Send great newsletters to follow up after a great landing page

October 9, 2012 kickofflabs — No Comments

They’ve forgotten about you

You got them to your landing page. You got them to sign up. You even got them to buy something! But now they’ve forgotten about you and found another solution.

Don’t let this happen to you. Start sending great newsletters today.

1. Add context.

Does your subject or for preview line remind customers who you are? In the paragraph above I’ve reminded you about landing pages and newsletters. Nothing is as obvious as you think.

2. Set a goal and make it obvious.

Most people will only take one (if any) call to action and click on one link from a newsletter. What do you want that action or link to be? Sharing? Purchasing? Is it obvious?

3. Teach to solve problems.

Your customers have a problem they need to solve. Give them part of the solution in your newsletter. It could be complimentary to your product or something that teaches them how to use your product in new ways. Even if you haven’t launched yet you could be solving their problems today in a way that makes them grateful and keeps you in their heads.

4. Use KickoffLabs and MailChimp together

We love our own auto-responder and newsletter features, but we also love having those monkey butlers at MailChimp deliver mail.  We just launched a HUGE update to our integration with MailChimp. It’s a great integration that literally takes only two clicks to setup.

  • You can now decide what type of MailChimp email is delivered (double-optin, welcome confirmation, or none) for both your existing sign-ups and future sign-ups.
  • Our awesome KickoffLabs custom form data is now automatically sent to MailChimp for each sign up.


Learn more about this via our blog and video demonstration! 

For more tips…

Josh Ledgard

Founder – KickoffLabs

How to create the best online forms for your landing pages

October 3, 2012 kickofflabs — No Comments

Most online forms suck

You’ve seen them. Most online forms are ugly, too long, don’t offer any incentives, and make it nearly impossible to find the call to action. Your form could be different if you follow these steps.

1. Apply the ten foot rule.

When you’ve finished creating your form stand up and walk back 10 feet from your computer. Does the form stand out? Do you know where you would click to submit it? If not then you need to work on the design.

Our pages are designed to convert. We see what works across thousands of landing pages and optimize our landing page designs based on that data. And we still let you make the call to action deep purple. :)

2. Only capture information you’ll really use.

Are you really going to change your approach if you know the customer is 25 years old, likes chocolate sorbet, has 4 kids, and prefers the color blue? If so, then collect that data in the form. Otherwise you are wasting the customers time and lowering the number of people completing your form.

We set ourselves apart here by going out and finding magical customer data that gives you insights into your lead’s social profile, age, location, and even profession without having to ask.

3. Offer signup incentive.

Products really don’t sell themselves. You have to sell people on giving your their contact information by giving them something in return. Use your thank you email to give out exclusive free tips. Offer anyone who signs up this week a 75% discount.

Your probably more creative than us so I expect you’ll come up with a great incentive that’s aligned with your business.

4. Offer rewards for sharing.

This is the “second conversion” most people forget. When someone has been convinced to sign up you now have an engaged customer. Now is one of the best times to ask them to share your signup incentive. You’ll get more bang for your buck.

We make this dead simple. Once someone submits any KickoffLabs form we present them with a second call to action. It’s one that most people forget. “Hey, you were interested in this. Tell your friends. “ We also make it easy for you to run a contest to that really rewards your influencers.

5. Learn something. Then learn something new.

You should take this opportunity to answer a question that will help you shape your business. Only ask one extra question at a time. Make sure it’s a question you can’t get answered any other way. Once you’ve gotten a general consensus then remove the question or replace it with a different one.

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Mo (MailChimp) Monkeys

October 2, 2012 Scott Watermasysk — No Comments

About 8 months ago, we released the initial version of the KickoffLabs MailChimp integration.

This week, a major upgrade to our MailChimp integration has been released.

  1. You can now decide what type of MailChimp email is delivered (double-optin, welcome confirmation, or none) for both your existing signups and future signups.
  2. Our awseome KickoffLabs custom form data is now automattically sent to MailChimp for each signup.

These changes put you in complete control of the MailChimp integration and better enable our customers to leverage the power of MailChimp while still taking advantge of KickoffLabs simplicity and ease of use….and of course it literally takes just two clicks to set it all up.

Or to put it another way, Your email marketing campaigns just got even easier.

We made a quick video for you.

Be sure to look out for more awseom integrations like this in the coming weeks.

The best landing page lead capture forms money can buy!

September 24, 2012 kickofflabs — No Comments

One of the best features in KickoffLabs 2.0 are the updated lead capture forms. Lead capture forms are used to collect customer data on your landing pages. These forms can be used as a part of your pre-launch strategy, to gather customer feedback, generate sales leads, or as contest entry forms.

1. Click and drag form design

Our goal was to make it simple enough for anyone to design great looking forms without needing to know anything technical.  Just open your landing page editor and click over to the form tab along the top.

Field Types

Today, from the form tab, you can add the following field types:

  1. Single Line Text – Often used to capture shorter text like someones name, phone number,  or part of an address.
  2. Paragraph Text – Used to collect general comments or longer form text.
  3. Choose from a List – Ask your customer a multiple choice question such as “Male or Female”.
  4. Checkbox – Do they want to be included in your distribution list? Are they over 13 years of age?
  5. Email – We always ask to capture this with your form so you can get in touch with them later.

Field Options

These options are commonly exposed for new form fields.

  • Name – This is often used as the label above the field.
  • Description – Typically used as the placeholder text or additional form hints.
  • Required? – Does the user HAVE to fill this field out?  By default only email is required.
  • List Choices (Only for lists) –  The list of choices presented to the user in a dropdown.

Re-Ordering Your Form

You can change the order of your form by simply dragging and dropping the form fields to the desired location.

You can also use the edit and delete buttons as shown to, well, edit and delete form fields.

2. Changing call to action button text and color.

It’s critical that your call to action button stand out next to your form. The button text and color are typically exposed by your landing page theme. You can adjust this to see what works best over time.

3. Making your lead capture form viral

One of the things that sets Kickofflabs apart from the online form competition is that we give you the tools to encourage customer sharing. Once someone submits your form we present them with a second call to action… one that most people forget… “Hey, you were interested in this so you should tell your friends. “

This feature gets you more bang for your buck since customers will be sharing your landing page with their friends.  We also make it easy for you to see who is really driving the most additional leads for you. This way you can run a contest to that really rewards your influencers.

4. Learn more and ask less

The shorter the better. If the information isn’t critical and you aren’t going to really use it then you shouldn’t have people answer the question. We set ourselves appart here by going out and finding magical customer data that gives you insights into your lead’s social profile, age, location, and even profession without having to ask.

5. View, push, export, and leverage your lead data

Within Kickofflabs you can always view your latest signups or send them all a newsletter. But we know that you may want to leverage your own CRM or email list management tool.  Today we let you:

  • Export all your signups and custom data to a spreadsheet.
  • Setup a Webhook that posts the lead to a URL.
  • Push all your signups to MailChimp.

And we’re just getting started.  Stay tuned for Aweber, Salesforce, and other new integrations coming soon.

Bonus: Change themes or embed your forms

All of our landing page themes today support custom forms. This means you can find just the right style for your customer set.  Our landing pages (and therefore forms) can also be emdbedded into Facebook or your wordpress site. Just follow the steps from your dashboard or contact us for help!

What do you think?

Have you had a chance to play with this feature? How could we make it even better for you?

iPhone 5 – Learn marketing from todays most popular landing page

September 13, 2012 kickofflabs — 12 Comments

I love dissecting how the best companies in the world entice customers online. You can always learn something from the big guys because they have the budgets, research, and customer volume you dream about.

You know Apple and Amazon don’t slouch when they design these pages.  When you don’t have the time or money to research the best layouts/copy/presentation… draw your inspiration from them.

What you are going to see here is a great information layering approach that’s designed to suck you in and sell you at every turn.

The Apple.com Home Page

We’ll start before you get to the iPhone’s landing page.  Apple knows that they need to:

  1. Warm people up to the idea of a new phone.
  2. Seed traffic from another popular source.

They do these things with their launch announcement video and making the ENTIRE Apple home page a simple iPhone 5 call to action.  Check it out here:

What you see demonstrated here is:

  1. A big, simple call to action. Every item on this page is a click target that takes you to the iPhone home page. At the top layer Apple’s goal with this content is to get you engaged with it. They want you to click through the layers and become more drawn in with each passing minute until you give in and buy one.  You’ll see this pattern repeated throughout.
  2. People/faces. It’s not just a phone. There are people that stand behind it that you can see demonstrating the product. The faces on the home page (and throughout) are absolutely intentional.
  3. Short and long form videos.  Whether you want to watch the entire event or just a quick teaser video… they’ve got you covered.
  4. Showcase the upgrade. Since this phone is nearly identical to the 4 when it comes to design details they want to make sure you get the impression that it’s taller.  Having the phone at this angle subtly gets that across.

The iPhone 5 Home Page

This page is made for the 90% of people that just need the brochure. It’s three times longer than the Apple home page, but almost exactly three times shorter than any of the detail pages.  Not to short to skimp on details, but not too long to bore most people.

Here is what you can learn:

  1. Repetition works. You need to hit home the basic selling points over and over again. This page expands on the selling points, images, and videos from the home page and adds on another layer of detail. For example: The top level menus are selling points that are repeated in the videos, this page, and then on each of their more detailed pages.
  2. Buy actions stand out at the top and bottom. There is a unique color used on the buy button on top and the layout of the buying options on the bottom help them stand out.  All roads lead to your credit card. :)
  3. Leading with the differences again. The first thing highlighted is, again, the reasons you’ll like this phone over your existing one. Your phone is now crap compared to the “All new design!”
  4. Image details accentuate the text. I love how the wireless bar is angled at you in the “Ultrafast Wireless” section. It screams “LOOK 5 BARS OF LTE” to your subconscious.
  5. Emotion paired with tech stuff. It’s not a chart paired with “Powerful A6 Chip” to show you how powerful it is. This tech detail is paired with a shot of people capturing a happy memory (cruising on bikes – hint – speed) with iMovie… which is, I’m sure, faster because of the A6 chip. So your either a techie reading the details or the average person saying “I can make movies on my phone!”… and they’ll all be of happy times!
  6. More giant calls to action. Just about everything on this page is clickable to get you to the next layer of the onion. You don’t hunt for links… you just click and learn more.

 

A feature details page

The rule of three’s is in full effect here. The detail pages all average 3X the scroll height of the primary landing page. There is a lot of scrolling to be done on these pages that have added more details.

They act as a “catch all” for everyone that wants to find that one feature they need.

 

This page caries forward the best practices from the main landing page and adds…

  1. The guarantee. The bottom of this page lets you know that you’ll be covered.  They offer protection on your investment.
  2. More happy faces. I just have to call them out. People sell. I can tell you from our own experiments that people sell more than cute dogs.
  3. Cross promotion. This product works well with our other products. Don’t own them? You should check them out too. :)
  4. Added details to repetition. The same selling points are here, but now they’ve added details. For example: Instead of one paragraph about the A6 chip you get three here.
  5. Brand alignment. Note the passbook image that’s designed to Align Apple’s brand with other popular brands you might have heard of.  These partners were not chosen randomly and serve to to make you realize that Apple plays nice with other people you may have heard of.
  6. Visual page breaks. These let you know where you could stop reading each section. It’s important for long form content. I love the use of the icons and horizontal lines that are used to make you pause while drawing you into reading the next section. This is really like 5-6 full pages of content here.
  7. Education is critical to advertising. Apple uses these ads to education you. The icon for the map section is the same icon used on the phone. That may seem obvious… but it helps teach you to look for that map icon when you buy your phone.  The parama image shows off the app. From that image I know what it is AND how I’ll use it.  I’ll be more comfortable when I get my phone and therefore happier with it.
  8. The face of the phone builds trust. Mr. Ive is the man who stands behind this product. He’s real and you can watch a video of home. It’s building trust. This wasn’t some design by committee thing.
  9. Simple numbers paired with visuals and text. If you have to use numbers to sell then you need to pair them with a simple explanation and a visual to demonstrate the point.
  10. Make public data yours.  The chart in the “Ultrafast” wireless section is great. They didn’t have to generate these numbers. They didn’t invent the technologies. Putting this chart on this page, however, makes you think that the iPhone is light years ahead of everyone else.
  11. Respond to common fears.  I’m still worried that I really won’t like a bigger screen. But, here they are, telling me that it’s OK the screens taller. I’ll still be able to hold it in one hand and type just fine.

To Recap

What you’ve seen here demonstrates the following best practices.

  1. Information layering. Start with the least ammount of information possible required to sell someone and then add additional layers that make the case to customers that require more selling.
  2. HUGE call to actions.  Each page is designed to suck you in further and they make sure you can’t miss clicking on a link for more information.
  3. Happy faces sell. The closer you can integrate the happy faces into your product be better. Faces can also be used to build trust.
  4. Align your text, data, and visuals to be all saying the same thing. Don’t use random images to prove a point. They should build on the text.
  5. Repetition is key. What seems obvious to you needs to be beaten into people with less context.
  6. Educate. The best ads do this in a way that makes you comfortable AFTER your purchase.
Can you make a better landing page?  What would you change about these Apple pages?
Josh Legard
Founder – KickoffLabs

PS: A lot of people told us they also liked our related post “How to create a billion dollar landing page like Instagram“.

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KickoffLabs 2.0 launches with custom forms, new themes, and a new designer!

September 11, 2012 kickofflabs — No Comments

In June 2011, we launched KickoffLabs. In our first month, we made $10 and signed up only 30 customers. Things felt rather bleak, but we doubled down on those early adopters and started delivering on their feedback every week.

Fast forward one year. In the last month, we passed the 10,000 customer mark, saw the 500,000th lead generated from KickoffLabs, and passed 600,000 visitors to the pages we serve for you! We’ve decided again to listen to our customers and deliver on your most requested feedback.

Custom Online Forms

Go beyond collecting email. Learn. Want to ask your customers how they found you, what smartphone they use, or even just their name? Simply click, drop, and drag your way to awesome online forms inside any of our templates. Learn more…

New Landing Page Designer!

We’ve made landing page generation even simpler while adding options to upload your own image assets, insert videos, change the page layouts, use tiled background images, and much more.

Support for private page drafts and versioning

Now you can work on a private draft of your landing page while an existing version is published. Or simply keep your page private until you are ready to publish it!

Direct access to HTML and CSS editing

You either like sticking to the script or you want to get your hands dirty. Now you can. Click over to HTML and edit away. We’ve provided a handy guide for the technically inclined. If you’ve edited WordPress or tumblr themes, this will feel very familiar.

New Landing Page Themes!

Our existing themes may have been great for quick and dirty launches, but what if you want to promote your mobile app, feature a video, add a slideshow, or sell something? Now you can. Today you can start from one of 13 great themes including…

Themes for mobile apps…

Themes for selling…

Video and slideshow themes…

 

And much more!

We’ll be going into more detail here on our blog over the next few weeks, but in short…
We’ve improved page load performance significantly.

  • Collect stats and custom forms on your hosted pages via our API.
  • User merge tags in emails templates to use a customers name or custom theme data.
  • Check out our radical new electric blue color palate.

Login and check out the updates today!

We’re pretty excited about this update. We’re delivering on your most requested features, making a simpler experience, and setting ourselves up to deliver more value on a regular basis via new themes and app integrations that are coming soon. We’ve already added one since 2.0 went live!

Thanks,
Josh and Scott
Founders – KickoffLabs

How to get your first 989 customers

June 7, 2012 Josh Ledgard — 1 Comment

I had a lot of fun doing this Mixergy class so I decided to create a public talk out of the content. Last night I presented “How to get your first 989 customers” to a great group at the EastSide Incubator.

The video has been posted here:

and the slides are here:

Getting Your First 998 Customers

It feels good to give back a bit of what we’ve learned at KickoffLabs over the last year.
Enjoy!
- Josh

Introducing Magic Contact data for KickoffLabs Landing Pages

April 24, 2012 Josh Ledgard — 3 Comments

Magic contact takes customer email addresses and fills in missing data such as Twitter names, Facebook profiles, biography, current employer, and even their full names.

It’s magical! You no longer have to ask busy customers for twenty peices of data they are going to lie about anyway. This data is available for the majority of your recent signups and you won’t find this combination anywhere else.

Actual Magic Contact Customer Data!

(Most names changed to protect the innocent.)

Discover Influential Customers

In addition to magic contact you can now sort customers by their influence to your business. The combination contact data and influence sorting helps you learn more about and create stronger connections to your most valuable customers. Check it out today by viewing your signup reports!

How do I see this cool stuff?

The most influential view is available to everyone by viewing the signup reports on your landing page. Magic Contact data is only available to paying members with premium or max plans. So upgrade today if you haven’t already. :)

Thanks,

Josh & Scott – Founders of KickoffLabs

NOTE: Magic Contact data is only available on your customer signups that have occurred since last week. If you’d like us to fill in the missing data on older emails in your customer list reply to this mail and we’ll be happy to help.

How to create a billion dollar landing page like Instagram.

April 9, 2012 Josh Ledgard — 10 Comments

Instagram just sold to Facebook for 1 BILLION dollars. I’ve captured their landing page at http://instagram.com so it can be studied further before Facebook gets their hands on it.  What makes this the perfect landing page for a billion dollar company?

Lets walk through the image I’ve marked up here:

(Click for full size version)

Starting from the top left corner where most users eyes will go first…

1. If you can highlight a great price… do it.  Who doesn’t LOVE free? Right away this says “Anyone can join this party”.

2. A great visual that answers “what” questions.  A phone with rotating images of the app. Says right away that you need a smartphone and that this is an App I’m selling you on.

3. Memorable logo that helps explain the product.  You’ll notice that everything on this page is designed to help explain the value proposition… right down to the logo. It’s a straightforward old-timey camera with some color for flare.

4. A tagline that sells their mantra or vision.  You’ll see the words “fast”, “Beautiful” and “Fun” several times along with similar words like “Easy” and “sharing”.  It’s straight out of the Steve Jobs school of presentation by repetition.  They took their vision and explained it 4-5 ways on this page.

5. A concise product description that both sells AND educates.  Nothing worse than not knowing what you are going to get. This description is also your help manual that tells you exactly how you use the app.  Again… a page straight out of Apple ads that educate as well as sell.

6. Clear calls to action for downloads.  Not only do the App store logos stand out because they are the only non-colorful things on the page… the pricing tag and images on the phone will also lead to a download.  It’s hard to click on this page and NOT end up downloading the app. :)

7. Repetition of the price… “Did we mention it’s free”… in case someone read that far.

8. It’s all above the fold. In fact the very bottom of the page doesn’t go more than 600 pixels from the top.  Enough for grandma to still see most of it with 6 different browser toolbars installed on her Windows XP netbook.

9. Great examples.  The words “Meet Instagram” are right next to two great example screenshots. Again… another way to focus on what you get out of the product.

10. Links for the 1%. There are links at the bottom for the 1% of people that need to know more.  But they don’t take up any of the primary real estate. You have to work a bit to find them.

I’m not saying you can’t sell for 1 billion dollars without a great landing page… but it sure helps. :) What’s great about this example is that on the surface it looks like they skimped on their web site. But the reality is that they:

A. Didn’t need a great web site because their focus was on mobile.

B. A lot of effort clearly when into this landing page through thoughtful copy and design.  The same attention to detail in their app is excuded in this “packaging”… yet another page out of the Steve Jobs era Apple.

So, go on, go forth and create the next billion dollar landing page.  But when you do… remember that KickoffLabs only asks for a small fraction of that valuation. :)

- Josh

PS: If you’d like your own billion dollar landing page… We’ve got you covered with our “Instabillion” landing page theme.  

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The Second Conversion Most People Overlook

March 29, 2012 Josh Ledgard — No Comments
megaphone

The Second Conversion

Okay, so you got someone to your site, they signed up for your beta, and they’ve even started using it. Woo hoo! Success, right?

Hold your horses, cowboy…

While it’s certainly good that people are taking an interest in your start-up, you’ve overlooked a critical element of the conversion process: Getting referrals.

Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing available to you. Think about when a friend or colleague whose opinion you value recommends something to you…

How much more likely are you to act on that recommendation? It could be for a new movie, a local restaurant, or a car dealership. That third-party endorsement from a happy user you trust carries a lot of weight.

It’s the difference between a runaway blockbuster smash hit and a fizzer that spends one weekend at the box office before being quietly shuttled to DVD purgatory.

I don’t want that to happen to your great idea so…

What are you doing to get the users of your product or service telling their friends?

Here are seven tips to increase the likelihood of your users putting the word out on your behalf.

1. Make it easy to share

You need social share buttons in obvious – but non-obtrusive – places and the actual process needs to be smooth as silk or it’s all over. No one is going to jump through hoops to tell the world about you, but if you’re truly remarkable and you make it easy for people to spread the word, they will!

2. Create a “mission” your customers can get involved in

We all yearn to be part of something meaningful, worthwhile and bigger than ourselves.

So let’s say your goal is to get 10,000 customers by next month. Tell your customers; if they like you and the way you’ve positioned your cause, they’re very likely to help you achieve your goal – or at least go a long way to doing so.

3. Send a personal thank you note

At the very least, email anyone you notice sharing the love and genuinely thank them! If you have their mailing address (because they’re a customer), hand write a personal note from you, the Founder, and pop it in the post. Do you think that would have a positive impact?

4. Find out why people aren’t sharing your message

Reach out to your first 1,000 customers personally and find out if they’ve told anyone who might be interested. If not, find out what it would take to get them to do so.

This might sound rather tedious, but you’ll learn very decisively what you need to do (or do better) to earn this kind of recommendation organically. The fact is, most of what you do to get your name out there will fail whereas we both know personal recommendations work. So tedious it might be, but it’s also a very effective way to uncover things about your market you probably don’t yet realize.

5. Reward referrals resulting in conversions

Hundreds of thousands of companies use refer-a-friend rewards programs and you can, too. An example is how Netflix adds free months to your account when you sign up a friend using your unique referral code.

Yes, it requires specialized programming skills – or the willingness to outsource the job to a reliable web developer – but the return on investment could potentially be very large if a lot of people get on board and start recommending your product or service.

6. Run a referral contest

A variation of the previous tip is to hold a tell-a-friend contest, where the customer who generates the most referrals (paid or trial, that’s up to you) within a designated time period wins a prize. Make the prize relevant to your customers’ interests as well as worth the effort. A common prize for these kinds of competitions at the moment is an iPad.

7. Don’t stop selling!

Be sure to keep extolling the benefits of your product or service to your existing customers. Remind them every week what tremendous value they’re getting and all the ways their life is now easier as a result… “And, uh, by the way, shouldn’t you be telling all your friends about this unparalleled awesomeness? Yes, you’re right; you should! Here’s how…”

 

So the basic thrust is to focus on treating your first wave of customers like royalty, making sure they receive truly remarkable service and reaching out to them personally; make it easy for people to share the message; remind people regularly without being obnoxious; and then start working on how to scale that and amplify your communication using the voice of your happy customers.