How do I improve my conversion rate and get more people sharing my landing pages?

Full Transcript

Josh Ledgard: Hi everyone. Welcome to KickoffLabs On Growth. Our goal is to help you grow more sustainable businesses, by sharing stories from our customers and our team. I'm Josh Ledgard. Today's episode is going to focus on one of the most common questions we get asked at KickoffLabs, and I'll paraphrase, how can I improve my conversion rate and get more people sharing my campaign? As a reminder, KickoffLabs is a tool that helps people build out campaigns with landing pages, where people come in and they convert on a landing page, but then going beyond traditional landing pages, we also allow people to share that campaign and offer rewards for people that are successful at sharing that campaign.

Josh: And so, that's why there's two halves to this question, not just how do I improve my conversion rate, but how do I improve the conversion rate and get more people sharing the campaign? With me today is our designer at KickoffLabs, Lauralee Flores. She's helped hundreds of our customers improve the design and copy of their landing pages. I hear you were just now doing a design review for our customer. How did that go?

Lauralee Flores: Yeah, it went well. I do one most days. Many of our customers will create a campaign and either start it and not get the numbers that they're looking for, or if maybe they haven't launched their campaign yet, but they're not quite sure if they've got it all set up correctly, or if there's anything they should change. I'll look through their campaign, look at their landing page, look at the way that they have set up any rewards for people who share, and see if there's anything that I recognize that they can change. The customer today had a really good campaign. They had a 30% conversion rate on their landing page, I think it was like maybe 31 or 32%. And then their viral boost, which is when they sign up, how many people are coming or sharing? Are coming because of someone who shared it with them?

Lauralee: They had I think it was like 72% viral boost. So they're getting a lot of people who sign up, who share the campaign with their friends who are then signing up. They had a really good campaign and there was a couple things that I'll mention today, that I hadn't thought about that I told them, that could improve their conversion rates even more and their viral boost as well. I'll include that today in our discussion, but it was a really good campaign.

Josh: Yeah, that's good. Those numbers, when I see a campaign like that too, they do often go hand in hand because you are more likely to sign up for something in general online, if you've had a friend recommend it. And so, that's where when you see these campaigns where they've got above 50% viral boost, you also tend to see a higher conversion rate, because a lot of their traffic is coming from friends telling other friends to sign up. And then those people are just much more likely to sign up, which is one of the basic premises behind KickoffLabs in general. But it's always cool when we see that working for customers. I think that covers ... We are going to talk about baselines and definitions. I think that covers like a baseline definition for conversion rate and viral boost, so people should have an understanding of what that means.

Josh: And so, we're going to go through now the things that we look at, when people ask us to review their campaign about how they're doing, and how can they improve these two numbers. The first thing that I do is starting at the top, thinking about the conversion rate side. Because if you can't get people to convert, you're going to have a really hard time convincing them to share. I look at the conversion rate first, and the first thing I look at, if they already have a conversion rate ... I mean, sometimes people ask us our advice before they've got the campaign out there, and that's where we can only really just give generalize best practices. But if they've got some traffic out there, it becomes a lot more useful because we can customize the advice for people that have traffics.

Josh: The first thing I look at is, do people have traffic at all yet? Because if they've got a decent approach to a landing page and a thank you page, I often want them to get some traffic. I mean, I'll still give them advice, but it's hard to really give advice without knowing, well, hey, what you have is working and why would you change it? Or well, what you have really isn't working, and you should make these changes to follow some of the best practices we've seen. First thing I look at is do they have enough traffic, for the numbers to tell us anything? Because if they don't have much traffic and they say, "Well, my conversion rate is really low or really high," it doesn't really mean much because it's not statistically significant.

Josh: The next thing I look at is, what are the sources of traffic to their campaign? And so, I'll ask them how they're driving traffic to the campaign, and then look at the details of the analytics within KickoffLabs to say, is all of this traffic coming from an ad campaign? Is it coming from contest site? Is it coming from bloggers? Is it coming from Instagram? Where is the traffic coming from? The important part of that is, does that make sense for their campaign? Because if the campaign is maybe an accessory for an iPhone or a camera lens or something, but all of their traffic is coming from LinkedIn, I might say, "Well, it looks like you're telling a lot of people on LinkedIn and they're coming to the page, but they're not really consumers interested in buying this product."

Josh: Or vice versa, if it was a business focused product and all of your traffic was coming from Instagram, I might have some questions about, is this the right set of traffic to be sending to the campaign? That's even before they get to the landing page at all. Then taking a deeper dive, I'll look at the advertisement. It's pretty common for people to run ads to drive traffic to a campaign, and do the ads match the copy, tone and feel of the landing page? Because ads, even if you have a good click through rate on the ads tend to convert better, if the campaign matches what the ad says. Because as a consumer, you don't want to click on an ad and then say, "Well, where's the thing I clicked on?" You want to get to the thing that you clicked on and you want it to match the look, the feel, the messaging, especially of the ads.

Josh: I'll often find that people are going crazy with experimenting with ads and ad copy, and different branding, and images in the ads, that after a week or so of doing that, where people end up in the landing page, they're not building the landing page out to match what's happening on the ads. And then the other question I'll ask is, besides ads, what are they doing to send traffic to the landing page? Are they building relationships with influencers? Are they just telling friends and family, who may not be the best customers? Are they going out to related communities for the product, that might be communities of interest?

Josh: Like if you were building an accessory for cars, and you were going out to these different car enthusiasts websites and promoting it, and building relationships there, that would be a great source of traffic. And so, are people sending the right traffic to the campaign? That's really the first step, is just evaluating before people even get to the campaign, how are you sending them there? Does it feel like the context matches the goals of your campaign?

Lauralee: We had a customer who reached out to us a little bit ago, asking their campaign wasn't performing as well as they wanted and when I jumped in to look at their campaign, one of the things I noticed was that they didn't have any traffic. They had a boost on their first day and then there was really no traffic after that. I think that this topic of not only the traffic, but I think it's important for people to plan in advance, how are you going to bring traffic to your landing page? How are you going to pull people in? I love all the things you said. I think those are all really, really great. Because when people get to that page, if you get the right people in, your job's going to be a lot easier.

Lauralee: When you think about the landing page itself ... Jumping on to the next point, when you think about, okay, how do I approach my landing page, to be able to get people to convert? The landing page really only needs to do two things, like it really just has two jobs. One, is you just need to be really clear about what it is you're offering. I think that sometimes customers don't really realize that they're not clear. You're so close to your product, and so it's helpful to have other people look at your page too, to make sure it's clear what it is you're offering. Keep it really simple. I know sometimes ... We don't see this as much anymore, but I still see it occasionally where they try to be really vague, and mysterious about what it is you're offering. Just be really, really clear. That's the number one thing you want to be on your page, is just really clear about what it is you're offering.

Lauralee: And then the second thing, you want to just make sure that it's really clear about why they should sign up right now. Oftentimes, customers might be doing a prelaunch campaign, so they haven't even launched their product yet, and you just want to be really clear about why they should sign up right now, before you have a product. Like what kind of bonuses they're going to get by signing up now, versus just waiting until you have our product. That's the other thing you need to make really clear on your landing page. When I look at landing pages, there's a couple of different things that I look for. As a web designer, lots of people might think that I will look at the actual design, but what I'm finding more and more is the design doesn't have that much of an impact, as long as you just start and have a decently good looking page.

Lauralee: The most important things is just being really clear with your copy. Being really clear about what it is you're offering, making sure that headline really states what it is you're offering. Don't try to be tricky with it. Just be really, really clear. And then just also pull in why they should sign up. You can use your subtitle for that. If your product's really, really easy to understand what it is, you can use your subtitle to say why they should sign up right now. If your product or service is something that's a little more complex, use your subtitle to explain in a little bit more detail, what it is that you're offering. And then use a little text right next to the sign up box about why they should sign up, and then reiterate it with the button.

Lauralee: On the button, say something like, "Get pre-launch discounts," something like that so that when they put in their email address and they click on the button, it's like, "I'm going to get prelaunch discounts just by signing up." And so that's kind of the incentive. You want to make it really clear what it is that you're offering again, and then why they should sign up. If you can do those two things, what I've found, is you've got just out the gates it's a really good page overall. There's a couple other things that I noticed consistently. The other thing is you want to make sure that your signup box is right up. Like the place where they can sign up is right up at the top of the page, where it is you're explaining what you're offering.

Lauralee: I know it sounds really simple, but I still see a lot of people making that mistake of like adding a lot of copy, a lot of content onto the page, and pushing that signup box down below. Just put it out right up front. Just make it really clear what it is you're offering, why they should sign up and offer the option to sign up right there at the top. The thing that I ran into today on that page, that campaign that was performing really, really well is they had very large images on the page, and so the load time on the page was fairly large. And so, just keep a close eye on your image sizes. You want the load time on your page to be quick. What we're finding is if it takes a long time for a page to load, like if you're on mobile and the page is taking forever to load, people who are going to leave immediately.

Lauralee: And so just whatever you can do, whether that is to ... You don't want pixel related images of course, but there's a good size that you can do, making it about maybe just slightly under 2000 pixels wide. You don't want it too big, and then you can just keep with that. I think this one today was over 5000 pixels wide, so you just want to keep it fairly small, but still wide enough for any page. And then you also don't want to have too many fonts. We're not seeing that as much anymore. But you also want to keep an eye on like too many resources on the page, too many images, too many fonts really the landing page, unless you really need to explain something, doesn't have to be too long. There's no harm in making it longer, unless you're adding things that make the load time really long. But those are a couple things that you can do when you think about the design of your page, what you can do to increase the conversion rate and get people to sign up.

Josh: I heard you say a couple of things. One, I heard you say design isn't important.

Lauralee: Yeah. Coming from a designer [crosstalk 00:13:33].

Josh: Yeah. Coming from a designer, which I thought was humorous. I just didn't want to interject just then, and I'll paraphrase that. I think a good design gets out of the way of good copy and an incentive that ... The design backs those things up. It's not primary, and those things become primary. I see it all the time. I mean, I'm always surprised. Sometimes I'll look at a page and say, [inaudible 00:14:01], my eyes are like, "It's not a great design." And then I look at their numbers, I'm like, "They're actually converting." And then you wonder why they're converting. It's exactly what you said. They nailed what they're doing and why you should sign up piece of copy. So if you can do that and then make the design great, I think that's a huge bonus.

Josh: I'll second what you said about the load times too. I had a customer a few weeks ago that was asking about the conversion of his page, and he had 30 YouTube videos embedded on the page. That takes a long time to load even on a desktop, 30 YouTube videos. And I said, "Well, do you really need 30? Or could you just pick one, and then link to your YouTube channel and say for more videos, click here." He's like, "I hadn't thought about that. It's a great idea." I'm like, "Yeah, let's just focus on one that's a great video, that helps sell your product and then link to your YouTube channel." Because he was proud of all these videos and the content they'd been creating. It was interesting content and good stuff, just showcasing the product in different ways.

Josh: But it was just too much to put all of those videos on a page, and nobody was ever going to sit through and watch the 30 videos. But if they just linked off to it and say, "Hey, for people who really want more information, they can click here and watch all the videos." Don't think you have to take all the information about your product, and then dump it onto this one landing page. You can have multiple destinations for people to sign up, multiple pages that talk about different parts of the product, and then split up. That helps split up the audience too.

Josh: The next thing, and this might be a good case for people like this, the company you just talked to that had a good conversion rate and a good viral boost, talking to people that have signed up, whether you've got a good conversion rate or a low one, and just reach out to them one on one, just sending them an email or calling them if they left a phone number, and just reaching out and saying, "Hey, why did you sign up for this? I think my product is amazing, but why do you think it's amazing?" What did it for them to get them to sign up, and you'll start learning the benefits. One of the podcasts, the earlier episodes we did, we talked to the people making lab swab.

Josh: They did this technique as they were doing testing early landing pages. To A/B test, they had a bunch of messages on the first version of their product, and when they started asking people why they were signing up, a lot of it was because of the environmental reasons that it was a reusable cotton swab for cleaning different things. That wasn't the main message on their first landing pages. They started then running A/B tests about that message, and realized that they just needed to lean all in. Their early adopters were all about the environmental aspects, to the point where I think the final version of their page was just an image of like a fish choking on a cotton swab. Really, just they went all in, but it worked. I mean, they convinced people to sign up on that. I assume you do encourage people to test changes. What are the things that you would encourage people when they're running A/B tests on their campaign, to change and test?

Lauralee: I would test ... I would go back to those basic two things that your page has to do. It has to make really clear about what it is you're offering. And so, that would be the number one thing, is are you clear? And so, maybe you're not quite sure or maybe you have two ideas, that might be interesting to people or you're not sure which one is more clear. Maybe test that main headline on your page and possibly the subtitle. Just test different ways of getting your message across. When you run an A/B test, you only really want to run one if plan to have enough traffic, to be able to get the data necessary to say whether one is performing better than another. That goes back to our earlier point of getting traffic. But A/B test requires some traffic to be able to do this. That would be the first thing I would test, would be the headline.

Lauralee: The other thing is, maybe you have a number of different incentives, or different ways that you want to talk about your incentives that you're offering. You can test those. You could test, have one being more vague of saying like these early birds discounts, or you could say "Get up to 50% off." You might be more specific in the other ones. You might want to test or run different A/B tests on the incentives that you're running, and see which one performs better. I wouldn't necessarily do both at the same time. You could if you're under a short timeline, but if you just run an A/B test on the headlines first, you're going to know which ones are going to perform better. You'll be able to single out that one thing.

Lauralee: If you're under a short timeline, then I would say just test them both and just go with the one that performs better, regardless. At least you've just made one perform better, so you'll get more conversions running with the one that then performs better, even if you're not sure if it was the headline or the incentive that caused it. But those are a few ideas around A/B testings. Is there anything else you would add or that you would maybe would test Josh?

Josh: I think you covered ... I mean, the common question I get about A/B testing is people that ask, short form versus long form. With that, it really is different for the product or for the industry. In general, I tend to prefer shorter pages, because I think for you as the person managing the landing page and the copy going forward on your future marketing sites, the less copy you carry forward that you deem necessary the better, because it's just less to maintain and less to have to upkeep. And so, I would absolutely to tell people to test, have a shorter version of your page, even if it's already short, could you cut a whole section on the page and then it would still convert just as well? If so, you might consider just doing that. It's a really simple task because you just open up, copy your landing page and just say, "Could I take this section off?" Test it without that whole section on a page.

Lauralee: I like that. I like that a lot.

Josh: All right. Let's change gears and talk about the second half of this, which is improving the viral boost. And so, as a reminder, this is one of the things that makes KickoffLabs unique compared to other pure landing page solutions, is that we have the ability to generate your unique link for everyone that signs up in your campaign, and ask them to share the campaign and enable you to reward people that share the campaign. If you are doing an upcoming book launch as an author and you ask me to share it, you might encourage me to share it by giving me a free digital copy of the book, if I get three of my friends to sign up for your book launch list. This success. And so, we report on this and the KickoffLabs dashboard a couple of ways. One is the viral boost, which is just the percentage of customers coming from other customers.

Josh: The next thing we report on is the percentage of people sharing a campaign. I focus mostly on the viral boost because that's telling you, is the sharing ultimately successful? That number should be closer to ... I mean, it should be at least 35% on a KickoffLabs campaign. And then, good campaigns like you said earlier, are going to have closer to 60% or 70% of the leads, coming from the sharing. One thing not to get too carried away with, is that we do show a number that says the percentage of people sharing and people often say, "Well, I want to get improved that," and you do. But keep in mind that most people are not content creators online. Even today, most people are still content consumers. And so that number being around under 10%, 3% to 8%, somewhere in there, still can be a good number as long as those people are driving signups. Because that means you've got some people who are influential, compared to other people in the campaign.

Josh: I think to improve that viral boost depends on a few things, which really mirror what you said above, about the initial conversion rate. We were talking about the what and the why. It's on this thank you page you're asking people to share, you really have to explain what it is that somebody gets for sharing, and that explains why it's important. And then just reminding them a few key things about the brand. Like this is what the product is. Don't you think you want to share it with your friends, and what's in it for you for sharing. I forgot to add the important one of how you share. So are you making it easy? And so you're thinking about, are you making it easy to share? How do you want people to share? On what social networks do you want people to share? Why they should share, in terms of what's in it for them. What are the common mistakes that you see people making with these questions, Lauralee?

Lauralee: I think it is kind of higher level. I think that some people when they start a campaign, they don't realize like what we talked about. If you get someone to sign up on your page, and they get to your thank you page and they are incentivized share, and they're excited to share and they go share it with our friends, those friends who like let's say they post something on Facebook [inaudible 00:23:52] and they're like, "Check this out." One of their friends see it and they're like, "My friend talked about that." They go to that page. They're much, much more likely to sign up for that. They're already inclined to sign up for that. So versus someone who gets to your page some other way maybe via an ad, they're going to be more like, "I don't know about this thing." They're not going to be as qualified of a lead.

Lauralee: And so, I think that going back to what to do on your thank you page, is you really want to view this as a crucial part of what makes your campaign successful. The best campaigns that I see, are those who really focus on this part of that campaign. Once you get the landing page to a good conversion rate, if you can just nail this part of it, you're going to increase your conversion rate even higher because of the qualified leads that they're going to bring in for you. You think about it in the sense that these people who sign up, they're going to be your marketers. They are going to be your advertisers. And so you want to make it ... I think that one of the mistakes people make is that, they don't invest in this part enough.

Lauralee: Meaning that they don't create or think about what's going to be most valuable, and creating great incentives, valuable things to the customers, like what is it that they want? Often, and as closely related to your product, the better of for instance, percentages off discounts, parts of your product or something. Like just getting really creative about it. Maybe if it's a general topic, educating them on stuff like offering eBooks or video courses, like teaching them about stuff could work too, depends on the product, but just getting creative and thinking about what is most valuable to people, and really investing in that. One, making those incentives actually worth it, because when-

Josh: I'll add to that. I think making it actually worth it, requires you to really think about and make a hard choice of you are going to, for good campaigns, spend money on acquiring traffic. If you are going to set a budget for acquiring traffic, think about two parts of this budget. One is the budget that you're going to give to Google or Facebook or wherever you're running your ads, as like an ad budget. But then the other part of your budget, actually and this should feel good for you, is what is your budget for your customers to become promoters of your product? And so, setting aside a sizable chunk of your marketing budget to say, "We're going to give away a bunch of our product or a bunch of discounts." Because it's worth it having customers engage other potential customers in the conversation. Ans so, think about setting aside a sizable chunk of your budget, not just for traffic generation in ads, but for rewarding customers who are influential and who do become influential with these sharing techniques.

Lauralee: Yeah. Because when a customer signs up on your landing page, they might still be kind of neutral in terms of like feelings towards your brand. But when you're offering great things for them and they work hard to share with their friends and get people to sign up, they become really invested in you and your brand, and your company succeeding. They become kind of a part of your company in a sense, and they want to see you succeed. And so, it's creating that kind of relationship with people, requires some thought and requires some investment in them as well. That's what this thank you page allows you to do, when you do it right. I think that the best campaigns that I see, are those that have thought through that and are investing in their customers in that way.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. And so, we talked about making it easy to share. We talked about having a good incentive. To get really specific, a couple of things that I look for on people's campaigns, do they have something that feels achievable at the low end? By the low end I mean, some people make the mistake of they set this campaign up and they say, "Well, once you get 25 other people to sign up, then we're going to give you a 10% discount." Put that in context, a lot of places will give you a 10% discount online just for entering your email address. And so, the thought of working my friend network to get 25 people to sign up for 10% off of a $50 product, in hand is not very motivating, where is it if you said, "Hey, if you get three people to sign up, we're going to give you an additional 25% off, or if you get five people to sign up, we're going to give you the product for free."

Josh: You can choose to limit it. Something that people worry about all the time is that, well, what if I end up having to give away too many things of the free product? Well, I mean, start with the limit. You can say, "We're only going to do this for the first 100 people that achieve it." If those 100 people achieve it and you are able to prove that you're getting good leads as a result of it, then it might be worth increasing that to 200. Nobody's going to complain because you increased the amount of things you're giving away. They will only complaint if you say, "Well, we're not able to fulfill the orders of these things." And so, set yourself a limit but think about, can you make something feel really achievable at the low end?

Josh: And then the other thing that I think the best campaigns do, is motivating the high end influencers. I mean this in two ways. There are going to be a percentage of people who just, you haven't met yet in your industry, who are able to do a post on Instagram or a popular blog, that gets you 25 additional email addresses. Do you have something that's motivating for them? And how are you also reaching out to them? The really successful campaigns always tell us, "I met these people that I had no idea existed in our industry, because I saw that they'd gotten 10 of their friends, 20 of their friends, 30 "Friends" to sign up in the campaign."

Josh: They reached out personally and said, "Hey, can we form an even stronger relationship?" And realized that in some cases like, yeah, this person runs an entire blog dedicated to the type of product I'm selling. Maybe we should have a closer, more recognized affiliate relationship or a closer, more recognized partner or content creation relationship, in that sense. And so can you reach out, and just really keep those people going even stronger?

Lauralee: Yeah. I love that. Like thinking about not ... Because there's going to be the average person who signs up, who doesn't have a large social network, but they can post it on Facebook and they can email a few friends or family, that they think would be interested. Can you offer things, like Josh said, that are achievable at that low end that are between ... Depending on how you decide to reward people, but something that's really, really easy for them to achieve, but still gets other customers and it gets them spreading the word.

Lauralee: Because sometimes what we find is they might share your product with people, and even if it doesn't drive traffic there, they're still marketing and advertising for you. And so, giving something that's achievable, that they feel like they could earn and achieve and receive, for those people is, I think crucial because there is going to be a lot more of those also, in addition to those high end influencers that you also want to think about.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. What are some other things when you're looking at somebody's campaign inside of KickoffLabs, that you check for to see are there missed opportunities, or are they taking advantage of all the opportunities of using a product like KickoffLabs?

Lauralee: Yeah. One of the things that I noticed is, one of the common ways that people on thank you pages that are using KickoffLabs, what they like to do is something called a reward level where they can give ... Like if someone were to get two friends to sign up, they can get one reward. But if then if they get five friends to sign up, they get another more valuable reward, then if they get 10 or 20 people to sign up, they get an even more valuable reward. Those are reward levels. We have something called reward level emails, and what I see the best performing campaigns doing, in fact the campaign that I looked at this morning, they were using this as well.

Lauralee: The campaigns that perform the best do this was with these reward levels, you can send an email or you can set up automatic emails to go out when they reach certain levels. Let's say that you set up an email to go out when they receive their first reward at 2:00 or 3:00, let's say it's 2:00. They get that email with that reward, letting them know they will receive that reward. But the best performing campaigns send one or two before that. If they have a reward set up at 2:00, they'll send one when they've gotten one reward and say, "You're so close to getting this next reward."

Lauralee: What that does, is when people get the automatic email, it comes to them to say, "Hey, you're so close to getting this next reward. Just get one more friend to sign up," people go out and they share again. Because they're like, "I'm so close to getting that." Especially as they get to like four or five, or seven. So thinking through like how to keep people engaged, sharing, and part of the campaign excited with it, thinking through that part is what I see campaigns that they get this really good viral boost also, achieve that they do that. That's one of the things I noticed. How about you Josh? What's something that you see people do or that they miss out on?

Josh: Yeah. I mean, just some specific things, if they're using ads, I tell people, I check and make sure they're using UTM codes, that are the standard codes that you put into a URL to track what campaign it's coming from. Because otherwise sometimes it becomes indistinguishable if traffic is sort of organic traffic from Facebook or ad traffic from Facebook, and/or Google or other places. And so, the codes are just ... KickoffLabs will separate the codes to tell you if it's successful, for at least the signup and any analytics platform is pretty standardized around these UTM codes, that you can generate. And so, making sure you're generating those links for specific campaigns. You can even generate ... I see people that are successful when they go post to Reddit or there forms online, they generate their own personal UTM posting codes.

Josh: They know like, hey, this is from Reddit, this is from this post that I made here in this forum. That way they can really see, tracking what traffic generation is being successful for them. You talked about the reward levels. I often make sure they've got a reward level mail turned on at the first point earned in the campaign or their first referral, because I think that really keeps people motivated. Even if you don't give them something for just getting one other person to sign up, it reminds people that, hey, you are tracking this, that it can be successful, that I could earn something, and it doesn't just go into the void if I've gotten someone to sign up for the campaign. So I tell people, "Think about turning on a reward level at the first points that somebody earned after they sign up."

Lauralee: I like that a lot. I hadn't thought about that. One thing that ... Like going along with that first reward is when someone signs up, sending an automatic reply to them. It's an easy option to just say, "Send this automatic reply in KickoffLabs," in fact by default we set it to send out, don't we?

Josh: The automatic reply is not turned on by default-

Lauralee: They have to put in their email just so it's right.

Josh: They have to put in their email address and an address to be able to send emails from us, but I do check that as a really basic one as well of saying, do they have the automatic reply email turned on in their campaign at all? And then another thing that I'll look at is, do they have their share messages so we can pre-populate the message on Facebook and on Twitter? Do the share messages match up? Just like the ads we talked about earlier, that the ad messages should line up with what's on the landing page. If you're telling people to share and the share message says like, "Hey, get 50% off like I just got," but then they show up on the landing page and you're not talking about 50% off anything, then the share message doesn't really match.

Josh: And so, do you have a share message? And is it repeating the same messaging that you have on the landing page? I know as owner of a business, it's going to feel really repetitive to you, but really think about people are only ever paying half attention to any of these things. Some people might look at the email, some people might look at the share message, some people might read the thank you page. That's why the messages have to be a little bit repetitive along the way, and you're not going to bother people with the repetitive messages. Anything else?

Lauralee: One other thing to think about isn't necessarily one way or the other, but some campaigns work really well if you say, "Not only are we going to reward you for getting your friends to sign up, but just engage with us on social media, follow us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram or YouTube," or wherever it makes sense. So you can reward people for doing those things. In some campaigns that makes a lot of sense to do that. That's also a good way to go, but that's kind of campaign dependent.

Josh: Yeah. It's absolutely true. I think it's a great way to get people those easy points early on and engage with them, is getting them to grow your audience and your presence on social media, not just on email. That's a function that we've got in KickoffLabs as well. I'd say the last thing, people ask all the time like, "Should I be following up with my audience? As I'm growing this email list, should I be following up about the campaign?" And the answer is emphatically yes. You should be taking that audience and on a regular basis, reminding them about the campaign, reminding them about the benefits of participating in the reward levels or the competition you're running, and getting them to reengage on a regular basis.

Josh: Everybody has the fears like, are people going to unsubscribe from my email list? I'll just save you the trouble. Yes, every time. Once your email lists get to a certain size, no matter when you send email, no matter how good the content of the email is, no matter how great the open rate is and the engagement rate of people clicking through, there's always going to be a few people that just click on subscribe and that's okay. Maybe they've moved on, maybe they've found something else. Maybe they don't need it anymore. Maybe they are only casually interested. You didn't need those people on your list anyway. What you want on your list are the really engaged people.

Josh: And so I tell people, once a week or once every other week, sending out to the entire list a reminder about the campaign as it's going on to keep people engaged, and tell them when is this campaign ending so they know. And then as you get closer to the end, you might do that a couple times closer to the end, to really do that last sort of a pledge drive style push for your campaign.

Lauralee: Yeah. I think that when you think about your campaign, if you can just listen through this and pick a few things to improve on, I think that you'll see an increase in success in your campaign, whether that's conversion rates or viral boost. And so, you don't have to do everything. You can try to get it all right, but just make incremental improvements, is one other thing to do. Just try to do just the best you can do as you're creating your landing page, and as paying customers of KickoffLabs, you can also reach out to us and say, "Hey, can you take a look at our campaign," and we'll create a video looking through your specific campaign too. That also really helps to get really someone who doesn't have an investment in your campaign, to give you some really good feedback that sees a lot of them too.

Josh: Yeah, absolutely. It's a fantastic thing we offer. The other thing I want to know is, thanks for listening if you made it this far. This was an interesting podcast to do, because we're talking about a lot of things that feel very visual in one way. And so, what we're going to do is when we post this episode, the show notes for the episode that you can find at kickofflabs.com/podcast. We'll post some good examples of landing and thank you pages, that follow some of this guidance that we have. I mean, some of it was not just visual guidance. I mean, a lot of it wasn't. But we'll post a bunch of examples of some recently created good campaigns at KickoffLabs, so you can see what some of these best practices look like for successful campaigns. Because that's the follow on to this question we always get is, "Can you point me to some examples?" I always do caution people that what worked for somebody won't necessarily work for you, but it'd be good just so you can see some things that do have worked for people.

Josh: Thanks for joining me today and sharing your knowledge of what you've looked at. It was cool that we came right off of a customer review call to do this.

Lauralee: Yeah, this was fun.

Josh: Absolutely. If you haven't already, check out kickofflabs.com get your own campaign going. Even if you're already using another landing page provider, we do integrate with just about any other landing page provider that you can turn it into a more viral campaign. You can turn on these reward levels, you can turn on the sharing, and you can really dramatically improve your unbounce, your insert page, your lead pages campaign with KickoffLabs. I see it all the time. Thanks for listening. Have a great week everyone.