4 Big Reasons to Check Out Checkouts
1. Checkouts simplifies your tech stack. No shopping cart add-on, no ecommerce platform… using Checkouts often means you get to drop one of your other software subscriptions. And it might help you simplify even further, thanks to the way our engineers have designed this feature. Checkouts are built on the same foundations as the opt-in forms you can add to your Leadpages and Leadboxes—which means that anything you can do with a Leadbox, you can also do with a Checkout. So if you’ve been using a connector tool like Zapier to coordinate what happens between your payment platform and your email service or fulfillment system, you might be able to drop that, too.
2. Order fulfillment, follow-up, and post-purchase funnels get ridiculously easy. Let’s expand on that last point a bit. Because Checkouts are essentially Leadboxes that take credit cards, if you’d like your Checkout to automatically deliver a digital asset, like…
- An ebook
- A video course
- An audiobook
- Printable worksheets
- Knitting or sewing patterns
… you can do that. Just upload the file to Leadpages’ Lead Magnet Delivery area and you can automatically send over the file upon payment. Now you’ve got a successful purchase and a happy customer. But what happens after the payment is made? How about displaying a custom thank you page? Maybe you want to:
- Deliver helpful information on the product your customer just bought
- Clarify redemption instructions, event information, or shipping info (if it wasn’t a digital order)
- Give your new customer access into a customer-only community by directing them to your private Facebook group
- Encourage them to invite a friend to the event they just signed up for by sharing on social media
- Fulfill their purchase right on the thank you page—for instance, if you’re selling coaching sessions and want to include a link to your calendar where they can self-book
All of that is really, really easy with Checkouts. Now, let’s think about what happens after that. You might want to…
- Make sure your new customer gets added to your customer segment in your email platform
- Automatically trigger a survey email about their purchase
- Get their details sent to you directly via email so you can send a personal thank-you or fulfill a custom order
- Add them to your CRM
Again—no sweat. You can send your customer data to multiple integrations and your own inbox as soon as your customer clicks Purchase.
3. It might open up totally new revenue possibilities. All of this has one more exciting implication if you’re looking to expand your revenue sources. Checkouts can help you to sell things that would have been a major headache to sell and fulfill before. Want to start a paid newsletter full of deep industry insights? Just set up a Checkout and integrate it with your email list. Your new paying customers are automatically subscribed. Ever host a webinar and get the feedback that your attendees would’ve gladly paid for all the free knowledge you just gave them? Now there’s a way to act on that feedback. Integrate your Checkout with your GoToWebinar or WebinarJam session and start selling paid live trainings easily. We’re positive you’re going to come up with other creative ways to use this feature. If you’ve got ideas brewing already, jump down and tell us in the comments!
4. A smoother checkout experience for your customers means more customers for you. In all the conversion research we’ve done at Leadpages, one theme keeps popping up: make it easy for people to convert, and they will. Checkouts are based on this principle of simplicity. While you can add additional form fields to your Checkout if you need to send more info to your other integrations, the only data required to purchase is your customer’s email, credit card info, and ZIP code. Pricenomics and JotForm recently studied the impact of form fields on purchase conversion rates. Here’s what they discovered:
The upshot: doubling the number of required form fields nearly halves your average conversion rate. When you use Checkouts, you get to ditch multi-page purchase ordeals and convert more customers by sticking to five simple fields. Checkouts are simple and flexible enough to fit into your sales funnels at many different points. Here are a few of our favorite use cases.
5 Places to Make Seamless Sales with Checkouts
1. On your product pages. Yes, it’s obvious—but it’s also where we expect most businesses will be using Checkouts. To help get you started, our template designers have recently released more than a dozen checkout page templates built around Checkouts (all free with Leadpages). For instance, here’s the How It Works Checkout Page template in action, with the Checkout triggered by a button click:
And here’s the Elegant Checkout Page template, with the Checkout embedded right on the page. This can work well if you’ve already pitched your offer on the previous page but need a little more space and context than a popup Checkout can provide.
We look forward to releasing more checkout page templates in the weeks ahead—so don’t hesitate to tell us what kind of templates you’d like to see in the comments. And we’re especially eager to see all the ways you use Checkouts. Based on what we’ve seen from our beta users, it’s going to be impressive. 2. On your post-opt-in thank you page (or tripwire offer page). It’s a time-tested strategy: deliver free value with your lead magnet, then use the thank you page to showcase a low-priced, limited-time “tripwire” offer intended as an entry point to your paid services. Here’s an excellent example from Moritz Fine Designs. After someone opts in for a free download, they see this special offer for a $7 fitness planner:
3. On your webinar page. I mentioned the paid-webinar possibilities Checkouts create above. Here's an example that fully realizes that possibility:
If you’ve never run a paid webinar before, take a tip from these hosts. They put the price and value into context like this:
“A single hour of business coaching with Amelia is $120. Kerri charges upwards of $5000 for social media consulting.”
When you frame it that way, a $29 or $49 live webinar is an obvious bargain. 4. On your event signup pages. If you run live events, you might have different ways for attendees to buy tickets—maybe on your website, in advance from another outlet, or at the door. You’ve probably noticed that concert venues usually charge a door price that’s higher than the advance price. Austrian dance school Salsa Viva has discovered that they can use Checkouts to set up the same kind of pricing system:
Dance class attendees can reserve their spot for free and pay when they show up. But this Checkout-equipped confirmation page makes it worth their while to pay online in advance by giving them an 11% discount. 5. On your blog. Ever use your blog to announce new products? Or give case studies that make an awfully strong argument for your services? With Checkouts, you don’t have to reroute interested customers to a sales page. Just add a Checkout to a Leadbox, then add the Leadbox to your blog post. Done!
What’s Coming Next for Checkouts?
Dozens of Leadpages members are already making spectacular use of Checkouts to sell everything from $7 ebooks to big-ticket packages. (To date, the average order value for a Checkouts purchase is nearly $120—hardly pocket change.) But we there’s much more to come. On the roadmap ahead, you can expect to see:
- 1-click upsells: After someone makes a purchase, you'll be able to enable 1-click upsells to let them add another item without re-entering their info.
- Downsells: We'll be adding a way to rescue customers who have clicked out of your primary offer by immediately presenting another lower-priced offer they might want instead.
- Order bumps: Order bumps will let customers who've selected one product add an additional item to their order before purchasing.
- Complete Checkout-powered funnels: If you're thinking about how Checkouts could transform your sales funnels, so are we. You've always been able to create funnels in Leadpages by linking multiple pages together, but eventually you'll be able to create and map out funnels within Leadpages visually.
If you’re not yet a Leadpages member, choose a Pro or Advanced plan below to get Checkouts (and lock in your price for as long as you keep your account). If you already have access to Checkouts, now’s a great time to log in and start exploring. We’ve got some helpful guides waiting for you:
… and, of course, our support team looks forward to helping if you need them along the way. We’re really excited to help you earn more revenue from what you do with Checkouts. Let us know if we can answer any questions for you in the comments!
