Lesson 8: 5 Landing Pages You Should Already Be Using to Build Your Email List (and How to Use Them)


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Written by Will Hoekenga at LeadPages.net

Looking for previous lessons? Lesson 0 | Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 | Lesson 3 | Lesson 4 | Lesson 5 | Lesson 6 | Lesson 7

Over 4 million.

That’s how many leads we’re processing on a monthly basis at LeadPages. With all that data, we’ve learned a thing or two about using landing pages to build your email list.

In this lesson, I’m going to show you five types of landing pages that we’ve seen get great results so you can quickly implement them on your own website and in your own business.

Let’s get to it, shall we?

Landing Page #1: The “Thank You” Landing Page

If you only implement one thing from this article make it this first type of landing page.

Why? Because it takes advantage of a huge opportunity most marketers are missing out on right now — treating your thank you page like a conversion-optimized landing page. It’s also incredibly easy to implement since it’s a page you’re already using.

To show you the difference between a regular thank you page and a conversion-optimized thank you page, I present to you Exhibit A — a regular ol’ thank you page:

Now, let’s take a look at the thank you page we use at LeadPages whenever a visitor opts in to our email list:

As you can see, we replaced the traditional concept of a thank you page with a “thank you landing page” that is fully optimized for conversions.

Switching to this style of thank you page didn’t just work well — it actually doubled the number of people attending our weekly webinars. Naturally, that had a dramatic impact on the number of sales we get during webinars.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: But what am I supposed to do if I don’t do webinars?

Easy — identify the most high-value action a visitor could take after signing up for your email list (other than purchasing something). It could be…

  • Signing up for an autoresponder email series like an email course
  • Signing up for a free video series
  • Filling out a form that lets you know they’re interested in getting private coaching from you
  • Filling out a survey
  • Entering an upcoming contest

Regardless of the current level of your business, there is always SOME kind of action you can encourage visitors to take on your thank you page to further qualify them as a potential customer.

At the very least, you could stick some share buttons on the page and encourage people to share your website.

Landing Page #2: The Magic 404 Page

Ever experienced the palm sweat-inducing experience of sending out a bad link? The magic 404 page can make that experience a little less sweaty.

Rather than using the default 404 page on your website (which probably just tells your visitors to hit the “back” button or use your search bar), why not turn your 404 page into another landing page that builds your list?

For example, check out the 404 page on my personal blog:

Is this going to get you an extra 1,000 opt-ins per month? No (unless you LOVE sending out bad links), but when combined with all of your other list-building efforts, these 404 opt-ins will add up to a nice little total over time.

Consider this another “quick win” landing page that can take advantage of the traffic you’re already getting.

Landing Page #3: The Facebook Tab Landing Page

Most of the time, when people try to convert Facebook users into email subscribers, they do one of two things:

  • Post links to an external landing page that has an email opt-in opportunity
  • Drive Facebook ad traffic to an external landing page that has an email opt-in opportunity

However, what we’ve found is that you can dramatically impact both your conversion rate and your cost-per-click (if you’re running Facebook ads) if you publish your landing page as a tab on your Facebook page.

Here’s an example of a webinar registration page we published as a tab on the LeadPages Facebook page:

As you can see, this landing page lives entirely within the Facebook ecosystem. Here’s why publishing a landing page this way can boost your conversion rate and lower your cost-per-click on ads:

  • People using Facebook trust Facebook. So if you post a link to a landing page that allows them to stay inside that trusted ecosystem (rather than pushing them away to an external landing page), they’re more likely to feel comfortable with your page. This can lead to higher opt-in rates.
  • Facebook will often lower your cost-per-click on ads when your ads are pointing to a page inside Facebook. In fact, Brian Moran of “Get 10,000 Fans” recently implemented this strategy and lowered his cost-per-click on an ad campaign by about 40 cents.
  • As an added bonus, Facebook is actually more likely to approve your ad if it points to a landing page inside Facebook since they want users to remain on their site.

Brian Moran actually designed a landing page template built for this specific purpose that you can download at the end of this lesson.

Landing Page #4: The Guest Post “Content Upgrade” Landing Page

Remember Bryan Harris’s lesson in Week #3 about content upgrades?

He explained exactly how to optimize your best blog post for more email opt-ins by using LeadBoxes® or Leads by SumoMe to offer visitors post-specific bonus content.

I’ve experienced great results with this strategy, but I’ve also found that things can get dicey when implementing it on guest posts. The site hosting your guest post won’t always be cool with embedding an opt-in form that builds your list right on their website (even if it’s in the post YOU wrote).

So what do you do when that happens? Just send all that quality guest posting traffic to your home page?

Nope — you set up a landing page specifically for that audience. Then, you link to that page at the end of your post. Here’s how I recently did this for a guest post on Jay Baer’s site, Convince and Convert:

That link led them to this page:

And when those Convince and Convert readers clicked on the “Get My Free Copy” button, they were greeted with an opt-in form tailored specifically to them:

Landing Page #5: The Lead Magnet Landing Page

Last but not least, the lead magnet landing page is perhaps the most versatile landing page to add to your arsenal.

Rather than simply asking people to sign up for your email list, the lead magnet landing page offers visitors something of value (a “lead magnet”) in exchange for their email address.

Then, rather than sending traffic from mediums like Twitter, paid ads, etc. to a page that asks for their email address without actually giving them anything in return (much like our friend Leeching Larry from Lesson #5), you can send that traffic to a page that offers value in exchange for their email address.

Here’s an example of an insurance marketing expert using a lead magnet landing page that offers free marketing training videos in order to convert visitors into email subscribers:

We’ve found that short, to-the-point pages like the one above work really well when you’re giving away something free.

As you can see, the page quickly and clearly communicates what the visitor will be getting and how it will benefit them. It also uses social proof at the top and bottom of the page to build trust and reinforce value (which is a common theme you may have noticed on many of these examples).

While you may be familiar with the concept of a lead magnet landing page, here’s something you might not know: there’s one type of lead magnet that we’ve seen outconvert nearly every other kind over and over — the Free Resource Guide.

It’s nothing more than a one-page list of the tools you use in your business.

Here’s an example:

We’ve seen this incredibly simple type of lead magnet outconvert lengthy free reports, free video series, free coaching sessions, and just about everything else. It just works.

The good news? It’s just about the simplest lead magnet you can create. Simply list out the tools you use to accomplish something in a document (in the example, it’s a list of tools used to make DIY videos) and have someone spruce it up into a nice PDF on Fiverr.

Keep that in mind when creating your own lead magnet landing page.

Lesson 8 Task

  1. Choose one of these five landing pages to implement on your own site.
  2. Write down which page you plan on implementing and what you’re going to offer on it. Leave a comment here and let us know.
  3. Go to the special bonus area for this lesson to get the HTML, CSS, and JS files for the landing pages mentioned in this post.
  4. OR use this special Email1K link to get the landing page template used in example #5 + a 30-day trial of LeadPages (including access to 85+ templates) for $1.

4 thoughts on “Lesson 8: 5 Landing Pages You Should Already Be Using to Build Your Email List (and How to Use Them)

    1. Paul

      Hi Chad,
      Probably you were asking for a critique from the author, but as no-one has yet replied, may I offer some amateur impressions of your landing page and optin?
      It seemed to me that some page elements loaded a little bit after others, which made for a slightly jumpy experience. Might just be my internet, but perhaps check it from someone else’s computer (which doesn’t have your page graphics cached), and see if your hosting is fast enough.
      Very nice article about Ogilvy’s 38 tips by the way.
      The white banner at the top with your logo is a bit big, once the user has scrolled down. Very minor, but I noticed it and wondered briefly if it was broken. It could get smaller if it’s to stay in place.
      The optin at the bottom of the article looks just about perfect to me. Follows every rule I’ve heard of.
      The optin at the top feels like it’s lacking some aspect to make it specific. What kind of tips? Maybe you tested it already and the generic one won, I don’t know; just a feeling.
      Sorry – I lost the exit intent optin and now it won’t come back. The “I’ll send you stuff that’s not crap” line seems brave. Did it do well tested against a positive statement?
      HTH!

      Reply

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