How Chris Luck Got 68% of Cold Traffic to Opt-in for His Email List

Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

Hey, hey fellow marketer. Thanks for listening today. Now before we discuss the incredible polled traffic strategy on today’s episode, don’t forget to join me for this week’s free live webinar called The Three Most Important Pages in your online business. You’ll be able to join me live on Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time where I’ll be bringing a ton of content in answering all of your questions. To join me, just text LeadPages that’s all one word, LeadPages to 38470. Again that’s LeadPages to 38470 and I’ll see you Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time.

So more and more folks are warming up to the important of cold traffic but turning that traffic into anything but a page view has been a huge issue for a ton of people. Today’s guest is going to share how he got a 68% opt-in rate from his cold traffic. Now that’s something to be excited about. His name is Chris Luck and he is the founder of the Luck League, a membership site to help people make more money online. Chris has been in internet marketing game for a really, really long time so he has had the opportunity to test a ton of things and find out what really works. I love his creative use of LeadBoxes of course but what’s really special is the fact that the cold traffic is converting to both leads and sales and they’re happy to do it. I’m Tim Page, the conversion educator here at LeadPages, this is ConversionCast and here’s Chris Luck from the Luck League.

Hey what’s Chris? Thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Chris: Thanks for having me.

Tim: Yeah man I’m excited and you know, I know it’s cool that you’ve been listening to this show. So before we dive into you know, the details of this tactic, can you share with us the results that you’ve been able to get with this case study?

Chris: Yeah. So I launched a website recently Luck League and I actually started by for my opt-ins I always had like the basic opt-in form on the page. That always got about 20% opt-in then I started doing the two-step opt-in. They got about 38%, which was really good and then I felt like I could do a lot better and so I started getting really creative with some using some new techniques we’re going to talk about. And right now it’s kind of averaging out about 68% and that’s on cold traffic.

Tim: Man, 68% on cold traffic that’s beautiful. We were – I was actually recording another interview earlier today and we were talking about how excited they were to get to 25% conversion rate from cold traffic , which is still fantastic. So yeah, 60, 60+% is really great so congratulations on that. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about kind of what you do and what Luck League is all about?

Chris: Yeah, sure so I’ve been around for a while. I started out in ’99 as an affiliate marketer. I was going to school for computer science and when I kind of latched on to affiliate marketing, I had learned about it in some magazines. I realized I was making more money spending two to three hours behind my computer than I would with a degree in a corporate job. So dropped out of college before I even got my degree back then and I just did nothing but affiliate marketing up until 2007 and then I kind of switched roles. I got tired of promoting other people’s products and I thought I would create my own and I got into building membership sites. I built my first one in 2007 and I built like a portfolio of 13 of them up until middle of last year. I sold the company and now I’m just focusing exclusively on really just educating entrepreneurs on how to build their own businesses and I’m doing that through the new site that we mentioned , which was Luck League.

Tim: Yeah that’s great and you’ve mentioned to me kind of an impressive number financial number that you’ve been able to generate. Would you mind sharing that on the show?

Chris: Yeah, yeah so my first membership site in 2007 that did a little over 10M in revenue and it was just purely educational teaching affiliates how to become a better affiliate just by teaching them new traffic tips and strategies. And then I went on. I had that model that was working so well so then I went and built 12 more membership sites in different industries like self-help, personal development, and you know, health and wellness, every major industry you could think of. In total, the portfolio generated 25M between 2007 to September of 2013 and that’s when it got packaged up and sold it off. Because it just started to get to be too much and I just really wanted to kind of step back and get to my roots and really just work on educating entrepreneurs and focused on one site.

Tim: Yeah that’s fantastic and congratulations on that. So you’ve had a lot of success. You’ve been around a really long time and the reason I wanted to bring that up is just because I wanted to set the stage for kind of this case study. You know, show folks kind of what you’ve bene about that brought you to be able to kind of do these tasks and get this and seeing result from cold traffic.

So can you share with us a little bit about what you did and how you got there?

Chris: Yeah. So the site that I have now Luck League and what it, it’s kind of when you look at it it’s kind of block driven. So there’s a lot of content there. And on the content post that I was used to have, I always had an opt-in like an in-line opt in at the very bottom of the post. It just asks people if they wanted more , they could go ahead and click this button. It would pop up the two-step opt-in and it would –they would opt-in from there.

[0:05:25]

That’s what I always had but then I started rolling out courses on Luck League and on the course pages I actually wanted to have people opt-in for those courses specifically and just to get more information about them. I just carried over the two-step opt-in to that course page and again it was doing good. It was getting around 30% but then my courses are all video driven so I thought I’m very hands-on with Photoshop. I really love doing design and trying out new UIs and appearances and I thought it would be kind of fun to pull out just the typical button where it said, you know, click here to join now or click here to learn more or just what people are used to seeing. And instead I actually did an image that looks like a still that was from a just a video with a play button on it. And when you click on it then that image , which I believe it’s 600 x 320 just like it’s typical video resolution. So when they click on it that’s going to trigger the LeadBox that’s in LeadPages and that’s the opt-in based by letting them know if they want access to this course, and everything else on Luck League to put in your name and email and then that will take them on to where they can actually check out. So that’s it’s a completely different look. Just looking at it does not look like an opt-in at all until you actually click on it and when I think psychologically when someone is clicking on an image that they’re ready to see a video and then they get that name and email they’re just ready to continue from there.

Tim: Yeah really kind of starts that process of you know, we refer to it as behavioral inertia. So they’ve kind of started that process and it’s very unlikely that once they click that and they want to watch that video, that when they see oh I got to enter my name and email address, they’re just going to stop. Because they want to complete that cycle right? They want to get to wherever it was they were trying to go. And so it really drivers their psychology to almost not allow somebody to not opt-in. Does that make sense?

Chris: Yeah it makes perfect sense and glad you even brought that up because anyone who’s listening to this, I don’t recommend just going in and coming up with a still image of a video. And putting it on your page. The rest of the page actually I think contributes to that 68% opt-in in the rest of the page is that the way my pages are laid out is that it starts with a title so for instance I have, I’m looking at one right now, one of the courses. It’s how to get 100,000 visitors in an hour is the title , which interest people that land there. Then it has the video the still image that they can click on that pops up the LeadBox but then below that I have a summary of what is in that course and then below that I actually have a bullet. It says in this 29-minute course you’ll discover and then I have a couple of bullet points. So I’m really educating them on what they’re going to get when they get this video. So they’re just not blindly clicking on it putting in their name and email and then to me it’s not really a valid lead. I know that people that are clicking on it really want this course so then I could have a really good follow-up sequence.

Tim: Yeah and so it’s everything is kind of designed to drive them to really want to watch the video and it makes them much more likely to continue on with the process.

Chris: You got it.

Tim: That’s fantastic and so when folks are getting to this page do they find the links to kind of these course pages from your homepage or where do they typically find it?

Chris: Yeah. So just like a typical blog well I guess I wouldn’t say typical but the way that I build my site is at the top I always have a navigation that has all my categories for the blog itself. So on Luck League I have category like a business category, a social marketing category, optimization. And then I have one that says courses. So then no matter where somebody lands on my site, they’re always going to see at the very top in the main menu nav courses and when they click on that they see my list of courses. And then when they click on any of those that’s when they land on these pages where I have this new opt-in that I’ve been testing out that’s completely blown my mind.

Tim: Yeah that’s right and is there an opportunity for them to without opting in is there an opportunity for them to buy the course or they basically is there only kind of trail to go through the opt-in?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, that’s the only trail is to go through the opt-in. It’s kind of like how you see people that deliver how the –the term has been coined like LeadMagnets where they build a page that says put in your name and email and you’re going to get this. It’s the same type of concept but I’m doing it kind of all inline wrapped in my own site and my own look so they’re not landing on another page that they can’t do anything but opt-in. I may get words kind of very non-intrusive where it’s just a part of their experience but yeah they definitely have to opt-in before they continue to purchase the course. Because if they don’t purchase the course, then I can have a nice follow-up sequence at least educate them more about the topic that they were already interested in.

[0:10:15]

Tim: Yeah, how great rather than sending them to a sales page where you know, if they leave sure you can retarget them or something but you know, you really don’t have a way to continue communicating with them. So I really love this strategy and the cool thing is it would be really easy to implement. You just want to make sure whatever page you’re doing this on, whether it is a sales page for your product or whatever it is, you just want to make sure that the page itself is enticing and that you’re finding a way to make it so that it’s part of the experience of them you know, getting whatever it is that they want to so that opting in is kind of a nobrainer and the you can work on trying to get them to buy. So I would definitely keep that in mind and as with everything, it’s important to be testing this. So if you want to implement this in your business, in your website, you know, I would make sure that you’re testing this against your current sales page to see what kind of results you’re getting and seeing you know, if this is driving down your results.

So Chris thanks so much for sharing this. I think this is a really, really interesting case study and I’m looking forward to seeing the kind of results that people get. So again thanks so much for being on the show.

Chris: Yeah thanks for having me.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.