The Lost Opportunity That Nobody Thinks About: How To Optimize Your 404 Page To Build Your List and Make More Sales

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Hi, this is Jeff Wenberg from LeadPages. We’ve added a really cool new feature to LeadPages that I wanted to show you in this video... We recently added the option to set any page as your 404 page. So if someone’s on your website, and they find themselves that the infamous 404 page that displays when a link is broken, a page doesn’t exist, or the URL was mistyped, you can now capitalize on that by making your 404 page an opt-in page. Typically, what happens when a visitor finds their way to a 404 page is they leave the site because there’s usually no navigation back to where they came from and no indication of what they should do or even what happened in the first place. If they really want to find the information that they’re looking for, they may use the back button on their browser to try again, however, they’ll probably end up right back at the same 404 page. Ultimately, they end up leaving your site, and this obviously isn’t a good thing. If you’re not seeing how powerful this can be, let me explain a little further. If you set up a 404 opt-in page that explains briefly what went wrong and then suggest that they opt in to get the information that you have for them, you can increase conversion and get them moving back on the other parts of your website and in turn preventing them from leaving your sight altogether. If you can engage your audience and keep them on your site longer going to more of your pages, it’s way more probable that they’ll share your content, become a repeat visitor, or even purchase your products. One other reason this is so powerful is that when a person gets to the 404 page and it says the information is not available, they’ll read the other stuff on the page to see what’s going on and what they should do. So you’ll have a higher probability that they’ll actually read your copy, and assuming it’s really good, they’ll opt in to your offer. It’s sort of disarming instead of arming, which puts them in a different state of mind than they might be in if they were to come to an opt-in page under different circumstances, and this presents a great opportunity for you. If you’re a coder, you can download any of our free landing page templates and modify the template using your coding skills. You integrate the page with your auto responder. Again, there is some coding required to make that happen. You grab your landing page code, integrate it with WordPress, on your website, etcetera, then you publish the page. If you’re a LeadPages user, simply go to any of the LeadPages templates you’d like to use and slightly use this template to start customizing it for your 404 page. Just click on something to change it or select it from the menu over here on the left. You can enter your analytics code here. You can change the colors to make them look more like your site. If you’ve got a color document for your website, you can either enter the codes or select the colors from the sliders. You can change the font colors, the font type, select which auto responder service you want to use for your opt-in form. You can add a background image that matches your site, then you can add something letting the visitor know that what they’re looking for isn’t available, but you don’t want them to leave empty-handed. I did this right on my background image so you can do that or you can put it right at the top of the opt-in form. Then customize this as you normally would with your headline, and subhead, and so on. Change any text you’d like for all of these, the email field, or the button text, then when you’re done customizing, click on Save to My Pages. You’ll enter a page name then click Save. Then with a click of a button, you can publish this page through our servers, publish it to WordPress. If this were a normal page, you could publish it to Facebook as well, or finally, you can download the file and put it on your own server. Now to implement this in WordPress, you simply go to the LeadPages plug-in in your WordPress installation. Make sure you’re using the most up-to-date version of LeadPages within WordPress. Update if it does tell you there’s an update available, select Add New. From there, you’ll select 404 page. Select the page we’d just created from the drop down, then click on publish. Now your 404 pages will be opt-in pages to grab those people that might otherwise just leave your sight. You can get this implemented really fast. You saw how easy it was just now. It’s all inside LeadPages. So that’s all for this video. I’m Jeff Wenberg. Thanks for watching. Have a great day. [0:04:14] End of Audio