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AMY PORTERFIELD: Five minutes and fifty–six seconds. That's, on average, how long potential students spent on my sales page and my most–recent Digital Course Academy launch. And to give you further context, the launch before averaged one minute and nine seconds. That means people were spending almost five minutes more interacting with and reading my sales page, which means they were spending more time learning about and contemplating enrolling in my course.
Now, let's zoom out even further and compare this to what the majority of digital marketers are reporting for their sales–page sessions. And that's two to three minutes. So I'm going to toot my own horn just a bit and say we've cracked the sales–page code, and now I'm going to spill the beans and share all of our favorite sales–page strategies and tips with you so that you, too, can keep eyes on your sales page and, in turn, increase your conversion rate. Let's do this.
INTRO: I'm Amy Porterfield, and this is Online Marketing Made Easy.
AMY: Two to three minutes. This is the amount of time the majority of digital marketers are reporting for their sales–page sessions. Again, our average came in at five minutes and fifty-six seconds. What if you could keep your potential customers on your sales page longer than the average two to three minutes reported by most digital marketers? This will significantly increase the chances of having a higher conversion, which is something we experienced between my last two launches. And while your sales page that you're using right now, while it might work, what if you could add some bells and whistles to it to increase your session time by three, four, or heck, even five minutes? I think, yes, please. Right?
Like I mentioned, in my most recent launch, we did just that. We added a few fun bells and whistles to better support our customers, increase our session time, and boost our conversions. Our whole strategy was to organize the sales page in a way that gave potential customers visiting it the opportunity to quickly read through it, understand what the product is, and make a decision. However, we also wanted to give enough information about the product for those who wanted to read every single word before making their decision. And because this worked so darn well, I'm sharing it with you.
In this episode, I'll share four new strategies and tools that we used on our most–recent sales page that worked like a charm. I'll also share how you can use them yourself and what tools you may need to accompany them. Stick around until the end and I'll give you your next action steps that you can implement right away. Let's dive in.
So let me first explain and clarify a few things for you to make sure we're on the same page. First of all, when I say sales page, that's the page that you're potential students or customers will land on to sign up for your course or your offer. It addresses the what, why, how, and transformation that your offer or course provides. A session is essentially the time someone lands on your page until the time they leave, as long as they are active. This data is configured by Google Analytics, or at least that's how we measure our stats. I'll touch more on that in this episode. All right. So those are the things to keep in mind as we chat in our episode today.
First up, of the four new strategies we used to keep eyes on our sales page in our last launch, VideoAsk. It's a widget that you can add to your sales page, which allows you to have face-to-face video conversations with your customers. What we noticed is that potential students love having their questions answered by alumni and what we call ambassadors. After all, that personal connection is key, and there's something special about hearing from or chatting with someone who has gone before you.
So how this works is you customize your widget so it matches your branding—so that means you can change the color of it and the look and feel—and you copy and paste the widget to your specific website page. So that's our sales page. And don't worry, you don't have to be a coder to do this. They walk you through it so you can do it on your own and easily. Once it's on your page, your customers have the option of clicking on VideoAsk and asking their question via—okay, get this—text or audio or video.
So let me lay out how this looked on our page. As our potential customers scrolled through the sales page, we had a section that said Chat with Our Alumni Directly. That's right. You can ask questions and hear directly from the people who've created and launched profitable digital courses. And then we have a call to action button that says Chat with the DCA Alumni. Once they click on that button, VideoAsk pops up on the sales page with a video from me. So making that video is something you can do when you customize the widget. In the ninety-second video, I basically explain what they can use this for and how we have DCA alumni ready to answer any questions, whether they be about the course or even if they have a mindset block that they're dealing with right now before they decide to join the program. And again, they can send it via just text or audio or video. One of our DCA alumni then responds with a video. Now, you don't have to have alumni do this. You can do it yourself or have members of your team available to answer questions.
Something fun we found was that many people started with text or audio, but once they received the video from our end, because, again, all of our alumni only answer back with video, they would then start chatting via video. Honestly, this is such an easy and fun way to convert potential students.
So to be clear, someone sends a video, and then someone sends a video back. So it's back and forth. It's not like they're on Zoom together. It's just quick videos or audio or text back and forth. So it's like instant messaging, but you can do audio and video as well.
What was even more fun is that I would jump in when I was available. So someone thinks they're going to talk to an alumni, but I would jump on video and answer their questions when it was appropriate. So that was really fun as well.
So we ended up seeing a 33 percent conversion rate for all of the on–the–fence people who needed to talk through their objections with somebody on my team or an alumni. 33 percent.
Now, let me tell you, VideoAsk works. It's super user–friendly from an admin standpoint. If I can use it, believe me, you can figure it out. And it's really easy from the user–experience standpoint. So we've been loving using it. The best part is that you can use it for free or yearly or monthly. At the time of this recording, you can have up to twenty minutes per month for free or you can pay thirty dollars for one month, up to 100 minutes, and up to 200 minutes for fifty dollars. So it's not a huge investment, especially once you see how effective it is in converting your on–the–fencers is what we call them. But think of it this way. Let's say you spent fifty bucks on this, and you got just one sale of your course—let's say your course was 250 bucks—you use VideoAsk and you got one sale from it. It's worth it. That's why I think it's such a great investment.
Okay. Another thing we did was we included a section with testimonials. Now, we have always included testimonials, but what we did differently was include three or four on the page, and then as they scroll down, it says, Looking for Digital Course Academy Success Stories You Can Relate To? From there, they have the option to look through a database of testimonials that we have broken up into different categories. These categories include business stage, industry results, location, and those categories offer subcategories.
For example, if someone is a personal trainer and they want to read success stories and testimonials from other people in the health and wellness industry, they could go to Industry, scroll down to Health and Wellness and read through those stories. If someone wants to leave their one–on–one client work, they could go to Results and scroll to Leave One-On-One Client Work and read through the stories of students who have successfully done that thanks to DCA.
Now, this does take a bit of time to organize, and of course, gathering testimonials is something that takes time as well. And if you're brand new and it's your first course, you're not going to have that, right? You're not going to have a bunch of testimonials. But if you've been at this for a while, I think this is essential. We found that people wanted to read testimonials they could relate to. Someone who had been in their shoes or in their industry or in their country who has made a digital course, they want to hear about that. And because they could relate so deeply, they were able to find that confidence in knowing that if they sign up, they could achieve results as well. And that's one of the reasons that creating a database of testimonials and including it on your sales page could be so effective for you.
So how we did this is that we included a link to the database, which was housed on another web page. When they clicked on the Call to Action button on the sales page that read Read Student Testimonials, a new page would pop up. The reason this is important is that you want your sales page to stay open so they can check out the database, read some testimonials, and come back to the sales page to read more about your offer or your course and then purchase or whatever their next step might be.
We ended up having more than 500 clicks from the body of our sales page to our testimonials page during our most–recent launch. Oh, and on top of all of that, we had more than 500 people jump to the Stories section of the sales page. So we will certainly be doing both of those again.
Also, if you're wondering how to get more testimonials, check out episode number 370, “Behind the Scenes: How I Collect Money-Making Testimonials.” That will help you with gathering testimonials and make sure you're doing them in a legal way so that you can share them.
All right. Moving right along. The next addition we did this launch was adding a sizzle reel at the top of the sales page. Now, a sizzle reel is just fun to say, but what it is, it's a short video mash up of video clips, audio clips, photographs, music, and graphics that promote your offer. These are typically fast paced and high energy, but it depends on your product and offer. So this is a great feature to add to your sales page for the skimmers and quick hitters. On top of that, it gets your potential customers excited about what you have to offer and helps to minimize the nerves.
So for our sizzle reel, which was just over two minutes, we included clips of me talking about DCA and why now is the best time to create a digital course. And we also included clips from my students talking about their success and why DCA was an integral part of how they achieved that success, as well as still images with text about DCA. We also included some video footage from my live events, and we put this all together to upbeat music. At the very end, we filled up the screen with images of our students and added text that said, “You belong here.” Ah, I just love that so much. And just note that you do need permission to use images of your students from your testimonials, but if you follow the steps I lay out in episode 370, this won't be an issue.
Now, something I want to emphasize is that you don't have to have a professional videographer put together your sizzle reel. Heck, no. You can do that all on your own. Listen, it doesn't have to be flawless or Grammy Award winning. What it does need to do is get your potential students fired up, drive home the importance of your offer, and share what your offer is all about.
Honestly, you could use clips from your Facebook or Instagram Lives if you have any, and you can use images. You could create images with text layovers and just add some music, royalty free, of course. And you can do this in something like iMovie or HitFilm Express or, honestly, depending on your phone or computer, you could use their free program as well. So a sizzle reel is really cool. It is time consuming, though, so again, at the end, I'm going to have you kind of choose the ones that are going to work best for you, so stay tuned.
Lastly, but definitely not least because this was a hot feature on our sales page and actually has been for a couple launches now, is our chat feature. So this is basically that little chat bubble that you see pop up in the corner of sales or website pages where it invites you to have a little conversation with a team member. What we found is that if we can have a live, in–the–moment conversation with someone on our sales page, there's a guarantee that they'll be more engaged with us. We can literally answer their questions in real time. And all of this helps them to stay on the sales page longer because they're actually talking to someone.
While there are many platforms that allow you to do this, we use Beacon—b-e-a-c-o-n—which is a chat feature through our customer service platform, Help Scout. So this starts at twenty dollars per month. And just like VideoAsk, you can use it only during the month of your launch if that works best for you. Also, just like VideoAsk, you can easily customize it and code it right into your sales page and then it becomes a little chat bubble on your page.
So how we do it is that we add a little message that pops up after about twenty seconds of them being on the page. And it has a fun little message that says, “Hey, there,” and then it has a name of whoever on my team is live and says something like, “Josh from Team Porterfield is here. We see you checking out DCA. Chat with us now.” They can then click the Call to Action and begin a live chat with someone on my team, which is really cool.
So to be clear, this feature allows you to not only have a chat bubble on your page, which can sometimes get missed, but also allows you to customize a pop–up message to further engage with them and invite them in for a live chat. So you can do a bubble and a pop up.
Now, I'm going to tell you the stats from our last launch with this feature, and just keep in mind that I have a team, and I've been doing this for a long time. But we had 471 live conversations during my last launch, using this platform, and our average conversation duration was twelve minutes and fifty-eight seconds. Now, some of that would include doing research or the back and forth of having a text conversation that might have been delayed. But that not only helps them to stay on the sales page, it also helps to answer any questions in real time, and it keeps emails out of our inbox so we can be more efficient. So I really want to make that known, that we do this chat feature to, again, keep emails out of our inbox, because if they're in our inbox, then people have to wait for us to respond. And if they're on the sales page, then, let me tell you, they are more likely to buy if they get attention and get their question answered.
Now, at this point you might be saying, “How is that different than VideoAsk?” It's very different, actually. So this chat feature is like a real–time conversation, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, like, right now, in this moment. And it's just text. So a lot of times people say, “Well, when does the course actually start?” You send them a quick date. But VideoAsk is more of a conversation that is, I would say, it's a richer conversation, and VideoAsk could go on for even a day or two sometimes, where someone sends a video and then my alumni sends a video back, and that person might not see that video right away because it's all through email. And so when they see it, then they'll respond back. So it's a richer conversation. It's more personal. The person doesn't feel rushed on a chat. So it's just a preference.
So the chat is just a bubble that pops up. VideoAsk is something that you'll basically find in the middle of my sales page saying, “Do you want to talk to an alumni?” The chat is just you're going to talk to someone on my team, usually really quick. I know the twelve minutes seems crazy, but sometimes—you've been on chat before, where you ask a question, and then you get your answer, and then you don't close the box down, and then you have a question maybe five minutes later and you jump back in. That could attribute to the long conversations as well. So I feel like I wanted to share that number because that is the number we got as average. I think it’s a little misleading. I really like chat because the question and answers is super–quick back and forth.
Okay. I'm going to switch gears just a bit because I want to give you one more little nugget that you might find really valuable. Now, you may have heard me talk about using a short sales page and a long sales page in the past. And we also saw a significant uptick in how long people spent on our short sales page. We went from an average of one minute and forty–two seconds to an average of six minutes and fifty–nine seconds with our latest lunch. Pretty incredible, right?
But here's something you may not know. We only show our short sales page to those who have attended my masterclass—actually, were on the masterclass with me. And that's because when they're on my masterclass, they're already warmed up. They've already heard my pitch. They've already gotten so much detail. So while we still offer the bells and whistles that I shared with you in this episode, we minimize in other areas of that sales page when they're considered warm leads, people that just got off a masterclass. So on a masterclass, I'll say, “If you're ready to enroll, go to this link to sign up.” It takes you to an abbreviated, shorter sales page, but we still included these bells and whistles that I just went over.
That being said, we do link the long sales page up everywhere else. So we use our sales page in all the emails we send out after the webinar if someone didn't buy. But if you're on a webinar and I'm linking you to a sales page, you're going to an abbreviated sales page. Something to think about because people are ready to make a decision, so give them just a shorter sales page so they can make that decision quickly.
All right. So there you have it.
Time for your action steps. First of all, keep in mind that your action steps are going to look very different, depending on how far out from a launch you are. If you're a week out, you may have time to utilize just one of these. If your months out, you may be able to work on and implement more than one. And if you don't have a set date for your launch, you can keep these in your back pocket for when you're planning for your next launch. So identify how many you can realistically, both time wise and financially, commit to at this time. Depending on your budget, maybe you just start with a sizzle reel, and if you can swing it, try VideoAsk, which was huge for us. But decide how many you plan to use, and start planning things out. Decide within the week and make it realistic.
If you're more advanced and maybe have more financial resources to put toward your sales page, start putting time in your schedule to work on each one. For example, start devoting time to collecting testimonials slowly over time, or pulling clips for the sizzle real. To take it one step further, create a project plan for one or two of these strategies leading up to your launch. and start chipping away. I know you'll be glad you used these strategies and see that the time people hang out on your sales page is going to skyrocket.
Thanks so much for joining me today. I'll see you next week, same time, same place. Bye for now.
