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[List Building Breakthrough] How We Recently Tripled Our Blog's Opt-In Rate

By The Leadpages Team  |  Published Oct 05, 2013  |  Updated Oct 06, 2023
Leadpages Team
By The Leadpages Team
Increase Opt-In Rate

Note: This recorded conversation between James Schramko and Clay Collins was originally posted here at SuperfastBusiness. James was nice enough to let us repost the conversation (thanks James). [leadplayer_vid id="524F0022915D7"]

In this article:

[cta-box] Transcript: [0:00:00] James: James Schramko here. Welcome to this special video episode of SuperFast Business, and what we’re looking at right now on screen is Clay Collins’ computer. Welcome, Clay. Clay: James, it is awesome to be here. It’s been a while since we’ve spoken publicly in front of others and it’s awesome to be back. You’re my favorite interviewer. James: Well, you’re my frequent guest on SuperFast Business ever so that is because everything we talk about is interesting for our customers and you’ve always got something new, and today, we’re taking it up. We go from the usual audio to the audio visual, and you’ve got some really cool stuff to show us. The thing that really piqued my interest was when you’re talking about how you tripled the number of opt-ins that you’re getting on your website, and I thought this is something we must share for our entire audience so that’s why I’m putting it out there. So if someone’s listening to this on iTunes on a podcast, they will probably should head over to SuperFastBusiness.com and find the episode where we’re talking about how to triple your opt-ins, and you’ll be able to watch this presentation in video format. Clay: Awesome, awesome. Yes, so this is actually – We recently, in the last week, tripled the amount of opt-ins that we were getting from our website, and for those of you who don’t know who I am that’s totally okay. I’m not like saying this for anything, but I spend my entire life maniacally finding ways to get the highest conversion rate possible. So the fact that we tripled, almost quadrupled the percentage of people that showed up on our website that ended up opting in is actually – It’s a big thing because I haven’t had this big of a game for several years now, and this is all I think about and do day to day. I mean you can attest to that, James, right, like that’s all we ever talk about. James: Yeah, every time we talk, it’s like you’ve got an entire new thing happening that most people would be happy with if that was all they had, and you just kept innovating and innovating and innovating. You’re like probably the most prolific passionate person I know in this tech space so I love seeing what little adventures you’ve been up to. That’s why we report back so often. Clay: Cool, cool. So what we’re looking at here is stats in my LeadPages account so LeadPages gives you opt-in rates on your various pages. So what I did the other day on our blog is I decided that I was going to rather than just let people download from a naked download link, something that we’re giving away for that episode, rather than just letting people directly download it, that what we do is something like this, so in this episode of the LeadPages blog, we’re giving away a template to download a landing page template, and so rather than just linking directly to the template file, what we did was we made this an opt-in. So when you come here, you can opt in to download this, and it worked incredibly well not just because of what you’re seeing right here, right, so people get on our list, but then after they get on the list, the thank you page says this, “Thanks for signing up. Everything we promised you will be sent to your inbox shortly. While you wait for materials to arrive via email, we recommend you click continue below to learn more about LeadPages and what it can do for your business.” So this actually brings people to our sales page. So not only are we growing our list, we’re driving more people to our sales page, and when people get on the list, they’re getting a follow-up series of emails – I can’t show this. Yeah, okay. They’re getting a follow-up series of emails that talk about our product and what it does and provide a whole lot of educational value. So kind of the takeaway here for everyone is that regardless of what you’re doing and what you’re posting about in your blog post, you can find a reason to give something away in exchange for the opt-in with every single blog post. So if you have a recipe site where you – You know, you talk about health and you’re giving away a recipe, you can have someone opt in to download a PDF recipe. If you are explaining how to do something, you can give away a checklist that goes with your blog post. Kind of a poor man or a lazy man’s way of doing it is if you have a blog post, you can simply take that blog post, put it in a PDF editor or – I’m sorry – in a Word processor, save as a PDF, and just give away the PDF version of that blog post and… [0:05:00] …that just skyrockets your opt-in rate because it means that as opposed to what most people do where they kind of have a general opt-in on the site of your blog, you’re actually offering someone a customized incentive that is specific to the blog post that they just read that gets them to opt in, and this again has tripled our opt-in rates. So if you look at our pages right here, we went to every single blog post where we gave something away, and we either, and we added an opt-in box, or we took those post where we had nothing to give away, and we found as many of those – We found an excuse to give something away that’s specific to that blog post, and we put this up like maybe 4 or 5 days ago, and as you can see, this one got 65 opt-ins, 10 opt-ins, 17 opt-ins, 13, 23, 72, 19. These individually aren’t bringing a lot, again, over the last few days, but when you add them up, this is just page 1, and here’s page 2. Again, 150 opt-ins, 29 opt-ins, 22 opt-ins, 42, 41, and as you can see, the opt-in rates of these are incredibly high; 79%, 84%, 83%, 81%. So the volume is good considering how many of these are here, and the opt-in rate is just through the roof. James: Okay, I’m sold on this idea because I already transcribed every single video and audio, so I’m simply going to create an email segment in my database and I’ll have a tag PDF download or segment to date it further, then we create a click to download link underneath the lesson, so quick to download to PDF version of this first, and then after they get the download, we have a click to see how other products or how we can help you page. Clay: Yup, yeah, that’s… James: So how do we do it? How do we make it work? What is my team doing? I’ve watched this, I say. Check out this video. I just did with Clay. Make it happen. We’ve got a LeadPages account. Clay: Sure. James: What do we do? Clay: Alright, so here’s what I suggest you do. Go into your LeadPages account, go into templates, and let’s say you’re going to make a downloadable, let’s just do one for these episodes. You’re going to make this video, you’ll probably post it on YouTube, but people can download this video so they can email it to other people. Let’s just hypothesize that people can opt in for this post to download this video and a transcript for this video. What you would do is first, you need somewhere for people to opt in, so you could do something like this. You could put your logo right here. I don’t think I have your logo on my – I haven’t uploaded it yet to my system. So we can just like maybe turn off the logo, so maybe we’ll do something like this. Awesome freebies. I think it’s – Yeah – from James Schramko, and – Oh, I just misspelled your name. Sorry. James: I wasn’t going to say anything. Still, you could put an H there. Clay: Okay. James: Now you’re just messing with me. You do know John Carlton. He calls me Shrek because he can’t be bothered. That’s perfect. Clay: C-H-R-A – I got that right, right? James: Yeah, it’s 100%. Clay: Okay, okay, cool. It’s cool so yeah. So we’ve got this. Maybe we just leave it from like – You know, maybe we’ll just keep it on one line here just from – yeah, from James. Okay. And then, it might say here like, you know, opt in below to download the Clay Collins – Maybe say the video where James and Clay talked about tripling your opt-in rate. Something like this. And then, here, maybe we just – You know, I don’t know. Was this like take that out? And here, you know, a lot of people put in different things. I think we can just put in this download box like this, and then we found download now works better with free instant access so we’ll just change this to say download now, and so this brings up the opt-in box, and then let’s just save this right now. We’ll create an opt-in. I’ll call this like James example. I’m doing public spelling which is never good for me. We’ll go to opt-in form integration, and… [0:10:00] …you know, I use the UserSoft. James: [0:10:03] [Indiscernible] bought it. Clay: Cool. So I’ll just – I think I’ll do this one. Did you click the first name field? James: I got it. Clay: Okay. So we’ll turn this off. We’ll turn off go to webinar, and here’s what’s cool is that you can actually – For every one of these that you set up, you can have LeadPages hand out the video or whatever the giveaway is. You can have LeadPages deliver that. So that means that you don’t have to create a new form and a new auto responder and a new email list for every freebie that you give away. You can just add someone to the house list, and give away, you know, we haven’t uploaded it yet, but like let’s say this is what we give away. So you can just select from all the files that you’ve uploaded to LeadPages and you can have LeadPages email people when the file comes in. It looks – The email just kind of looks like this has the name of the thing and just a short description in the download, and so far, these emails that LeadPages sends out are ending up in the priority inbox in Google, but like the good one, the personal one, not in the commercial mail one. James: Very nice. Clay: Yeah. So we’ve set all this up. Oh, why don’t we give people this template right here? Are you down with giving people the template for this kind of file? James: Yeah, that’s fine. Clay: Yeah, okay. So I’ll sit down on the video where James and I talked about the opt-in rates and the template you see on the video. So I’ll just email this to you and you can set this up on your own account. James: Yup. Clay: So we save this, and then all you do is – Oh wait, do we set up the integration? Okay, wait. I forgot this integration so I’ll go to here and I have already one made, and then, digital asset delivery. Sorry, I forgot to save it the last time I did it. Okay, so save. Bam! So now this file is here on the internet and you can just – Below your blog post, you can just say click here to download what we talked about, and then people can get that. So just set up one of these for every single blog post, and you know, put your logo there and stuff, but this is all you have to do. James: Once you do one, you can just claim it, right? Clay: I mean that’s what we did. So if you look at sort of all the ones that we made here or all the templates, we basically just swap out the name of the lead magnet. So here we have labels for all of these. So if you look at – I’ll just show you the ones we used, and again, they all look the same. We’ve cloned them all. So here’s one, and every single one looks the same. We just sort of as far about use this proving, and then whatever it says here, we just swap that out for the name of the new template. So yeah, you can just set one up and you can have your team clone it over and over and over again for every single blog post. James: Yeah, we’re going to be doing that, so I expect that will be able to track a change. When you first talked to me about this idea, I didn’t connect it as well as you just showed me the second page, which is the part that I’m super interested in, which is click here to see the products or otherwise that we can help you and sending them back to the one page I really want people after they’ve opted in. There’s only two things I want someone to do at SuperFast Business. It’s to opt in so that I can communicate with them regularly and it’s to go to my products page to find the problem that relates to their situation, and then to click on our solution, and then to make a purchase, and that is how that site is so successful. So this is a step we’re going to build and it’s simple. This is one of those moments where there’s really nothing else to say. There’s no extra filler or flop. Just do this. Use the tool. Put it into play and I’ll be able to report back on the results that we get having implemented this. Clay: Awesome, awesome. Yeah, there’s something – I don’t know what it is. There’s something about having the opt in be extremely specific to, you know, what just happened in that episode like I bet people watching this one will be like yeah, it’s fun to watch this on YouTube, but I kind of want to have it on my computer and pause and start and roll it back, and it’d be nice to download the transcript and maybe the audio version, and then also, they can get this template that I’ll give to you to give away to people. James: I know for a fact there is because having a membership community, the first thing people ask if I put a new video in there is can I have the transcription, can I have the download link? You know, they like to consume their media on their own terms especially when people are busy. I want to put things… [0:15:00] …on a customer’s desk top. It’s like a Trojan horse. That PDF lives there on the hard drive for a long time, comes up in the search. It’s like 6 months later, oh, there was thing that Clay and James were talking about. I’ll have a look at that. They go along and buy LeadPages. It’s going to work out well for everyone. Clay: Yeah. And you know what I think? It’s true that a lot of people might say hey, I could just scrape the transcript and put it in a – You know, put it in my word processor and save it, and I guess I could go to – You know, I could get that plug in that allows you to download YouTube videos, and I could do all these different things, but giving it to folks in one like package zip file where it’s all there, it’s properly labeled and organized, just the convenience of having that available can motivate people to opt in, and then once they’ve opted in, now you send them to your sales page or something like that. James: And also in systems like mine, when people keep putting their email in for different things, they’re already doubled up and confirmed in my system. They’re just adding tags so for each segment I would make a tag and call it PDF, and then I could communicate with those people knowing that they were hyper responsive and interested in downloading extra materials so that I could have a different conversation with them. I can even order made sequence. Clay: Yeah. That’s super cool. I dig that. I dig that a lot. Well, I’ve learned something from you now too. Now we need a segment, yeah. James: You know, one of those links on these pages I’m tempted to put a redirect that adds a tag and creates a sequence. I’ll give one to play in this seminar. Clay: Cool. James: A little link in the bottom of my emails that says this email was sent with OIP. When people click on that, it tags them interested in OIP, and then later, it sends out an email why I switched from AWeber to OIP… Clay: Nice. James: …and that tenfold increase in my commission just by adding that sequence is that one follow-up email so I’m going to use some tag sequence, redirects in these templates here, so probably set up the first for myself like I’d like to do, and then we’re going to see what happens to the opt ins. Clay: Oh, that’s genius. Alright, well, we both learned from each other here. This is amazing. James: Clay, every time you come on, we’ve picked up something amazing. I want to say thank you so much for sharing this with us. This is not a long session, this is a powerful session so the action step for our viewer or our listener is to implement this on your site, come back to this post, tell us what happens, and I’ll certainly be updating with the comments with what happens on my side as well. Clay: Awesome, awesome, and if you post a link, I’ll grab it and I’ll feature it, you know, in a roundup of people that are employing this strategy because I think it’s really powerful and it uses some of the lesser known features of LeadPages that I’d like to highlight a little bit more, so if you want a link from my blog, you know, leave it on James and I’ll feature a bunch of people, and maybe you’ll get some people opt in to your list. James: Awesome. Thanks, Clay. Clay: Absolutely James. As always, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me on again. [0:18:07] End of Audio

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