[Landing Page Makeover] Download: How 3 Split-Tests = A Record-Breaking Landing Page For James Schramko

Note #1: As a side note, I owe a lot to James, who's done as much as anyone to raise awareness about everything we're doing here at LeadBrite. James is our top affiliate and has done a lot for us as a company without asking for anything in return (his only request is that we continue to make great software). If you don't know him, you should check him out here and join his list. Note #2: My conversation with James Schramko was originally about 40 minutes long and I had to cut it down to around 12 minutes out of respect for our collective "internet video ADD." What's unfortunate about this is that James was dropping knowledge left and right (and most of it was cut out). I'll be interviewing him again soon. [cta-box] Clay: Hello everyone, my name is Clay Collins. I am joined here with James Schramko. What we’re talking about today is the James Schramko branded template inside of LeadPages. So what I wanted to do was actually work with James and take his highest converting webinar registration landing page and bring that inside of LeadPages and upgrade it and do some different things to it based on what we found in our own analytics work.So James, I’d love to kind of hear about the starting point and why this works. I had this pulled up on my side. So the first thing that I noticed here is that you have a blurred-out mind map. You were telling me a story behind this.James: Well, a few years ago, I was preparing for my traffic product, and we’ve got quite a few people in our team who are in the research and development role, and they test out stuff, and we’ve been using a program called bubble.us to make maps, and they affectionately nicknamed this particular map the Spaghetti Bowl, and it’s because it sort of look a bit messy when you set it on a page, but I was going through that mind map, and I took a screenshot of it. I actually took a picture of my iPad where I was looking at the mind map, and it was kind of clear enough to see some of the things but not all of them, and I posted it to Facebook while I was waiting at the airport for my friend to fly from another state, and suddenly, I had people like melting down on my post saying I want it. I want the mindmap. Where do I get it? I need this traffic product. And I really respected people who could identify what was on the map, and they realized what they’re looking at, but wanted more. And that whole curiosity aspect was evidence so that lead me to develop my whole live events, this Fast Web Formula; free live event was the last one I did. I made the core of that a mind map for my own sections, and I thought, you know what, I will sell tickets to the events, and if people can’t come to the event, then I’ll sell the recordings of the event, and I will actually go through the first part of the mind map as a business growth coaching session. And I deliberately didn’t call it a webinar because the average man on the street doesn’t actually know what a webinar is yet. Some people do, and people in the IMspace do, but people in normal business don’t know what a webinar is in many cases, so I opened up a broader market, and then I had that curiosity factor of this mind map like what is it? What could be on that thing? And I think people have a compelling gravitation towards order and structure and needing to know everything that they can possibly find out about something, and a map indicates it there. You know, it’s literaly like a treasure map. If I could just get the treasure map, then I’ll be able to find all the treasure. Clay: So people saw this blurred-out map. They could make out maybe some of the words and some of the things that were being presented there, but still, some of it left to the imagination, so part of what was driving the opt-in was people wanted to get their hands on this mind map. Is that correct? James: That was the promise. The promise was they’ll be sent a mind map upon successful registration, but in any case, it works really well for lead generation. I discovered that in a separate market all together that if you could promise someone that you would rush them their report instantly. Clay: That’s cool. So what else do you think worked on this page? Why did this convert so well for you? James: So couple of the elements were it had a picture of me to help people if they knew me or wanted to, you know, build some of that emotion or connection. You know, I’m disclosing what I look like because there’s a lot of phantoms or blind offers… Clay: Right. James: …and pretend avatars out there, and then I put a logo from my event. I wanted that. This was number three of a series of events so I did Fast Web Formula and Fast Web Formula Two… Clay: Cool. James: …and then Fast Web Formula Three, and now I’ve got Fast Web Formula Four coming, which you’ll be coming to, which is awesome so I wanted people to identify with my brand and to know that they’re dealing with a professional company, and then there’s, of course, the mind map, which they’re going to get as soon as they get it, so they have this instant gratification, and I called it A Live Online Event. Clay: Nice. James: It wasn’t a webinar, and I think that that word choice was deliberate, and I’m happy with those choices. And then I tested various elements. Clay: Cool. James: Had at least four tests running on the traffic, and the main traffic source was affiliate traffic. I actually set up through my car, and it was way more complicated than what you can do with LeadPages. I had to set up an API call to GoToWebinar and integration with AWeber at the time, and so when they put in their details, it would track a CPA for the affiliate. I think I paid them $0.01 so they could test their conversion, then I paid them on sales of the events all the recordings. Clay: Nice. James: So as an affiliate-driven campaign, it was integrated with GoToWebinar and with AWeber, and then I tested various elements such as colors of sub-headlines and bullets versus no bullets, you know, sort of effectively made it shorter or longer copy… Clay: Nice. James: …and I tested different words like ‘claim your free business growth coaching’ versus ‘free business growth coaching’ and the variation in the test results was quite a substantial difference with the winner of being like almost double as effective. Clay: Yeah, a difference between like 26% and then almost 50%, so yeah, about double. So let’s go over the different variations that you tried. So free versus claim. It looks like free won. Is that correct? James: Yeah, the winner was free, free beat claim, and I picked up claim from one of my original affiliate campaign, so I had this copyrighter who gave me some tips, and he said that I should encourage people to claim their free bonus. And I think it works really well in that context, but it didn’t work as well for the webinar. Free is still like a no-brainer headline for getting people to a low-friction offer. Clay: Sure. James: Of course, it won’t be the right people, but you know, you have to measure sales to really know which offer is going to be the best in the long run, so it can be deceptive. You might get more opt ins but not make as many sales based on a qualifier like that, but I still think people have this sense of entitlement, and they like to gather things that don’t cost, so either of those is a good starting point, but yeah, the winner was free. Clay: Okay. So then you’ve got where it says live online event details. You tried orange versus green. What was the winner there? James: Green. It smashed it. I think orange was the worst one. Clay: If that kind of runs contrary to, you know, what we hear the opt-in orange is the best conversion color, I have some hypothesis about what happened there. What do you think happened? James: Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s like green means it’s sort of on. It’s live, it’s happening, and maybe they think orange is, you know, it’s almost gone or finished. Or maybe it blended too much with the call-to-action button, which is orange. Clay: That’s what I was going to say. I think that when it’s green that it still allows the call-to-action button to stand out, but when you have two oranges, it kind of pulls the eye in two directions who we can hypothesize about this, but ultimately, it’s just kind of do whatever the test says you should do. So we’ve got free versus claim. We’ve got orange versus green. The green beat the orange and the free beat the claim, and then you have bullet points versus no bullet points, and it looks like that the – Well, I’ll ask you. Which one won that? James: The no bullets version beat it. Clay: Any hypothesis about that? I’m frankly stumped. James: Well, I think potentially, they – Maybe my bullets weren’t very effective. Maybe it pushed the opt-in a little further down the page, and maybe I just didn’t need that much information. It may be slowed them down more than just say, “Oh yeah.” I mean maybe I talk past the sale, the classic overselling technique. Clay: Well, thank you so much for allowing the entire Marketing Show to benefit from these tests that you’ve performed. I want to go over your actual page that is inside of LeadPages and talk everyone through some of the changes that we made. The first change that we made was we added our kind of classic two-step opt-in box. So it is disarming as opposed to arming to go to a page. It’s disarming to go to a page and see no opt-in box there. Every single test we’ve run, when we have a two-step opt-in process, it outperform the one-step opt-in process so when you click on this button, this little pop up appears, and it gets you to register, and one of the reasons why this is effective is that when you see a pop up, you really are forced to make a decision. When you arrive at the page, you kind of have to make a decision, especially if it is a squeeze page like this. You need to opt in or go, but that decision is really brought to a head when you click on a button and you’re really forced to make a decision. It’s also an extension of just behavioral momentum if you can get someone to take one action, which is click on a button. The likelihood that they’ll take the next action is increased, especially if the first action requires a very low level of commitment kind of that’s sort of the essence of the foot-in-the-door technique. It’s also called Behavioral Momentum. So that’s the first thing that we did. The second thing that we did was we made it so that only an email address is required as opposed to a first name and an email address, and of course, the fewer fields you ask for the higher the opt-in rates. LeadPages is the only program that I know of that integrates with GoToWebinar and allows you to register for webinar with only an email address. So that’s another change. We also made a variety of design changes and I won’t go over them one by one because that’s going to be somewhat laborious. But as you can see, this template is here. You’ll see how we customized it for a Lamborghini super car expo. So this can be customized for a number of different businesses. Here it is inside of LeadPages, and as you can see, you can – I’m just going to click on James’s head here, and I’m going to click on my head. So it’s me instead of him. We can change every aspect of this including the date, including the mind map in the background. You can replace that with sort of a blurred-out PDF. If you want to, you can change the button text. You can change the arrows. You can get rid of things. You can get rid these arrows next to the button. So this is completely customizable, and James, I just want to thank you for donating your research. Thank you so much for being opened to being the first kind of co-branded template inside of LeadPages. It’s absolutely an honor to work with you. James: Thank you for creating such great technology, and I’m happy to give back anything that I can, and in fact, I’ll let you know the results that I get. You could put an update or you can comment somewhere near this post and tell people how’s it going. Clay: That would be really cool. So just to wrap up here, this template is now live and inside of LeadPages. Alright, well thank you so much for joining us. Thanks to everyone for listening. Go ahead and snag this if you want, and if you don’t want to, go ahead and join James’ list. Take care and thanks. Thanks, James. James: Thanks, Clay.