part of the URL with this person’s name and replace this part of the URL with their email address. And so that means that affiliates mailing for you and everyone who arrives at that page is going to see that page pre-populated with their name and their email address, and conversions go up.

But also, if you’re doing a webinar to your own list and you want to pre-populate those fields, if you’re doing list segmentations, someone’s already on your list but you’re wanting them to opt in for another email newsletter that you have or you want them to opt in to a sub-list for a launch that you’re doing, this pre-population is going to take your conversions through the roof.

A little bit more of an advanced feature, but something that anyone can do. We have a tutorial on how to do this and it’s within everyone’s reach..to be able to do this. It’s not something that a lot of people take the time to do because, frankly, it takes 2 minutes to create a page and LeadPages and this may take an extra 5 minutes to set up but absolutely crushes it in terms of conversions.

James:                        So is there any use you might have for it for your own list? I mean people might say, well, you already got their email address and they’ve already opted in. Why do you have to opt them in again? Where would you…why would you do that?

Segmenting Your List
Clay:   Yeah, so a couple of things. One, if I’m doing a webinar to my list,  obviously the more people I can get for my own list to sign up for that webinar the better. So I’d use it for that.  If I were going to…let’s say I just have like my house list, my standard list, and I’m doing a launch for something else, I think it’s rude and not cool to automatically just add them to the launch list, so I would still invite them to receive…

James:                        That happens in online marketing…

Clay:   I know right, it’s being decent…

James:                        All people should do this. You know, segmenting. Customizing that and having the user say ‘Yes, I want this’. That’s such a frictionless way to segment. I think that’s the answer right?

Clay:   Yeah, I mean that’s the answer and also… I don’t know if it’s cutting out but also, people have found, and we found that just the act of getting someone who’s already on your list to opt-in again for something increases consistency in commitment and raises their value on the list. You can take a hundred people on your list – 50 of them you have opt-in, and the other 50 you don’t have them opt-in.

And even of the 50 people you invite to opt-in that don’t opt-in, you know, the people who opt-in are going to compare better than people who received the same content who didn’t opt-in so it increases the value of your leads to every once in a while ask your people to opt-in for something else. It just re-engages them.

James:                        I would’ve used this feature a month ago when we had to warm up at 20,000 list and ask them to re-opt in, I would definitely have used that feature. And here’s the thing, of the people who did opt-in which was about half, those are far more responsive than the second follow up email to the unopted-in people is almost dead. Like ghost town. Tumbleweeds going through the village.

And the ones who opted in, and then the ones who opted in and then went to stage 2 of the 2-step form, are hyper responsives. So I’m a big fan of segmenting by another action. So, here’s a big question.  What’s next for Clay Collins and LeadPages?  You just…to the moon, do we go beyond? Where’s mars?

Clay:   Yeah I mean there’s…there’s a lot of stuff where…there’s so much plans.  I mean, I can work on this for the rest of my life.  You know, so I’m not going to…there’s some super secret stuff that we think is going to…it’s over settling, people saying stuff like we want to disrupt marketing but there’s some stuff that we really think is going to disrupt marketing.

So I’m not going to talk about that but I will say that we’ve added all kinds of analytics awesomeness to it recently. Like LeadPages has always worked with optimizing individual website optimizer and analytics and you can use whatever tools you want with it. But we’ve added analytics tools and A/B  split testing. Retroactive A/B split testing is going to be added.

So because we have data on how your pages are doing, you actually won’t even have to run an A/B split test to find out which page is doing better. You could just compare this page to this page and boom! It already has the data to be able to run that and tell you. And then you’d be able to do them proactively as well. Like going for further doing A/B split test but like all kinds of stuff like that…

James:                        It’s like when you send out an email and it has a spam check and it pre-tests if the email going to go through or not.

Clay:   Exactly…exactly.

James:                        Nice! That’s good. Well, don’t tell us everything because I want to get you back and ask you when it comes out.

Clay:   Ok.

James:                        So when you have your next feature launch, hit me up and we’ll bring it back to the audience. I want to just say, have you got any final closing notes from this discussion that you think would really help LeadPage users?

Clay:   Yeah, I’d say, yeah.  Well, yeah.  No I think the 404 page thing is good.  I think the pre-population thing is good.  I’d say that we haven’t done a really good job putting out information to people on how to do the pre-population in it.  It’s so easy and it sounds complex and If you watch the video on how to do it, you’ll completely understand it.  And I just say, start doing pre-population.  It’s going to change your business.

And so just hit up support if you’re wondering about the pre-population thing and how it works and they’ll send you a link to a really cool tutorial and in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to try and embed that training in there somehow so that it’s more visible.

But I’d say, do pre-population.  It’s like free money just to get that increase of like 20 or 30% in conversion rate. What we’re seeing is about like 20% increase in conversion rate just by doing this simple thing that anyone could do. I just say, do pre-population.

Clay’s Presentation at FWF 4
James:                        Well, I got two things to close on.  One is, I just wanted to urge you in the video that I sent you of your presentation at my event, go to the end of the video and have a look at the customer of ours who was telling us about his special LeadPages test and that was one of the funniest moments of the whole event.  Where he was telling us, describing his new high converting page.  So go and have a look at that.

A side note to the viewer or listener, if you’re listening to this on iTunes, If you want to see Clay’s presentation, there’s really only two places you can get it.  One is, you can get it inside SuperFastBusiness, in our member’s area where I’m putting the entire event recordings.  Two is, you’d be able to get it as a bonus from BuyWithBonus if you buy LeadPages from my link.

I’m happy to give you that video and I imagine at some point, Clay’s going to make this recording available to his own customers in some form or fashion. And it’s a really good recording.  It was a highlight presenter at the event so I just want to say thanks to Clay for that.

Prolific Content
James:                        Secondly, I want to ask you an unrelated marketing question. I notice you have a great strategy of putting up more videos to your blog. I noticed a different voice. Looks like you’re doing a lot of the same stuff that I’m doing with OwnTheRacecourse.  It seems to be working well for you. Could you just give me a little snapshot into the process behind that or, how’s that going for you?  Is it doing really well?

Clay:   You mean with the videos that we’re posting and having someone else do them…

James:                        Prolific content.

Clay:   Yeah, I mean, so, we figured out a system for creating content and I think everyone needs to find the way that they can express themselves in the least restricted manner. So, for me, that’s video. But it got to the point where I couldn’t put… I’m no James Schramko. Man, I could never keep up with you in terms of content creation. But we do…

James:                        I know this…but at least your second content piece today because I saw you earlier on one of our other buddies’ calls.

Clay:   That’s because somebody else facilitated it.  But the… no someone else is doing them. But I saw this from Gary Vaynerchuk back in the day. Gary Vaynerchuk had this popular show called Wine Library TV. I was like, this guy gets it because in every episode of Wine Library TV, he just reviews three wines. I was like… he doesn’t have to write a script. He doesn’t have to figure out all the stuff. He doesn’t have to be calculated.

He gets there, he picks three wines. He reviews them. He comments on them. Done. He could do this every single day because he has a formula in place and so that’s what we created for the marketing show was… there’s a formula. The formula is: Here’s a free landing page tip. Here’s how it converts. Here’s how we use it in our business.

If you’re not a LeadPages customer, you need to be a coder to set it up. If you are a LeadPages customer, here’s how to set it up in LeadPages and download it below.  And people love it because if you’re… even if you’re not a LeadPages customer, there’s something you can download.

You probably won’t be able to do all the integrations yourself unless you’re a coder, but even the coders are like “Screw this. I’m being paid 150 an hour. Why would I do this when your software could do it?” So that’s our formula. We do it in every single episode. And people love it. It works, it’s repeatable. And we totally stole that from you. So, I mean, having the repeatable system and the concept marketing in the video.

James:                        I give it away for free. So you didn’t really steal anything so to speak. You know I looked at people like Vaynerchuk as well as influences on content creation. He was the first guy that was ever aware of with that prolific video marketing. But it’s great to see that system. I have exactly the same discovery and it’s worth our listener paying attention to this.

When I put out TrafficGrab, which was a “How To Do” traffic product and I sold about 2.5 thousand copies. Firstly, I put it out at $79 and it was a much more valuable product than that so I learned something from putting out a high value product at a low ticket price. The second thing is, a lot of people saw the product and they were like, “Screw that! I’m just going to hire you guys to do our traffic.”

So our SuperFastBusiness Traffic Services went through the roof even though we’re teaching them how to do exactly what we’re doing in our own business and you’re doing the same when you give away a template.

You’re giving them that do-it-yourself but they come to you for the “Listen, I’ll just have the pre-done version, thanks very much.”  I imagine you could actually sell a service on top of LeadPages for setups and installation and testing and management of that whole thing.

Clay:   Yup, yeah. I think that’s so true. I mean, people underestimate the value of giving something away because most people don’t want to do it like so many of our purchases comment like midnight or 1 because some dude’s been like screwing around with the free template trying to like go through like the AWeber docs to figure out how to do the integration and like trying to figure out how to post it to their WordPress site.

And I call them the All Hell Purchases because there’s some people who are like screwing around and like, “Hell I’m just going to buy this thing.” And they buy it and they’re done in 5 minutes and they just go to bed. So…

James:                        Imagine if they did everything that way in their business. If they just went straight for that 4% action. Like you shouldn’t be doing stuff like that. The only reason that I log in to your software and play around with the new features is because I get it. I love the software.

I want to know all about it because I’m an avid promoter of it to anyone who will listen because it saves them all that grief and because it’s so easy to use. And you know, it’s exciting and fun to play with that stuff. So interestingly, the most popular product that we sell on our web development business is not the pre-done websites.

It’s not the custom websites. It’s the five-hour pack of maintenance where we’ll do pretty much anything for someone so they don’t have to. So, keep doing what you’re doing. It’s great stuff. Thank you for coming back on SuperFastBusiness.com. I hope you’ll come back and share some new features with us when they’re released and it’s always good to catch up, buddy.

Clay:   Absolutely. Absolutely and just thanks for that event again. I just… I’m still reeling from it but it truly was, sincerely from the bottom of my heart, it’s the best event I’ve ever been to in my life. I can’t believe I was humming… about like half the flight time.

James:                        Well you know it’s a fair way but I’m glad you enjoyed it. What I might do, if we get a few comments on this particular show, if people are interested, I might put a little preview from your presentation on a post on SuperFastBusiness.com so they can see what we’re talking about.

Clay:   Cool. That’s awesome. You know I’m not going to give that… you know, I think I mean, production value in that was…again like I said, I paid $5,000 to have that kind of recording made and so I’m not going to give that away for long, for a year or so. I hope people get inside SuperFastBusiness because I mean a couple of people were like, yeah, this is worth like 10x the price of the conference and stuff so just this one thing.

So, I hope people get access to that content. Your community is like cra… like I’ve seen people post questions. They were like, “What do you think of this?” It’s 20 people like, “Yeah I already ran that split test five times in my business and here’s what I think,” and you’re like, “OK, good.” People need to be in SuperFastBusiness in my opinion.

James:                        Awesome. Thanks, mate.

Clay:   Alright. Thanks a lot, man.

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