TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKERS

Rosie Gilderthorp, Vicki Jakes

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast, the show that helps you to reach more people, help more people and build the life you want to live by doing more than therapy.

Today I'm welcoming back Vicki Jakes, friend of the podcast, Do More Than Therapy expert speaker, and all round website legend to talk about something I know often gets us stuck. So you will have heard me in previous podcast episodes talking about the importance of getting people's email addresses. When you're building an online audience for a book, an online course, or any other passive income stream those email addresses could not be more important. And I know that you are all capable of creating a great valuable freebie for people that they will want to download. But how do you actually get them to download it? Vicki's gonna share with us today the secrets of landing pages that make people want to download your freebie. So for those who haven't heard our last podcast, Vicki, can you just say a little bit about who you are and how you help?

Hi, Rosie, thanks for having me back. And hi everyone listening. Yep, so I'm Vicki Jakes, I'm a website optimization consultant, which basically is a fancy pants way of saying that I, I can help you look at your website and make it convert better, sell more stuff, or get more leads, essentially. And I do that through a combination of my 20 plus years experience building, designing websites and working in the digital marketing industry. For massive clients as well. I've worked with like big pharma, finance, and for the past three years I've been working on my own, working with small businesses. And I think my background is sales, a long, long time ago, plus fused with my nerd instinct has sort of led me to be in this really quite unique position where I can, I can objectively look at a website and understand how you can sell more from it. And quite often that's to do with looking at the layout, the design, the wording, or the functionality, essentially, and I work with my clients to review their own landing pages, their websites and kind of figure out how to convince their users, their ideal customers to click, to do the things that they're meant to do. So this episode is right up my strasse. It really is like, I'm really excited to be able to talk about this with you today.

Well, I know it's right up your street. So if people want examples of Vicki's work, then you can look at the Psychology Business School sales page or the Do More Than Therapy Membership sales page, because Vicki worked with me on those pages, and she's responsible for the awesome layout and how beautiful they look, but also how well optimised they are. So do check those out if you want to see an example of what Vicki does because she's brilliant. But so I think we need to start with the terminology that we're using here. So first of all, what is a landing page? And how is it different from the other pages on our websites?

Great question. And I tell you what, I think this is the most asked question that I get actually. People say what's the difference between a website and a landing page? And the landing page, the landing page explanation is all in the name. Right, essentially, traditionally, we would create one page websites, which is what our landing page is, to send users to, in the, in the middle of a campaign, right. So the term got coined around the time that Google AdWords sort of first came out, you know, in the sort of early 2000s. And you needed a page to send you users to, to land on, if you like, from the ad that they were clicking on. Because it came very apparent, right, that if you sent users to a website, and gave them all this choice, they wouldn't do the thing that you hoped they would do, but you were paying money to send them there. So if you can send a user specifically to one page that's designed to convert, either you buy something on that page, or you hand your email over on that page, or you book a call on that page, that's the sort of three key types of conversion you'll often see. Then there's less likelihood of that user disappearing and getting distracted by shiny things on the website. A website, in comparison, is a collection of pages right, and if you are a business, you need to have a website, right? There's just no negotiation on that because Google, when it's calling your website likes to see a collection of pages. It can make sense of all of the individual pages, right? A landing page quite often is temporary, right? We're not always running offers, we're not always building our lists, we're not always selling things at the end of ads, you know, quite often we were running campaigns and campaigns usually have like a short shelf life. And so they can be temporary and be switched on and off. And quite often, you can have a landing page as part of your own website, which is, I think, where the confusion comes in. But perhaps it's not linked to from like the menu on your site or something like that. So just to summarise really quickly, just make it really clear a landing page is a single page website that's designed to send users to, to take action, right. And a website is a collection of pages, that is made to sell your business in general, like a give a good overview of what you offer.

Okay, that makes lots of sense. So one thing I wanted to pick up on there, is you mentioned, campaigns. And I think that for the kind of businesses that we run, we won't be used to necessarily thinking about that. But I think it's a really helpful way of thinking sometimes. So my understanding is that a campaign is when you're putting a lot of energy and resource into promoting one particular thing, one offer. And usually, we might use that term for an offer that's only going to be time limited. So it might be that you're opening the doors to an online course that you've created, so you're going to put loads of energy into promoting that online course for a couple of weeks. And then you're going to close those doors again. So you might not need to be kind of sending people to that page after that. Is that what you're meaning by campaign?

Yeah pretty much, and y'know campaigns are associated with ad spend, right? Because we're not, you know, if you think about any of the big brands that you follow, right, then, you know, Coca Cola wasn't always running the Diet Coke ads you know, they had to bring them down, try something else, try a new campaign. So campaigns do have like, a kind of a time limit to them generally. That said, though, that said, landing pages don't always have to be associated with campaigns, right. But the purpose, the key purpose of a landing page is to focus a user to taking one action. And it needs to sit away from your website, and it needs to have you generating traffic to that landing page that's different to the traffic that you drive to your website, so you kinda need to think about them separately.

Okay, that's really helpful. Okay, so now we know what we're talking about, what is the first thing that we need to consider when we're creating a landing page for one of our freebies? So thinking about the sort of freebies that psychologists and therapists might create, then it might be something like a guide to helping your child deal with a distressing emotion, or it's usually a guide, or a how-to of some sort that we've created.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty common for freebie landing pages. Either you sign up for an email series, some type of downloadable, a video, a webinar, a challenge even, or something like that. But there's three key ingredients that you need to have on the first part of the page when a user first lands to communicate to them, it could be your ideal customer, right? So we refer to them as, as thus moving forward. So you want to be able to impress to your ideal customer as quickly as possible what you offer because they're in judgey mode, we judge things really quickly. And actually, we assess pages that we land on in less than 50 milliseconds, in less than 50 milliseconds. So even before you've blinked your eye, you thought I'm going to stay on here, right? So you need to, in order to help translate what you offer much quicker than the kind of front breaking process, is you need to have a kind of a key headline that talks about who you help and how you help, an image eye catching image that can translate really quickly what it is you offer, and then you need to have a call to action button. There's no negotiation on that, you can't have a call to action bit of text, you can't have a call to action image, it needs to be button because we're in 2021, we have been trained as internet users like little monkeys at typewriters, we cannot deviate from it, we need to see buttons when we land on websites. Don't try to be a trailblazer here, do the thing that's going to convert, and that's how we convert. The headline quite often should talk about the problem that you solve and how you help in one, and that is tricky and tough like. And the example that always springs to mind for me is the Pinterest landing page. You can find it by going to about.pinterest.com and their headline is 'when it comes to a great idea, you know it when you see it', right which is great, right and they're talking about we offer great ideas is, and you'll know it when you see it. So they're kind of explaining that we kind of help with creative ideas, we help with inspiration. But it's in the button underneath where it says join Pinterest that the dots start to match. And you can see that this is something to join. And then when you move your eye, you track your eye over to the right hand side of the screen, there is a screen with the Pinterest app within it. So those three things will kind of connect and tell you what is on offer, that this is something to join, it's an app, and it will help you unblock your your kind of, unblock your kind of creativity blocks if you like to kind of get on with what you're doing in your business or whatever. When it comes to freebies, though, you really need to be very, very specific, right and say, free guides that will help you understand your child in five steps, right. Like in and I'm just sort of, you know, riffing off the top of my head about that. But what that says is, it's a free guide, so you need help, this is why you're here because you perhaps responded to a post or an ad about this. So here's a guide, and you can absorb that information in the guide in five steps. So that's essentially like what you offer and how you help encapsulate it in that title. That's all you need. That is genuinely all you need. If you need to, you put a little bit of subtext underneath to maybe anchor that. But as the eye tracks down, you should see a button that says Download Guide, or Sign Up Here. Something that has action words within it. You can't just say learn more, you can't be passive. Remember, we're trying to impress people in less than 50 milliseconds here. And then you need to have an image of the guide. And I think the Pinterest example is great because you can see the app within an actual phone screenshot and someone's holding that phone. Now if your guide is downloadable, I want to see it on a, on a phone screenshot or a tablet, or you know, as a document printed out laid out on the table. I want you to communicate to me quickly that this is something to look at. Perversely, if you've got a video guide, I want to see a screenshot of you in the video, just like on your page actually, Rosie, where we've got like you doing one of your classes actually, like encapsulated in, like a laptop screenshot. All of these things are meant to just save time, right? They're lean, they're lean devices that we're using to communicate effectively and quickly what it is you want to offer. I think we hold back as business owners from selling ourselves on our websites, because we don't want to be seen as pushy, right? Slimy Simon is what I call him, the sales guy that we've got in our head, right. And we don't want to be seen as like, we don't want to be seen as pushy, that's awful, we don't want to be seen as selling ourselves. But on a landing page, you've got to put that, you've got to check that at the door, right and put those fears to rest because you've only got one shot on your landing page to convert your user. And if you can't communicate quickly, you're going to lose the opportunity that you spent, you spent so long in driving that person to the page, why not convert them, you know, so if you're going to fall at the final hurdle, which is the landing page, after spending money on ads, you really need to think about your positioning and your messaging for sure. So those three things definitely should be in conjunction with each other. And you can't, you can't just drop one and have another like you need the text for people to read, so they can read it in their head, you need the image to anchor things and obviously, a picture tells 1000 words, and then you need that call to action button.

Okay, so those sound like the core things that we need to make sure that we have on a landing page. I often when I'm sort of surfing around downloading multiple freebies, as I do, I often notice that people have a little kind of 'about the author' section and things like that, would you recommend anything additional like that?

Well, here's the thing, right is if you can impress on your user enough with those three key ingredients I said before, especially by the way on mobile view, because we're most likely looking at sites on mobile now, then they might start scrolling, right and then that's when you can put in the following order, is what I recommend, is a section that outlines who this page is for, right. It might be tempting to just go straight into 'about me' but no one cares about you at the moment, they want to see if you can solve their problem. So I'd love underneath you know that first initial banner with your amazing pictures, CTA and header is to say, are you in this position right now? And you can outline the problem that your ideal customer has. And then in the panel below, you can talk about, in a bit more depth, how your freebie helps, that you know you couldn't've put up at the top of the page. So perhaps like there's some bullet points, what's in the five... like I gave that example of, you know, communicate with your child in five steps or tell me like, what's a quick summary of what's in the five steps, right? And if it's a very, very light lead magnet, you know, perhaps you're giving them a checklist, maybe explain what's going to happen, once they use your checklist, or what's going to happen once they read your ebook, or watch the video, right? So we want to see like you identifying the problem that your ideal customer has, and then showing them what's going to happen once they consume the document, then you can go into social proof, right and go into, you know, authority building. So we want to see some testimonials of people who've already consumed the product. And we want to see an about you, right? So who are you? Why are you telling me this? What makes you an expert in putting this together? And then repeat the call to action to download the document at the bottom of the page, because if a user scrolled all the way down, they'll want to see that again. So if you collect lead, if you collect signing up to funnels Rosie, where you might be used to seeing, I think it's an unfair thing to say, but it's often an Americanised view of landing pages, where they're insanely long, like you keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

Yeah, for like a one page download sometimes, you know, I don't understand.

Yeah, yeah. Like, especially like for the big sort of famous coachey types, you know, they have like these amazing landing pages. All they're doing is going through the sales process, right? They're identifying the problem, they're talking about the what if we solved your problem, oh, but hey, we've got this solution that's going to help you with your problem. And then here's what's in the solution. And then we detail everything that you're going to get and what the price is, and things like that. But with freebies, you don't need to, you don't need to do that, I just want to see the problem that you've identified for me, and show me that what's going to happen once I've consumed the document. So if I have been um-ing and ah-ring, and your ad copy, or your social post copy, or your email copy, that's driven me to this landing page hasn't already worked and piqued my interest, then, you know, you can do a bit more convincing. But most of the time, right, there's the decision, the decision's already been made by the time someone's clicked on your ad or your post, and come to your landing page. And if you've got those three ingredients correct, they're probably going to click on that button at the top and go for it. If they do scroll down, brilliant, but don't don't don't make them work really hard for getting an email lead magnet at all.

Okay, so sounds like that top section, where you're outlining what your freebie is, who it's for.

It's key. It's where the magic happens.

That's the most important bit because most people will make the decision that quickly. And then what you've got underneath that is stuff to help the people who are maybe feeling a bit more discerning that day. Because I do have days where I'm like, I'm not giving my email address to anyone, and then I'll get hooked in. And I'll be like, oh, maybe I will, maybe I will just have this other freebie that they've really, they have got to work for me at that point. So that's when I might want more of the stuff about, like, who is this perfect for? How's it going to solve the problem? Those social proof testimonials, and a bit about the authority of the author.

Yep. Yeah. And it's so funny to say that because we are very, very, very precious about our emails, we treat them like a part of our, you know, our extended self, if you like, and so we, we do a lot of risk analysis, when we hand our emails over. Can I unsubscribe from this easily? Can I just grab the guide and go? Do they look trustworthy? You know, all of those things come into play. The savvier of the consumer, you know, is really good at subscribing and unsubscribing. They might even have, like me, and I'm, I'm assuming you like a dedicated email for this type of thing as well, right. And, you know, some, some people might, might not, and that's the people that you hope will sign up and just kind of stay in your world.

So one thing I wanted to ask about Vicki, because you know that this is not my strong suit by a long way, is about stuff like colour and the design of your page. How important is that?

Really important, more important than you think, but it doesn't have to be something that blocks you from like continuing to do the work, or thinking that you need to spend lots of money to get a designer. You just need to have a bit of consistency with the layout that's on your page. James Wedmore suggests doing the squint test, basically, where you look at your page and you kind of squint and you think, does this look right? Because as I was sort of saying before, we've kind of got this inherent inbuilt way that we say like assess websites and use websites that has just collectively built up over the past 20 or 30 years. So when, when you're looking at a website, if you think it doesn't look quite right, it probably isn't. And that's because of a couple of reasons, right? Either your fonts don't match, your colours don't match, or things don't line up, like they're not parallel, or they've got even spacing between them. So if you can make life simple for yourself and pick one font, right, don't go and do millions of font, kinda font selections, and, you know, have a font for the button, a different one for the headline, just pick one font right? And then just make the headlines one size and your body copy another size and keep it that simple, just like you would in a word document, right? And use that same font for your buttons, right. And then make sure that your button colour contrasts with the background, right? It can be very tempting to do a very fancy design, what's called ghost buttons, where they're just lines outside the text without a kind of like a full background colour of the button. But actually having the contrast against the background is really important because it catches the user's eye and draws them to want to click on it. Some people say you have to have green for buttons, that's just absolute codswallop, there's no truth to that at all. There's no green for go here, you just need to have something that contrasts right. So if your branding is grey, and dark blue, right, go and pick a red button, go and pick an orange button, basically, or bright green button, something that will kind of complement but stand out from the background, essentially. And, and as always, with images that you have on your site, make sure that they're high quality, that they look good, they're not pixelated, right, spend some time finding the right image. As we were sort of saying before, like that top image on the landing page is going to do a lot of heavy lifting for you. So take time to find the image that will resonate with your ideal customer. It might not come at first, it might be the last thing that you do, or you might just hit on it, but it needs to, it needs to be punchy, it needs to standout, be memorable. And also communicate really quickly what, what you're offering on the page. With the Pinterest example, they've got that phone screenshot that we talked about, but it's all overlaid on a very out of focus background of some unfired ceramic pots, which is just genius, because what that extra image does, is it communicates very subtly this is aimed at commercial creatives, right? And so what can you offer very subtly in the background? I've got a lead magnet for a WordPress guide and the background image is just, it's very subtle. It's like illustrations of little laptops, like cartoon laptops, that you wouldn't be able to see unless you actually looked at it, but it kind of communicates a sense of fun, a sense of texture as well. But that took me ages to find. You know, for anyone listening to this, you know, take, it's okay to take time finding the right image.

That's really helpful because I think often, I always well, you know, I'm like I always try and create my landing pages too quickly. And I'm always looking for, to reuse images that I've used before. Or I don't, I just don't give them enough thought to be honest, and actually thinking about that, that this is a way that you can communicate, again, who this download is for. And you know, who should be attracted to it. I think that's really helpful. And it's making me think by accident, actually, the landing page that I created for some free training that we're running this summer has done much better than I expected it to do conversions wise, because I thought it was looking a bit boring. But actually, when I'm thinking about it, it's probably the first time that I've had a background image that has actually said something. So I've got a background image, which is like psychology textbooks. And I chose it because I thought it looked okay, was the aesthetic of the page, but I thought it might be a bit boring, but actually, it communicates really strongly who this training is for, doesn't it? And so I'm wondering if that is part of the reason that it's been a higher converting page in some of my previous ones. Very interesting.

Probably is the answer, right, is your, your image doesn't have to be clever. It just needs to communicate what you're offering, right, and again, I think in our quest to kind of not be salesy, we try and be subtle and gentle but actually just showing the thing that you want to offer, or similar in your case, is enough. It does loads of work behind the scenes subconsciously as users are assessing whether they're going to stay on that page and whether you can help them with the problem that they've got, essentially.

Yeah. So think if you're offering something like, I know a lot of people listening to this might be offering something like a webinar, or some kind of free online workshop, would you then go for the image of kind of your face teaching on a laptop? That kind of thing?

Yeah, yeah, I would. Totally right. You need an image of yourself presenting that webinar. And if you've not done it before, then an image of you looking friendly and approachable, like a brand headshot, or something like that. Because if people sign up to your webinar, they're signing up to hear you speak for 20 minutes, half an hour, hour, or whatever, so you need to look really friendly and approachable. If you don't have friendly and approachable images, just take, take a selfie, or something like that. And you can use a Canva frame to transport that image onto a phone or a laptop, easily done. And it's just like, it's simple devices, but it kind of communicates that, you know, you're really willing and open to chat with someone for the next hour. Because if they can't see that, if they can't get that, why would they sign up? So you need to like really think about the the kind of actual product, the actual offering that you're putting across there. With a PDF document, you don't need to show yourself for sure. But like, I run a five day challenge as my main lead magnet, and I have me, like I show me because you're going to be hanging out with me, basically, and I look friendly, I'm smiling, I'm not being moody. And all of these things like really have that user make the decision, whether they want to become your ideal customer and sign up to the lead magnet.

Yeah, and it's so worth spending the time on that because, you know, knowing, knowing mental health professionals, and I think this is a mistake that I've made so many times, we'll put so much effort into creating a resource that is really, really valuable for people, you know, we'll make sure that it's the absolute best it can be if we're putting on a webinar, we're going to have spent days making sure that webinar is high value. And I'm really, really going to make a transformation for somebody. But then we, I think we get a bit too passive about the marketing side of it. And I mean, maybe because we find it less interesting, or because I don't know, we don't understand that it, how it's going to matter to people. But this is where I let myself down, and it's where I imagine a lot of people listening to this might just not go that extra mile and go into Canva and put that image onto a phone or a computer screen, and it's like just taking that last little step can make all of your hard work pay off. So really important for people to do that.

Like, is how can you, how can you do it slightly differently to, you know, the sort of the pedestrian ways that people are putting webinar pages together. And essentially communicate that on your landing page. You know, asking people to come and watch you for an hour for free is a big ask. It's a really big ask, and anyone who signs up to your webinar, like the royal you as it were, should be, you know, you should be grateful for every lead that you get, those leads are quite expensive to acquire by ads as well. You know, because it's a big ask, we can't just assume. And you've got to put the features and benefits and outcomes of what someone's going to get from watching you for an hour, you know, God forbid, like if you're going to sell at the end of a webinar, that is totally fine, but put value across first, like God forbid you just go straight into the sale. Because users are attuned to that. And they are wary of it. This is why you know, it's harder to get people on webinars than it used to be. You can be a bit more, you know, less obvious about you know, the outcomes and things like that when it comes to a PDF lead magnet, I mean the kind of risk reward factor is different there. You know, because I'm just getting a document, I can assess it. As Janet Murray says if you can read a lead magnet in less than five minutes on the loo, it's a great lead magnet, right, but webinars definitely a different kettle of fish.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we could do a whole separate podcast episode on what makes a good webinar, because I have sat on some.... you just get no value whatsoever other than the sales pitch, and there is nothing more irritating. I was furious. And this was when I was new to business and I didn't know that that was the done thing. And we're, generally we're communicating with people who will not be expecting that. Because we're not, most of us anyway, most people listening to this podcast, we're not putting In our b2b or business to business stuff, where we're trying to help people who are struggling with their mental well being or trying to enhance their mental well being in some way, so they're not necessarily going to be expecting a sales pitch. And I think if you hit them with one straight away, it's going to be really jarring. It's not very values congruent, either. I think one of the reasons I love marketing is that actually, the 90% of people that come into contact with my marketing and don't buy anything from me, I hope I still give them some value of some sort. I think that I do, I think that's the way that my marketing works, what I love about content marketing, and then I know I can go the extra mile for that 10% who do decide to engage with my service or my products. And I think that's very much how I'd approach any kind of freebie I was offering, whether it's a downloadable, whether it's a webinar, it's, it's got to help the 90% and then help the 10% to make the decision that they actually do want to work with me. Yeah, we've gone off on a bit of a tangent there but...

No, I loved it. I loved it. Yeah. Well, you know, like I... it's a topic that I've talked about in my own world, in my own content is the bro-marketing techniques, really, and you know, long landing pages that hook you in and then finally get you at the bottom, you know, because you spent enough time scrolling, you know, long webinars that like hit you with like a really long sales process, when you're not expecting it like, they're all devices and they work, they work. But I think, you know, we're talking about freebies, like lead magnets here. You don't have to, you can be ethical, and creating news, utilise devices that you know, are just all about providing value for sure.

So, what are the biggest mistakes that you see people making on their landing pages? Because I bet you see a lot of them.

I'm loving this. Okay. Roll my sleeves up, ready? The biggest mistake I see is people putting a landing page on their website and calling it a landing page. So yeah, great, I've got landing page. And they think just by not putting it in their menu, means it's a landing page, right, and you just give people the individual URL. So I go to those landing pages and hey, guess what the same menu is at the top. And I have to scroll quite a long way down the page before I see the call to action button. And because of the way your site's been built, or your layout or whatever, you can't have a big banner image at the top with a call to action. Or you can't have, you know, any of the devices that we've talked about during this chat so far. But you're doing it because it's convenient for you, as the business owner to have a landing page on your website. If you can invest in like either landing page software, or creating a device on your website that will remove the menu at the top, that's going to be the best thing that you can do for those types of landing pages. And then they become proper landing pages. A great landing page has one call to action on it and that is it. You can repeat that call to action as many times as you want, as our long American friend pages have sort of demonstrated, right. But don't give people an excuse to click off and go and have a look around your site. I'm in Google Analytics a lot for plenty of clients, for all of my membership, right? The thing that I have seen proven again and again, is when you have a menu at the top of a landing page, you create a leaky bucket and users once they land on that landing page will click and go elsewhere. Right? Whether you think, surely they'll stay and do the thing? They don't, they kind of they get disinterested really quickly and think oh I might go and just check out another page on this site. So that's like the first, the first biggie. The second thing I see again, and again, is people having that call to action button way too far down the page. So imagine this, right? You've just seen an amazing lead magnet on Facebook, someone's posted a post or you've seen an ad on Instagram, or Pinterest or LinkedIn, you've clicked on the link, and you've gone to a landing page and the first thing you see is a block of like written text. You think maybe the site's broken. Okay, I'm going to click X and go back to the ad and try it again. Like that is a common user experience, right when they see that. Instead, what you want for them to see as soon as they land is that headline, the background image that we spoke about before, and the call to action button. If you make them scroll, you're asking them to do extra work. And if you're asking a user to work hard for something that's already very hard to convert, you're gonna see low conversion rates, conversion rates generally for landing page tend to be around 1 to 3%. That is a sort of common norm. So for every 100 people you send to your landing page, only... let's say that it's a good day, three people are going to confirm, right?

Ouch, that is so painful when you think. I mean, a lot of people who listen to this might be thinking about investing in Facebook ads or something for the first time. You are paying like a quid to get somebody to a landing page. I mean, it can be less, but you know, I've paid more as well. So the idea of, oh, 3%, that would be heartbreaking.

I mean, that's really good. I mean, you know, like my, my landing pages convert, at like, 20%, right, but that's because, you know, they're really short, you don't have to scroll to see anything, I have a timer that zhuzhes people along and encourages them to sign up. And it's really clear what's in the lead magnet and what you're going to get, you know,

And don't do yourself down as well, because what I know about your marketing is that nobody is going to click on your posts that takes them to the landing page by accident.

Sure.

Because you've already given them quite a lot of your messaging, that lets them know, this is for me before they get there. And I think that's also the secret to good conversion, is getting the right people there in the first place,

Totally. Like being hyper aware of where your landing page sits in your, your funnel, which is the sales process, right? So if you can bring in good quality leads at the beginning, your landing pages, just, you know, mopping up the loose ends, as it were. And I think in you know, the world of your audience, you know, it's, it's either going to be really broad, like you're offering your services to everybody, right and seeing who, because, you know, mental health issues can affect anyone, right? Or you have got a specialism and you might be able to like laser focus in on, you know, kind of like a particular group or a particular condition or whatever. It can vary. So, likewise, the conversion rates are going to vary there as well. I mean, generally, I'm finding at the moment, I'm paying around as high as five quid as low as two quid per lead, per email sign up lead in the moment is, you know, prices have really gone up in 2021 for a whole bunch of reasons, in the ad world, like Facebook have had to comply with new Apple iOS 14 update conditions in order to ensure privacy, us advertisers aren't quite sure you know, what, what to do next. So it's a tough world out there, right? You know, in organic marketing, where you don't have to pay, as you know, is still like, really useful because of that. But if you want to start growing your audience, you've got to think about ads. And if you are thinking about ads, and you are willing to pay that money, then you need to make sure that there are no barriers to your user clicking on that button when they land on the page. And so if you're making them scroll, or do any extra hard work, or even any extra easy work, because remember internet users we are lazy, we are petulant, get stroppy about anything. How dare you show that thing to me? I can't believe I'm on the wrong page? We do things called... in the industry we call it rage clicking, people do rage clicking.

What's rage clicking?

So I have software called... like there's lots out there like Hot Jar and Crazy Egg, I use Crazy Egg to monitor how people click around my landing pages. So I can see if they're going to click on something they think is a button or not. Or if they go to scroll, and they miss my button, it's a way of actually visually seeing where their mouse moves around the page. And it creates a heatmap on the on the page. And you're able to see if anyone does like rage clicking where their mouse just clicks, you know, multiple times in the same location. And we rage click as internet users, when we get really peeved off with something not working. We've all done it, you know, a pop up closing or something like that. So, you know, it's again, it's like another device I utilise with my clients to kind of see you know how best to position the elements on the page and with conversion rates, if you are able to track it, and a great way to track it is by looking at the total views of your page, which you can just track in Google Analytics right, versus the amount of signups. So you can just go look at your email marketing tool and see, and make sure the same timeframe is applied to both of those, you can work out the conversion rate, right, one divided by the other times 100. And then you can work on small, small, tiny, incremental changes to see if you can improve the conversion rate and with, with my challenge landing page, it's like a five day challenge, right. And originally, I had like this really long statement saying, you know, five day challenge can help busy business owners. I mean, it went on and on and on, right, with how to, you know, optimise their websites, it was like, way too much technical language in there. And I, you know, I kind of squished it down and made it lighter, and I improved the conversion rate by like, 5%. You know, it's insane, like, so, but I just did that first and tested it again, you know, and then I was able to go right well, I'm going to try a new image now and see if like, the, the kind of image would improve the conversion rate, and it did ever so slightly. And then I updated the button once and it made everything worse. So I went back to the old button basically, so, but if you do lots of changes, you won't be able to see what is worked and what hasn't. So you just need to like pick one thing at a time.

And then it sort of becomes fun. It's a bit like a game to see what you can do.

Yeah, totally, this is why I do what I do, 100%. I love it. Like I love looking in the data and looking for stories, and comparing figures and things, hmm maybe that might have had an effect. And then you're not just looking at the data and living in spreadsheets, you're thinking about the psychology behind it as well, which I'm sure your audience will totally dial into, and user behaviour. And also looking, you know, you zoom out 20,000 foot and look at what's going on in the world right now as well. And you can hazard a guess as to why people might be doing what they're doing. Like, for example, conversions are down across the board, because traffic figures worldwide are down, because we're all going outside again, right? We're not locked up. And that's just what's happening right now, as we start to in the kind of northern hemisphere go back into, you know, colder weather, we might see traffic figures go up again. Things change around Christmas, things change around seasonal times, you know, so like, being aware of the sort of cultural, societal, worldwide, global views of what's going on in the world. Being aware of you know, user behaviour, and really understanding your ideal customer in depth, and then making those changes can all help you kind of like play that game. And it is fun. 100% I love it.

So the last thing that I wanted to ask you about today is the practicality side of it. So how would you recommend somebody go about building their landing page? Because you mentioned that the software that you can use that makes it easier to make it a single call to action page. I didn't realise actually that if you just put it as a normal page on your website, of course the menu and stuff will be there distracting people, so what what are the tools that you would recommend people use?

So I use a dedicated landing page software tool called Lead Pages. I've been using it for about two years now. And I'm I'm going to be using it forever. I've tried them all. I love it. It costs money, though. But the reason why I use Lead Pages is because I have several different offers for different things in my business, that don't necessarily relate to my core website. My core website is a brand website for me, right? So it's my consultancy stuff. But I run a membership. But I want to test a different lead magnet that's not quite part of my membership. I do marketing and Facebook ads for clients as well. I do SEO audits, right. So I've got lots of different facets in my business that perhaps won't quite sit under my main domain. And so having a landing page tool away from that means I can just test lots of things and try different things. And the URL doesn't matter then essentially. And the builder within it is designed specifically to help convert people on a landing page, right? So all the templates that you can load in tools like Lead Pages and there's others as well, like Instapage and Unbounce they have been tested within an nth of their life, right? They've, so many people have used those, the designers that put those templates into the platforms, know they confirm, right. So you can load in a layout that is probably going to convert and all you have to do as a business owner is change the text, the image, the call to action, and then like load in any kind of extra sections. But again, it costs money. And there's an investment that you can pay monthly, right. So again, if you want to just focus on a campaign, try it and then you know, if it's not for you or whatever you can stop. If you've got an existing website though, like Squarespace, I mean, that's an amazing... like you can build landing pages in Squarespace with no issue. But again, you've got the kind of the menu issue at the top and it's the same with Wix as well. You can't get around that. WordPress is a little easier. There's you can either kind of put CSS code into your site that will hide the menu or have a plugin that will hide the menu and there's loads of list building plugins like, like Thrive Suite that you can add, and it will allow you to create landing pages within your own website and remove the menu at the top and things like that as well. I even, I think Lead Pages also you can connect with a plugin as well. So it depends, it depends where you're at, if budget really is an issue, and you're like, I don't want to invest in a third party tool like this, just looking at the email marketing tool you're already using. Right? So MailChimp, ConvertKit, MailerLite, these seem to be like the top three I'm always talking about at the moment, Active Campaign is and other ones. They all have inbuilt landing page software tools, and I'd say ConvertKit's the best one, MailChimp is okay, MailerLite has nicer templates. But they've all got these pre built layouts that you can just literally drag and drop and ping in. And all you've got to do then is replace the image that takes the call to action. And the forms that they have on these pages will load directly into your list, right. So when a user signs up, they go directly into your list. With all of the other tools that I've talked about, there is a bit of connection faffing that you have to do.

And it can go wrong. I've had so many experiences.

Always. Always, I'm seeing it all the time.

Because I use Lead Pages as well, and I really thoroughly recommend it. I love the analytics actually, I know. Because Vicki's so clever with Google Analytics, you, it's easier for you to get that stuff anyway. But for me just having it on a dashboard, where I'm like, oh, this is converting at this percent brilliant, is just it's such a time saver for me, and I'm all about saving time. So I would not be without Lead Pages, I love it. But the only time I have got frustrated and tried to chuck my computer out of the window because of it, was that initial trying to get it to integrate with, I think it was back when I was using MailChimp, it's been okay since I've been on ConvertKit, but occasionally that used to go wrong and you'd be like, Argh! But actually, you can always retrieve people's email addresses that you've collected via those platforms. Even if they haven't shown up for whatever reason in your software, you can usually download a CSV file, which you can then upload. So it's never, it's never as bad as you think it is. There is often a bit of tech kind of tweaking needed with those things.

Yeah. And mostly like your need to connect your email marketing tool with a third party landing page tool using an API key, which can be found in the settings of most of those tools that I've sort of mentioned before, and then you just have to add your account name, and the API key is like a sort of alphanumerical code. That is it. That is it. If in doubt, though, there's always tools like zapier.com, which you literally open it up and you say I want to connect my MailChimp with my Lead Pages, and it will do all of that for you. And all you need to do is login and it kind of does all of like the whiz bang wizardry stuff for you. But you know, the the kind of initial option, sorry, the latter option that I mentioned, which was just utilising the landing pages within your email is... granted, you're not going to get a fancy URL with those, you know, especially the MailChimp one is like horrible, it's like got loads of like letters and stuff in it. But it works, you know, and it's a great way for you to test if it's going to work, because then you bootstrap, right. If it works really well you get enough leads, you sell to those leads, you make money, you can invest in Lead Pages, or Insta page or Unbounce, or whatever, or invest in a developer to help you hide your menu on your website and bring it all over to your website, right. But you know, when in my word like lots of people tell me like they give me the excuse that they can't start building their email list and like putting out lead magnets because their website's not finished. I'm like ah-ah-ah, you can go and use a landing page in one of those tools. And they're really easy to use, like even the most technophobic people I know have been able to create one.

I think that's really great advice to finish on actually; just don't wait. Because really, you need to be building your email list as soon as you possibly can, because it takes time. Unless you've got a huge budget, which probably none of us do, then it takes time to get it off the ground. And to get that momentum that you need to start making sales from it. So get started now, and at least you can start testing. So thank you so much, Vicki, that's been so valuable. And I'm hoping people are feeling really excited and energised to go and create their first landing pages. I know that quite a lot of people who listened to our last podcast episode came over and worked with you. So where can people find you if they want to work with you?

Well, probably the easiest thing to do is come and join my next five day challenge, and sign up to my own lead magnet. You can find it at the https://superchargeyourwebsite.com/5-day-challenge/ and it's a five day challenge where you'll learn more about how to get your website seen by your ideal customer. And it's the best way of coming to find out what I'm all about. And you can also just come find me at heyvickijakes.com as well, I live there helping out all of my clients, people in my membership as well. But yeah, if you come and join the challenge, it's the best way to come and find out more about what I do. And you can get some value as well.

Fantastic and if you want to go deeper on this particular subject, and you want to make sure that your freebie has the best chance of being downloaded by the people who need it, we've got an expert masterclass with Vicki waiting for you inside the Do More Than Therapy membership. So if growing an audience is on your business plan this year, the membership really is the place to be. So I hope I'll see some of you there too.

Perfect. Thanks again Rosie.

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