Now you can push customers from KickoffLabs into over 180 services including Salesforce, Infusionsoft, Highrise, and Constant Contact!

We’ve done it through a partnership with Zapier. This feature is available to all Premium level customers.

To Get Started

• Create an account with Zapier.
  
• Go to your landing page dashboard inside of KickoffLabs.
• Click on the Zapier logo under “Emailing your customer list”.
• Follow the instructions there to setup your Zaps.

You could even send yourself a text message or IM whenever someone signs up on your landing page.

Why we love Zapier.

Zapier enables you to automate tasks between other online services (services like Salesforce, Basecamp, Gmail, and 181 more).

They were one of the first KickoffLabs customers and it’s great to see how the product has grown up since they started with just a landing page! It’s awesome to now have a partnership with them. It’s the kind of success we love to see when someone starts with an idea on our product.

On my last night I returned to the hotel at 10pm. One hour after cookie time. Only crumbs remained. I joked with the woman working the front desk that “The other guests didn’t even leave me a raison cookie.” Elizabeth asked what kind of cookie I was hoping for. I said chocolate chip.

“No problem. I’ll go whip some up and give you a call when they’re ready.”

Shocked, I went back to my room and started to pack up for an early flight. I was almost finished packing when I realized no one had called yet. I couldn’t be mad… “why would they make cookies after 9pm?”

Then I answered a knock on the door to find the woman from the front desk with two warm cookies and a glass of milk.

This wasn’t just one good employee hellbent on customer service. During the week:

• Someone working on the free breakfast saw me searching for something. I asked if they had a microwave so I could warm up some leftovers. She brought me back to the kitchen, gave me a tour, and warmed up my corn bread.
• I left an email printed out in the business center. They looked up my room number and delivered it. It would have been much easier to have tossed it.
• The pool was supposed to close at 10pm. I got in one night at 9:50. I would have been happy with 10 minutes, but at 10pm someone came by and told me “The door will lock from the outside, but stay as long as you like. Just don’t start a party in here.”

People don’t brag about the level of service that’s written in your company policy. That’s the baseline. They brag about the unexpected. They brag about the tiny moments of joy you create for them. They brag about warm cookies and milk.

- Josh

1. Get realtime alerts when someone signs up.

If you wait a week to get closer to your customers they will have forgotten about you. That’s why we just launched “Realtime” as an option for your status reports.

2. Learn more about new signups!

Now you know when someone signs up, but what do you know about them? Take a moment to learn something about people before contacting them. It’s why we go out and pull all this extra data about your signups.

3. Send everyone a personal email.

One sure fire way to get through to someones crowded inbox is to truly personalize the message. “Hey Scott, I noticed you’re running your own startup…” The information we give you at KickoffLabs makes that possible. Can’t email EVERYONE… pick the ones you think have the most potential.

4. Start a conversation instead of a pitch.

Rather than going straight into a pitch about your service… ask some questions. “What are the biggest problems you’re having today at KickoffLabs?” The more you listen the better your pitch will be.

5. Surprise them with a random act of kindness.

Rather than using your blog and social profiles to pitch your service all the time… try pitching your customers. Even if there isn’t a customer alignment we love highlighting cool pages they’ve built and servies they are offering. They’ll love the shout out.

Thanks,
Josh

P.S. Pamper yourself today by signing up for our FREE course on Landing Pages. We’ve been getting some great feedback about it including:

P.P.S. Thanks Ryan! Everyone should follow him @ryandeiss.

I’ve never met a customer as hard to convert as Gabe. He won’t eat when he’s hungry, and he won’t sleep when he’s skipped his nap and is beyond tired at bedtime. He needs to be sold on the idea. He’s really not that different from most of your customers who clearly have a need for what you’re selling.

But I don’t like ice cream and NEVER want to eat it again

You can’t just tell Gabe that he’s hungry and you’ve made all his favorite foods. You also can’t just tell your customers that you’ll save them 20 hours, thousands of dollars, and get a free prize for signing up.

Those are great bullet points to keep on your page, but they won’t work unless:

• They feel like they can trust you.
• They feel as if you’ve spoken directly to them.
• They feel you are empathetic to their needs.

Emotion trumps logic. Without these feelings, everything else is a meaningless feature bullet that doesn’t exist to them. With Gabe that means getting down on his level, looking him in the eyes, and explaining:

“I understand how you feel. Daddy’s hungry too. Being hungry can make you sad… and I know you don’t like crying. Remember yesterday when you were sad and food made you feel better? Let’s go eat together.”

I didn’t mention the buttery goodness of grilled cheese. I didn’t offer a “FREE” M&M. I didn’t just tell him I’d solve his problem. Creating emotional connections is a basic pitch style with proven effectiveness you can use for anything. You need it in addition to a logical set of value propositions.

What if you pretend they are little dinosaur poops?

It’s hard to predict with Gabe what’s finally going to get him to commit to something. I do know that what works on him doesn’t always work on his friends.

Last night Gabe, again, needed convincing about dinner. We’d already made the emotional pitch and got him to sit down… but sometimes even that can’t convince him to eat his peas and carrots. Then my wife found the hook:

“What if you pretend the peas and carrots are dinosaur poops… and you ate them… and you didn’t tell Daddy what he was eating. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

This pitch worked because:

• It created an association to something we know he likes.
• It created the feeling of exclusivity because of the secret.
• It made him envision having fun eating his peas and carrots.
• He’s two. Customers in that segment think poop is super funny.

You might need different hooks for each customer segment. You may also need one hook to get someone into a free account and another to convince them to make a purchase.

Going to “trampoline land” would be a bad idea for me.

If Gabe doesn’t understand what you said, he believes it’s a bad idea. He doesn’t know what a trampoline is so he doesn’t believe that it would be fun going to a room full of them.

You have to use words and terminology your customers will understand. Realize that you are probably an expert in your field. Your customers know far less about your industry than you imagine. For Gabe, that means selling him on “a room where you can bounce and jump all night long.” That’s something he understands.

Remember that the average adult in the U.S. reads at an 8th grade level. How would you pitch your product to a middle schooler?

It’s time for BIG… TRUCK… RAACCEESSSS!

Gabe craves ritual and consistency. Every night before bed, Gabe gives everyone in the house a truck and a stuffed animal to drive. We have to race two laps around the house… sometimes Gabe takes 3 or 4. Then he’s happy to read two books and generally go to bed.

If we try to skip a ritual, it could take twice as long to get him down to bed. It just throws off his world. Your potential customers aren’t any different. It’s fine to stand out and try new things from time to time, but if you have an e-commerce site selling cat products, people expect:

• Product descriptions and pictures that accurately describe what they are ordering.
• A shopping cart and a clear way to add items to it.
• Trust indicators that clearly state they could return the items, it will ship quickly, etc.
• A chance to review their order before they commit.

They don’t expect blog posts about dogs and a lengthy checkout process. To understand which rituals are important for your business, you need to look at the market leaders and your competition.

E-commerce sites, for example, should just let Amazon do 90% of their usability because they’ve created and tested the online checkout rituals of consumers today. Neglecting rituals will make selling something twice as hard as it should be. Rituals create comfort.

It’s just a big blue truck.

Today we were driving and Gabe asked me: “What’s that truck?”. I explained “It’s a big blue truck. It delivers furniture to people and has a cartoon dog on the side. It looks like a Peterbilt.” I don’t know why I said all that. I thought he’d care. Here was his response:

“Daddy… that’s just a big blue truck.”

That was all he heard and all he cared to know. People have short attention spans. Whether it’s your tagline, the background image, or logo… something is going to grab their attention and that’s all they are going to remember. The rest is fluff when it comes to first impressions.

Tell me about our day, Daddy.

Gabe loves to review everything he’s done during the day. Fun he’s had, lessons he’s learned, etc. In that spirit, I encourage you to:

• Compliment facts and features with an emotional connection that builds trust with your customers.
• Build hooks specific for each of your customer segments. Your hook should make people picture how happy your solution will make them.
• Make sure you aren’t forgetting basic rituals customers expect from a service like yours.
• Use terminology your customers will understand. Don’t try to impress them with your expertise.
• Sometimes it’s just a big blue truck. What do you think someone sees in the first 2 seconds of your landing page?

What have your kids taught you about selling? What parenting lessons could you apply? Feel free to leave a comment below.

- Josh

Recently, we wanted to launch a lifecycle email class called “Landing Pages 107“. It’s an email series that teaches people how to build better landing pages. Think content marketing done with email over 30 days. But we had a problem.

We had thousands of existing customers. This class would be great for them. We needed to make it ridiculously easy for them to opt into receiving the class.

So we built the “Instant Signup” feature for KickoffLabs pages. What it does is enables someone to register on a KickoffLabs page in one click. This link, for example, registers me for the class:

http://www.landingpages107.com/?_email=josh@kickofflabs.com

(It’s OK, you can try it, someone can only be signed up once. )

Then I could use tokens or “merge tags” to generate unique links for people on existing KickoffLabs, MailChimp, or Aweber email lists. So when they receive the newsletter advertising the course they can just click and opt in. It let us make a signup newsletter that looked like this:

Here’s how you would create a personalized link in each Newsletter tool within their designer.

KickoffLabs Emails

http://www.landingpages107.com?_email={{customer.email}}

MailChimp Emails

http://www.landingpages107.com?_email=*|email|*

AWeber Emails

http://www.landingpages107.com?_email={!email}

The safety net we added here was that we turned on double opt in for the campaign. So someone will still have to click approve via email before they are truly added to the class.

To turn this feature on yourself open the dashboard for your landing page and choose “Instant Signup”.

Then enable it and publish the page.

You can test it out with the links provided. If you’re form has other required fields we’ll populate the email address to save the customer time, but they will still have to fill out the other fields.

We’ll do another blog post in the future that talks about lifecycle emails and setting up something just like we did with Landing Pages 107.

Josh

This means that any leads captured with KickoffLabs can be synced automatically with AWeber! This includes their email addresses and any custom form data you may have captured as well.

The real beauty in this feature (besides the great features of AWeber) is just how easy it is to set up and manage.

To see for yourself, log into your KickoffLabs dashboard or check out this short video:

- Scott

It is tempting to think having a website with all of your information displayed will be enough to entice the user to fill out a form or pick up the phone, but this isn’t always the case. This is the place where a landing page is required. Creating a great landing page is a critical step in the conversion funnel. By viewing the page as a speed bump in the conversion process rather than an information dump, you’ll find users will be inclined to move onto the next step.

In addition, you’ll be able to attach ROI measurements to your various marketing campaigns. As you test and refine your campaigns, this insight into their net values will enable you to become more efficient and effective at driving down costs per acquired customer. So how are you tracking and measuring the performance of your landing pages? There are new methods of A/B testing that can make this tracking easy.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B testing is one of the easiest ways to increase conversion rates and learn more about your audience. It allows businesses to test different messages and designs of a webpage to see whether or not it is more effective than the current page. The testing should be random to ensure that a wide range of users get either page “A” or page “B”.

A/B testing also referred to as split testing, starts with a hypothesis of the types of content changes that could impact your conversion rates. For example: Will a download button result in more downloads than a download link? The different web page content, or variants, is configured for a test and traffic is split between the versions. The test results indicate the conversion rate of one version over another and are monitored until a statistically sufficient number of visitors have been included in the test.

There are a variety of tools out there for conducting and monitoring A/B tests. There are two basic types, and some tools provide both: you need a tool that will randomly deliver one version of your page or the other to your visitors. The other tool you need is something to monitor the results for each page (which also keeps track of which page the visitor was shown).

Things You Want to Test

Optimizing the copy on your website is at least as important as optimizing the design, especially if the primary goal of that site is to convert visitors. A pretty design can only get you so far. If you really want to gain new customers, you need to optimize the text on your site to instill trust in visitors and make them want to purchase from you.

There are a ton of things you can test on your site to see what’s most effective. Besides design elements, there are things like headings, calls-to-action, and your specific offers. Proper testing of these things can triple or even quadruple your conversion rates!

Here’s a brief list of the web copy elements on your site you might test:

1. Headline: The headline is what grabs your reader’s attention and gets them to keep reading. Test different wording, as well as different text sizes here, to get the best results.
   
2. Call to Action Text: The exact wording of your call to action can have a surprising impact on your conversion rate. 37signals has done extensive testing of their call to action text, and finally found a phrase that delivered 300% more signups than other versions.
   
3. Call to Action Position: Where you place your call to action can have a huge effect on how well it converts. Test a few different positions (above body copy, beside body copy, below body copy, within body copy, etc.).
   
4. Call to Action Style: How you style your call to action includes whether it’s just a text link or a button, the size, and the colors used. These things should be tested individually for the most accurate results.
   
5. Copy Length/Style: The length and formatting of your body copy makes a huge difference in how many people actually read it. Test out different formats (lists, lots of headlines and short paragraphs, etc.) as well as different copy all together to see what works best.
   
6. Corresponding Images: While not strictly copy, the images you opt to use with your text can have a huge impact on conversions, especially when selling a physical product. Test out which images work best, how many images are optimal, and how large those images should be.
   
7. Different Offers: You may want to test different offers to see which one works best. Try to set your offers up so that they have similar values (to prevent skewed results). For example, you might offer one group of visitors free shipping, and the other group 10% off.
   

A/B Testing Best Practices

A/B testing is an important part of any successful marketing effort. Here are some best practices you should follow when conducting an A/B test.

• Test Early and Test Often: You should run tests as early as possible when considering a new promotional technique or when launching a new product. You want your site optimized as soon as possible, so you aren’t losing sales.
  
• Always Test Simultaneously: Running tests on both variations at the same time is vital, to prevent skewed results based on timing.
  
• Listen to the Results: Resist the temptation to listen to your instincts if the empirical data is telling you different. You’re running controlled tests for reason. If in doubt, re-test.
  
• Allow the Test to Run for Sufficient Time: Cutting the test off early just means there’s more room for error. The same can be said for letting it run too long. Try for a time period of a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on your site traffic (you want a minimum of a few hundred test results before drawing any conclusions, and preferably a few thousand).
  
• Make Sure Repeat Visitors See the Same Variation: You don’t want repeat visitors who saw variation A on their first visit to see variation B on their next visit. Make sure you have provisions in your code to show them the same page until the test is complete. This is especially important if you’re testing different offers, not just different wording.
  

The key to a successful A/B test is consistency and control. You want your data to be as accurate as possible, and that requires careful planning and execution. By following the best practices above, you’ll have a successful A/B test with sound results on which you can base important decisions.

About the Author: Hagi Erez is the founder and CEO of Pluralis. An online marketplace for Landing Page Optimization which has a straightforward offer: let your potential customers optimize your landing page and pay for results, not for efforts (see how it works).

I love making changes to our landing pages and measuring the results. The big challenge is knowing what needs to be changed. For that you need to get people outside of your bubble to give you their feedback and guidance. You know too much. So do your current customers and co-workers.

Feedback from people outside your bubble will drive you crazy, but there is good news. You’ll know what you need to change and the results will demonstrate that. Better yet… there are now several services we’ve used personally to get real feedback that improves our landing pages.

Get your own one way mirror with BetaPunch

BetaPunch is a service that lets you watch people’s reaction to your landing pages and answer specific questions you might have.  We recently signed up with them and had 5 people record a total of 60 minutes worth of feedback while answering our specific questions. I sat there trying to yell through time and screen at my testers… “No, that’s NOT what we do… CLICK THERE… Why don’t you see the button?!?!?” It was our fault. The results helped shape a lot of our recent changes and drove up our conversion rate. I like the service so much we decided to partner up and offer you a special discount:

 Have someone else come up with your A/B tests

We just added integration with Pluralis. Pluralis is a cool new service that enlists a crowd of conversion experts who come up with your tests. You open a contest at Pluralis for optimizing your Landing Page. You receive revised versions of your landing page from many professional optimizers from around the world. You approve the versions that you like the most and Pluralis will test them until a champion is detected – AND – you pay only AFTER a lift is generated!

Get 6 months of KickoffLabs, 3 BetaPunch Reviews, & 50% off your first
Pluralis Contest!

You’ve got less than 5 seconds… Make it count.

The last service we’ve used is FiveSecondTest. You take a picture of your landing page, add some questions, and submit it to testers.  They’ll get to see it for 5 seconds before having to answer your questions. I love this concept because it’s affordable and most real visitors won’t even give you 5 seconds.  It’s great to see what people can take away from your landing page design with a limited am mount of time. It’s also easy to get sucked in as a five second tester… which you can do to earn some free responses.  :)

Thanks,

Josh Ledgard

Founder – KickoffLabs

We’re always editing the copy on our landing pages to see if we can sign up more customers. We test each change against the previous winner to make sure we’re picking the best message. This is A/B testing and you could be doing it right now with your choice of tools integrated directly into KickoffLabs. Read on for tips based on our own experience.

How to do it?

1. Upgrade your KickoffLabs account. 
2. Publish your landing page via KickoffLabs as a baseline.
3. Choose one of our A/B testing partners from your page dashboard.
4. Open your published page for editing on THEIR service to create variations.
5. Paste the code that service provides you into the KickoffLabs dashboard.
6. See what variation converts better!

Test Headlines

Your page may have a lot of copy. Don’t get stuck in the weeds A/B testing minute details. See if radical headline changes speak better to your audience than your baseline.

Test Big Visuals

Do you use big screenshots, a background, or a video?  Try swapping them out. Test a video against screenshots to see what works better for YOUR audience. Remember that standard generalizations and best practices may not work for your customers.

Delete Stuff

You may not need everything on your page. Try removing some copy, images, extra buttons, links to Facebook, etc. If the variation with less stuff works just as well you can spend your time refining the details that matter.

Make it Pink

Does your call to action stand out enough? What if it was hot pink? You may be surprised by what you learn.

Consider the Source

Try tuning your tests to the context of your visitors. Take a look at your referrals and figure out if they are coming from your ad, a tweet, a blog post, etc. Then try and test some messages for those people. BTW – you can create multiple pages on KickoffLabs to use for each source.

There’s really no excuse. Upgrade KickoffLabs now and start boosting your conversion rate. 

Thanks,

Josh

We recently came across two services that let us put together a quality video in a couple of hours and for less than $200!

First, check out the video:

OK, so how did we do it? (and by we, I mean, how did Josh do it?

Tools

1. PowToon – allows you to build a great looking animated presentations.
2. VoiceBunny – Crowd Voice overs – seriously, this exists.
3. Vimeo – Like Youtube… but for profesionals that don’t want ads running before, during, and after their video. Note: Since posting this there have been some suggestions in the comments below about how to make YouTube a better free option.
4. KickoffLabs – We host this video on several of our own landing pages. The method/price is cheap enough we can do targeted videos for each landing page target.

I am sure there are other options out there, but we are quite happy with the experience using these tools. The video is our first attempt at using these services and we already have ideas for things we will change and improve in the future.

Script Building

Even if you aren’t using these tools your video needs a script. We did this ourselves following a simple formula:

1. Discuss the customer problem
2. Offer a solution
3. Explain why your solution is the best

In our case we also tried to answer a common question about the definition of a landing page in simple terms.

Other Tips

• Before submitting your script to VoiceBunny do a rough take you record yourself. This way you’ll know if the timing needs to be changed in your video.
• Cut stuff. We had to cut this down a few times and it could still stand to be simpler. You don’t have time to jam everything in.
• Simple explanations.  You have more context, and know more, about your product than ANYONE else on the planet. How would you explain your product to a small child… or a golden retriever?

Armed with these tips and tools I expect everyone could make their own great product videos… that they publish on targeting landing pages built with Kickfoflabs.