How do you handle prospects most effectively?
As previously suggested, when you first manage to attract a new
prospect to your site, their action in visiting represents the first level of
commitment to your business, but you obviously want more than this.
Consequently, you have to decide what form you want this commitment
to take when you choose what page of your site you are going to send
the visitor to.
How to automatically make a small commitment much larger…
For instance, I have already suggested that if someone decides to
browse around your site for a reasonable period of time, this indicates a
heightened degree of commitment because they are obviously seriously
interested in what you have to offer or say.
Nevertheless, inviting someone to browse around your site in this way
is not the best way of doing things, because there is an inherent flaw in
approach. Unless you have some way of identifying or recognizing the
individual who is browsing around the site as they are doing so, it is
possible that they could leave your site for good without doing anything
else and you would be none the wiser.
Fortunately, there is something that you can do about this because you
can add software to your site that will identify an individual who has
either remained on your site for a specific period of time or has visited a
certain number of pages on your site. Furthermore, the software will
also identify return visitors as well and the best part of all is, it is
entirely free!
If you use a web host that allows you to control your account using a
cpanel, look for ‘Fantastico’ (or perhaps ‘Fantastico DeLuxe’) under the
‘Software/Services’ list:
Click the link to be taken to a list of software programs that are already
pre-installed on your site through the cpanel that you can activate with
just a few clicks.
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Look down the list of software available until you see ‘Crafty Syntax
Live Help’ listed under the ‘Customer Relationship’ section:
Some web hosts may not include this particular program in their cpanel
listing, or you may be using a host that does not offer a cpanel, but
that’s not a problem. In either situation, download the software from
the Crafty Syntax site and install it manually by following the
instructions on the site.
By adding a snippet of code that is created by the program to the pages
of your site, you can do all of the things that I suggested earlier
completely free of charge.
For example, if someone visits a certain number of web pages, the
system will notify you or it can automatically send a pop-up message to
that visitor asking them if they want additional help or (even better), it
can offer them a free gift for subscribing to your site.
Furthermore, you can do exactly the same when someone comes back
to your site for the third or fourth time (you can choose how many visits
are necessary to trigger this), and you can watch the activity of any site
visitor in real time whenever you want.
Consequently, if you had nothing automatic setup, you could always
track your visitors activity before contacting them manually to offer
further assistance or inviting them to subscribe.
However, the more effective way of using Crafty Syntax is to set it so
that it automatically invites people to subscribe to your newsletter
automatically whilst offering them a clearly valuable ‘bribe’ gift to
subscribe.
Because so few people will have seen this kind of thing happen before
when they are browsing around a website like yours, you will probably
be pleasantly surprised how many people will take you up on your offer.
Now, as suggested, most marketers are not going to invite people to
browse around their site in this way without asking for a specific
commitment up front.
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In other words, in most situations, it makes far more sense to direct
your traffic to a landing page on your site, a page that is specifically
designed to either collect e-mail contact information or to prompt your
visitor to take a specific required action.
However, even if you do this, be aware that some of your visitors might
still be tempted to look around your site before committing to
subscribing to your mailing list or to taking the action you want to take.
Thus, even if you are using a landing page, it still makes sense to add
an additional ‘backdoor’ way of collecting e-mail information or
prompting the required action by using Crafty Syntax elsewhere on your
site.
Creating and using effective landing pages…
There is no doubt that the most effective way of constructing your sales
funnel is to have a landing page at the front end, a page where you
specifically ask the visitor to take an action which represents a
significant degree of commitment to your business.
As suggested, for online marketers who are trying to build a prospect
mailing list, this is almost always a page to collect the visitors e-mail
information. But there are some businesses where it might be more
convenient or effective to seek an alternative action, so this would
depend on the business you are in.
The first and perhaps most important thing to understand about a
landing page is that it is a page which has only one purpose. You want
your visitor to commit to your business by taking the action that you
require with the only alternative option being that they close the page
completely.
However, there is another consideration to bear in mind, depending
upon how you are sending traffic to this landing page.
If you do not start off by doing so, it is fairly likely that at some point,
using paid advertising will form a part of your promotional activities,
and that in all likelihood means that you will begin to use AdWords.
This is important to factor in to your sales funnel plans from the
beginning, because when you use AdWords, you have to create your
landing pages in a way that Google approve of.
If you do not, then the cost that you will pay per click on your
advertising will be significantly higher than you would have been paying
if you ‘played the game’ the way AdWords wants you to play it.
There are several factors to take into account when creating a landing
page that will attract a good AdWords ‘Quality Score’ which is what you
have to do to minimize the amount you pay per individual click.
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Firstly, there has to be some content of value on your landing page, and
whilst this does not have to be sales page length, there nevertheless
must be some content on the page.
In addition, this must be written content because the Google search
robots do not as yet recognize content within videos. Consequently,
even if you use a video landing page (a practice which is becoming
increasingly popular), you must also include written content on the
page, otherwise it will appear to be empty as far as Google are
concerned.
The next thing that is necessary is to include certain internal links from
your landing page to various other pages on your site. These must
include links to your ‘Privacy’, ‘Terms and Conditions’, ‘Earnings
Disclaimer’ and ‘Contact Us’ pages as well as to your ‘Site Map’.
Now as suggested earlier, you really do not want to include additional
links on your landing page because by doing so, you present your
visitor with various different options for leaving your page without
taking the action that you want. If for example someone follows your
‘Earnings Disclaimer’ link, you can be pretty certain that they are not
going to come back to your landing page to sign up. Thus, you really
don’t want these links to be prominent or noticeable.
Add them to the bottom of the page where they are almost
unnoticeable, and make sure that they are both small and in a relatively
indistinguishable type color. However, do not be tempted to include
them in the same color as the background, as Google will pick this up
very quickly and penalize you for it. Hence, your links should look
something like this:
Very small, not easy to read and hardly noticeable is perfect!
You might notice that the final link in this list is the ‘Site Map’ link. The
reason that this is important for Google is that when they visit your
landing page, they want to see what else you have on your site, which
they find by following this link.
As far as Google is concerned, you cannot have only a landing page on
your site. You must have other content pages as well which the Google
search robot can find by following this site map link.
Furthermore, these content pages should give information about the
same subject or topic around which you have created your landing
page, plus, both your landing page and content pages should focus on
the same or related keyword terms as well.
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As you can see, Google are pretty demanding when it comes to the kind
of site that they want to send visitors to through their AdWords
program.
It is therefore far more effective to build and perfect your site –
especially the landing page – before starting to use AdWords.
In this way, you can make sure that your site is content rich and that
your landing page works before starting to spend money on advertising.
When you do things in this way, you can be confident that your ‘Quality
Score’ is going to be high and therefore the amount you will pay per
click will be correspondingly low.
Okay, so what kind of landing page should you use?
The answer to this is, there is no single, simple answer.
Every market is different, and what works in one market sector or niche
may not be at all effective in another. This is another sound reason for
creating your landing pages and testing them before starting to spend
money with Google. The last thing you should do is test when it is
costing you money to do so.
Most commonly, there are two possible objectives that your landing
page might have, and then there are two different ways that you can
construct that page.
In the first case, the most common objective for the majority of online
marketers is to collect e-mail information from their visitor. By doing so,
they have the ability to send a continual stream of product suggestions
and recommendations to that prospect.
When trying to collect e-mail information from a visitor to your landing
page, it is a 99.9% given that you must offer this visitor a free gift of
significant perceived value as a ‘bribe’ to persuade them to subscribe.
The days when a free subscription to your newsletter or e-zine would be
sufficient are long gone, especially as the ever increasing tide of spam
e-mail is making people ever more protective of their e-mail
information.
In this respect, one experiment that you might like to try is to do
something a little bit different in terms of the e-mail information that
you collect.
Traditionally (and still the way that most marketers collect e-mail
information) is to ask the visitor for their name and e-mail address.
The idea of asking for their name was that the marketer concerned
could then set their autoresponder system so that it addressed outgoing
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e-mail messages to the new subscriber by name, which in theory was
supposed to help develop a closer relationship with that subscriber.
However, the truth is that nowadays, most people know that this is an
autoresponder trick, something that you set up automatically.
They are aware that just because your mail message to them begins
‘Hey Jack’ or ‘Hi Jill’, it does not for a moment mean that you have sat
down and written that e-mail to them personally.
Consequently, this tactic of using the addressee’s name in your greeting
is no longer effective. Hence, you might try asking your site visitors for
only their e-mail address because in tests, the results of many
experienced marketers who have tried this have matched my own.
I have found that if you only ask for the e-mail address, your
subscription levels actually increase.
I believe that this is partly because you have automatically halved the
work that the individual has to do to subscribe to your list and it might
also be that, because you do not ask them for the name, it allows them
to retain a higher degree of anonymity and privacy.
Anyway, this would certainly be something to test because it has
definitely worked for me and for many well-known marketing names.
So, the most basic, ‘traditional’ but nevertheless still effective form of
landing page is a text only page that offers a valuable free gift and
requires a subscription in order to get hold of that free gift.
There does not need to be anything fancy or particularly clever about a
page like this. In fact, the more distractions there are on the page, the
less likely it is that your visitor will take the action you want.
Consequently, this kind of page is often most effective when it is
nothing more than plain black text on a white background.
For proof of this, this landing page example is used by the most popular
online dating site for men and has been used pretty much unchanged
for the past couple of years.
Whether it makes a big visual impression or not, this tells you that it is
obviously working, which is of course the primary objective:
Alternatively, you might want to try using a video landing page as these
are becoming increasingly popular, perhaps because net users are
becoming ever more comfortable with and interested in online video.
In this case, the landing page includes a short promotional video which
pushes the benefits of either being subscribed to your site or of the
product which you are promoting.
Within the video, there will be some kind of product presentation,
accompanied by a suitable free gift offer and a call to action which
details exactly what the site visitor has to do to get their free gift.
This example of a video landing page is simple and effective, but do
note that there is some keyword (‘make money online’) focused written
content on the page to give it some credibility with the search robots
that will be sent by all of the major search engines, including Google:
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As you can see from both of the previous examples, these are what you
might term ‘standard’ landing pages in that they are designed to collect
e-mail information.
However, depending upon the business or market that you are
operating in, you might adopt a slightly different approach.
For example, a company like this who are trying to generate leads for
their mortgage business do not ask for contact information on the first
page because I would guess that through testing, they have established
that they have to ‘sell’ their services far more convincingly before doing
so:
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Nevertheless, the basic principle is still the same because once the
visitor clicks on the red ‘Get Started’ button, they clearly indicate their
interest in mortgage finance by doing so.
There are probably two or three more steps before the company behind
this advert ask for contact information. But you can be absolutely
certain that at some point, they will ask for contact details because
otherwise, how can they send the information the customer will
request?
Here is another example where one of the leading financial and
investment sites, the Motley Fool is offering an intriguing sounding
report that apparently drove Bill Gates into early retirement (they
claim), but of course you have to sign up for their mailing list to get
your hands on it:
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In effect, both of the previous two landing pages have to work a little
harder to grab your e-mail contact information and in order to do so,
they take more time and space before they get around to making their
‘pitch’.
Nevertheless, the ultimate objective is still the same, which is to pull
you into the top of their respective sales funnels by grabbing your
contact information.
Now all you would need to do is to drive targeted traffic to your landing
page in order to start building your prospect mailing list, thereby
drawing your own visitors into your sales funnel.
You MUST test your landing pages…
One vital thing that you must do with your landing pages, particularly if
you’re planning to use AdWords a little further down the line is to test,
test and then test them again.
The first thing to establish is whether text only or video and text landing
pages work best in your market sector or niche. Try to create a couple
of pages that are broadly similar – copy and paste some of the
information from the text only version onto the video page – and send
50 visitors or so to each different landing page version.
If after 50 visitors, you haven’t got a clear ‘winner’, take the number up
to a hundred visitors each, but then try some different variations. In
this way, you might try half a dozen or even a dozen different landing
page variations before you have one or two that clearly outperformed
the rest.
Incidentally, if you need free video landing page templates, try running
a Google search for ‘free video squeeze page’ because at the time of
writing, this returns quite a few sites where you can find suitable free
templates (although the same templates seem to be offered by many
sites).
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At this point, you are still testing on a ‘macro-level’ by comparing video
and text only format pages but once you have some idea which works
best, you need to test on a micro level.
To do this, take your best performing landing pages, change no more
than one or two words on the page, and then run back-to-back testing
of two or three very slightly different versions against one another.
If one of your new versions performs better than the one you have been
using previously, use the new one as your base starting point from now
on. Change a couple more words from this most successful version
before running back-to-back testing once again.
Testing is a continual, ongoing process because you can never reach a
place where you have a perfect landing page. However, it is only by
testing that you can establish what works best in your marketplace, so
it is not something you can afford to ignore.