7 Secrets to Profitable Landing Pages

7 Secrets to Profitable Landing Pages

Are you trying to learn everything you can about using landing pages for your business? Do you want to see your profits increase? If so, you might want to keep reading.

You see, here at Emercury we specialize in helping our customers get the most out of their marketing efforts. While we are a marketing-automation platform with a central emphasis on email-marketing, what sets us apart is the amount of time we spend helping our customers succeed.

This includes educating people on every step of acquiring and converting leads as well as the best ways to understand and best utilize each technique and tool along the way. As of late we’ve been spending a lot of time helping our customers best utilize their favorite ways of capturing leads.

As it turns out, landing-page builders like Unbounce and Clickfunnels are quite popular among our customers. Often however, many fail to utilize the full potential because they get trapped in the hype behind these tools. They miss the forest for focusing too much on certain “trees”. This includes the bells and whistles and fancy features related to building the page itself.

In this article I’ll share with you seven secrets that will help you achieve much greater profits. These are the seven tips I find help most of our customers truly multiply profits and increase back-end sales.

1) You have to understand why we even use landing pages in marketing

To understand why marketers value a good landing page in the first place, you have to go back to the beginning. In the “good ol days” we didn’t have the concept of a “landing page”. We had websites that were built as a storefront. They just presented everything you do and sell.

People still gave us their email addresses and bought our products, especially in the early days when the competition wasn’t as high. However as the competition kept increasing and people’s attention spans kept decreasing, marketers realized something.

You can’t just expect a person to land on a page that has 8 different things going on at the same time and expect to have a decent conversion rate. Having a “signup for our newsletter” form which appears on the sidebar of a busy website with tons of other stuff going isn’t very effective.

So smart marketers created something called a “squeeze page”. This is probably the earliest type of a landing page. It is just a bare bones blank page that has a short promise offering something of value in exchange for your email address.

Since then the concept has become better defined

A landing page is designed to be the first page where a person “lands” after arriving on your website. Typically we build landing pages for people that come to us from paid advertising. It’s meant as a way to provide the best returns on paid traffic. That’s why experienced marketers send all of their paid traffic to specialized landing pages, and almost never to a front-page or regular website page.

It is often wrongly said that a good landing page only attempts to achieve one goal. That’s a misunderstanding. A landing page only attempts to get the visitor to perform one action, and there are no other actions available on the page. However, it can and should attempt to achieve multiple goals, but more on that in the next secret. For now, realize that a landing page only allows for one action and one outcome.

In that sense, this is why the visitor’s experience is different than if they arrived at another type of page on your website. For example someone landing on front page, one of your valuable blog posts or other more traditional website pages.

Do note that you can and you should divert your general website traffic over to your landing pages as well. Just don’t expect people to share your landing pages or see them ranking in google searches. You need to create high-quality valuable content for that. However your valuable content can and should advertise your landing pages.

2) Change your mindset (landing pages are nothing on their own)

The main mistake I see when people discover the concept of landing pages is the following. They forget that a landing page is just a step in a bigger process. It is in fact a very visible and important step, but it is just a step.

This is why we wrote an entire article on the secret to ClickFunnels’ success. From a technological standpoint, they offer nothing more than a way to build landing page. However, what sets them apart is the amount of education they do for their customers.

Instead of focusing on landing-pages, they focus on “funnels”, and a landing-page is merely one piece of that puzzle. It’s a very visible and important entry point, but it is just one step.

If you think of the funnel as a book, then the landing page would be something like the cover of that book. Or perhaps if the funnel is a physical store, then the landing page is just the storefront.

This distinction is quite important because you need to realize that the main job of a landing page is to get people inside of a funnel. It is the funnel itself that does almost all of the selling, up-selling and cross-selling.

3) A landing page is more than just an entry point

This might seem to contradict the previous point, but a landing page is more than just a fancy door. In fact, the metaphor where a funnel is the book and the landing-page is just cover breaks down slightly when you utilize the full power of a landing page.

While it is true that the subsequent steps of the funnel do most of the persuasion and selling, that doesn’t mean that landing pages have no part in it. If that were true then we would all just use “squeeze pages”. Remember this is just a blank page that has a short super-strong promise of a valuable item in exchange for an email address.

But we don’t do that. We have longer landing pages that go into a lot more detail then just why you need to hand over an email address. This is because the landing page is pre-selling and preparing the lead for better outcomes further down the funnel.

A landing page shouldn’t confuse the reader by asking them to perform one of multiple possible actions. It should only offer the option for a single type of action. However, a top-performing landing page is measured by more than just how many emails it can get. It’s performance is seen in terms of its contribution to the overall performance of the funnel as a whole.

When you design your landing page you can, and you should attempt to achieve several goals

It should achieve many other goals, aside from just getting the visitor to share their email address. If you think of the funnel as one entity with certain goals, your landing page should help with achieving many of those goals.

Let’s say that in building your funnel you’ve set the goal of gaining people’s trust and building a reputation. Well, the landing page can certainly help with that goal.

For example, as you feature great client testimonials on the landing page, your goal isn’t just to get more email addresses, you’re also increasing the likelihood that these people will take some action down the line, further down in the funnel.

4) Change how you view the “Thank You Page”

If you’re not familiar with the concept, this is the page that people get right after filling in their information on the landing page. For example, your landing page might offer a free ebook if they give your their contact information. They fill in their name and email address, click submit, and then they’re automatically redirected to a different page.

This is called the “Thank You Page” because in most instances it starts out by thanking the person for signing up, or showing interest. It then helps deliver on the promise. It does this by either delivering the good, for example a download link, or it gives them instructions on the next steps.

You want to see thank you page as part of the landing page experience

In technical terms the thank you page is a separate page on your website. However, as a marketer you want to look at the thank you page as the other side of the landing page. Imagine that your landing page is like a flyer, and your job is to get the person to flip to the other side for a complete experience.

This will help you do a lot of things right, such as keeping the design consistent, as well as making sure that the thank you page flows right from where the landing page left off. It should have excellent continuity.

The thank you page is also part of the larger funnel, so get its function right

While some marketers use the thank you page to deliver a requested item, such as a free eBook, we find that it’s best to use it to drive the person down the funnel.

Most of your profits will come from the email marketing side of things, so you want to get people habituated to opening your emails as fast as possible. This is where the thank you page can help. If the thank you page drives people towards the singular action of filling out a form, the thank you page drives them to the singular action of checking their email.

You want to sell them on the idea why they need to go into their inbox and open their welcome email right way, as well as give them the instructions on how to do it.

5) Automate your welcome message

As you learned in the second secret, when you’re building landing pages, you want to consider the funnel as a whole. Building landing pages isn’t just about getting the most email signups, it’s also about producing the most-profitable funnel. You always want to think of the process as a whole, as opposed to looking at landing pages as an isolated thing.

With that said, the welcome message is just as important as everything you did to make those pages effective. It doesn’t matter how good your landing page is if you don’t deliver on the promise. And the way you deliver that promise is through a well-crafted email automation. One that triggers seconds after the person signs up.

There are 2 steps to achieving this:

1) Integrate your landing-page solution with your email-delivery service.

In most cases you want the person who fills in the landing-page form to be instantly added to an email list inside of your email marketing software.

Over here at Emercury we go out of our way to help you integrate your favorite landing-page solution with our email-automation system. Just take a look at some of our integration guides, for example: Facebook Lead Ads, Unbounce and Clickfunnels.

2) Set up an automation to send that welcome email instantly

In Emercury this is easy. You just create an automation that triggers when new subscribers join a list. Then add a “Send Message” as the first block in the automation.

In order for this to work, you just need to make sure that people who fill in your landing-page form are instantly added to the appropriate Emercury list. Refer back to the integration guides for this.

6) Build out an intelligent follow-up automation

The money is in the follow-up. That’s why we wrote an entire piece explaining how you can easily triple your profits by focusing on this aspect. And today if you really want to see some good results with your follow-up, you want to utilize modern email automation. Old-school broadcasts and sequences will no longer cut it.

This means that your email service provider needs to offer a way for you to easily build out email automations. Unfortunately, with most providers they fall into one of two extremes.

Either they have no automation builder (just old school “autoresponder sequences”). Or they take it too far and have super-fancy overpriced automation features that you’re unlikely to need unless you’re a fortune 500.

At Emercury we’ve worked really hard to strike that golden middle. We have a visual automation builder that you can start using minutes from now. And it has all the main features that you need, without any of the useless and price-bloating bells and whistles.

7) Get the right partner on your side

Most marketing automation providers don’t actually care about your success. In fact, most marketers have come to take it for granted. They’re used to it and expect nothing more than access to a software platform with their subscription.

That’s why marketers are so surprised when they first discover Emercury. They can’t believe that we go out of our way to actually help them make more money using our platform. We do more than just “code fancy new features” for the platform.

We invest a lot more time in educating and helping our customers make and increase their actual profit. And let’s face it, that’s why you’re in marketing in the first place.

You can implement everything that you’ve learned in this article, starting today. In fact, you could start implementing it within minutes, for free. That’s right, all of the features you need to achieve these things are included in our “forever free” plan.

In fact, we might just have the most generous free plan on the planet. We limit very few options to the paid plans because we want you to use all of these features to start boosting your profits. And hey, upgrading to a paid plan will be a no brainer after that.

So make sure to fetch to lock in your forever-free account before we change our minds. Get yours here.

 

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