One of the most common questions I get asked by my audience is: How do I find my perfect customer on social media? I see a lot of frustration from business owners who dedicate so much of their precious time putting together beautiful social media profiles for their business, filling it with fantastic content, adding an optin page to build their email list, and then finding themselves confused and frustrated that all that effort isn’t translating into more sales for their brilliant business. You’re doing everything the “experts” say you should be doing to make social media work for you, but it still isn’t.
Please note this post contains affiliate links. Please refer to my disclosure for more information.
That hard work you put in deserves to be rewarded, and it might make you happy to realise that the answer is probably closer than you think. Before I talk specifically about why your optin page isn’t working, and what to do about it, let me share with you one of the best tips I ever read (it came from Russell Brunson, creator of Clickfunnels) about how to attract customers online. It is this:
You don’t need a million sales funnels to make your business a success. You only need one.
So when it comes to helping my customers, the answer to their problem lies in creating (and most importantly, optimising) just one single, very simple but very fantastic funnel. The most critical aspect of that funnel? You’ve guessed it. It’s getting your optin page converting.
What You’ll Learn About Optin Pages – And Sales Funnels – In This Post
In this post, I’ll walk you through the most common mistakes people make when it comes to their optin page. But I’m also going to go beyond that, because a good optin is only going to work if it’s part of a great funnel. I’ll also introduce you to a very helpful recommendation if you are really stuck when it comes to building that one, perfect end to end funnel, and getting that hard work translating into regular new customers.
If you’re completely new to this, an optin means you should be collecting email addresses on a dedicated landing page with one enticing and free offer, one box to enter their email address and one submit button (rather than sending people directly to your website homepage to get lost in blog posts, about pages, contact forms, fancy branding and service pages).
Perhaps you’ve already put together an optin page for your business, coupled with big ambitions and dreams of how rapidly you’re going to build your email list. You stick that optin page link all over your social media profiles: Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook…..and voila, thousands of leads starting signing up to buy from you.Except that last bit doesn’t always happen. If you don’t have any experience in building optin pages (and that’s ok; most business owners don’t), your story might go something like this instead. You stick your optin page everywhere, promote it on social media, you might even pay for ads, and watch painfully over days, weeks (or even months), as you get just a handful of leads sign up, when you were expecting hundreds or thousands.
So what went wrong with your list building efforts?
Maybe you just didn’t get the traffic you expected on social media. But in my experience, the answer nearly always lies in a low conversion rate for your optin page.
My big goal for you by the time you’ve finished reading this post is to be armed with all the information you need to fix your optin page and get a fantastic conversion rate (and plenty of email sign ups too), and understand exactly how that page fits in your funnel to bring you new customers.
Let’s start with a look at some numbers.
What’s a good conversion rate?
You might be thinking: how do I even know if my optin page is converting well? How do I know if my conversion rate is good or bad?
So here are a few figures for you to put it into perspective.
If you are converting under 10%, that’s bad.
10%-20% isn’t great and you should be doing better.
20% is the minimum you should be aiming for. All your optin pages should convert by at least 20%.
20-30% is good. That’s the figure most marketers should achieve with a good quality optin page.
30-40% is excellent. In fact, I’d suggest that although 20% should be your minimum, 33% is really what you should aim for: 1 out of every 3 visitors to your page convert.
40% or more is obviously best, and here’s a fact for you. It isn’t that difficult. I have had plenty of optin pages that have converted at 50-65%. I’ve even heard of some marketers converting at as much as 80%.
So have a look at your numbers as they currently stand. If they are less than 20%, you’re definitely going to learn a lot from this post. If they are between 20-33%, then you’re still going to learn a lot that will help you improve that figure.
Putting those numbers in context
Traffic is expensive. Even social media traffic isn’t free – it costs time if not money – time you could be spending with paying customers. And advertising is incredibly expensive. Let’s say (for simple maths), that you’re running ads at $1 a click. Spend $1000 driving traffic to an optin page that’s only converting at 10% means you are spending $10 per lead. Get that conversion rate up to 33%, and now you’re getting leads at a more modest $3 (which is excellent by the way). I would go so far as to argue that sort of improvement can transform a business overnight if you’re suddenly cutting your lead costs to a third, irrespective of what business you are in.
(Don’t forget, of course, that cutting your lead costs is also half the story. You also need to be converting those leads into customers, which is the rest of the sales funnel jigsaw puzzle, but I’m going to give you some really useful pointers on that at the end of this article).
With that in mind, if you want to improve your conversion rate here are 5 easy steps you can try today.
#Fix 1: Your target market Vs your offer
The obvious one. Perhaps your optin page just isn’t appealing to your target market. Have you really challenged yourself about what you are offering to your audience and whether it’s right for them? It’s not about whether it’s of really high value (which is often counter-productive by the way), but whether it’s of specific value, at that specific point in time, to your audience.
Who are your target customers? What do they desire. If you were to introduce yourself, right now, to a target customer in person and had just 5 minutes to spend with them, how could you best help them in those 5 minutes?
Conversion rates and compelling offers go hand in hand. You have to give some serious thought about who you are targeting, what makes them tick, and what sounds intriguing and valuable to them right now (note: I specifically said valuable to them, not valuable – a 2 page PDF is valuable to them if it contains the right info for your audience).
#Fix 2: Your headline
Not a copywriter? Fear not. Admittedly a great copywriter will do wonders for your headline, but you can do this bit yourself with a little bit of research and some technical savvy.
The problem most businesses have when it comes to headlines is simply not spending enough time writing it. When I say do some research, I really mean take a morning out of your working week and read up on good copywriting, experiment with different headlines, and fine tune your efforts. And as for being technical savvy, by that I simply mean you’ve got tot split test your headline to see which one works the best for your audience (Side note: whatever landing page platform you use – Clickfunnels, Leadpages etc – you absolutely need a platform that offers split testing capability if you want a high converting optin).
# Fix 3: Your promises
By promises, I mean the other copy that appears on your optin page after your headline. What are you promising? Is it interesting? Is it compelling? Think about good headlines you see for blog posts – they always make you want to click through to read the full article, without giving away the whole thing. That’s what your promises have to be. They should entice your audience to want to know the answer.
Promises are also about other things. For example, you might promise that the solution is easy. You might promise it’s a 5 minute fix. Or a 3 step action. Or you might promise that it’s a solution they haven’t heard from before.
(I’ll pause here to say: you MUST deliver on what you promise when they sign up!)
#Fix 4: Your promotional message
Here’s a big one that a lot of people miss. Let’s say, for example, that you run an Instagram ad for a webinar. The webinar is your optin, and the ad promotes the webinar something along the lines of:
My 3-step solution to achieving glossy, shiny hair (anyone know, by the way?)
And then the user clicks on your ad, and they get to a webinar page that says:
Free webinar: find out how to achieve the perfect wedding hair.
What you have here is inconsistency in message between the ad and the optin page, and that will kill your conversions. In the ad, you mentioned glossy hair. You didn’t mention glossy in the optin. Nor did you mention shiny. And now you’ve also mentioned wedding, which you didn’t mention in the ad.
So make sure your ad lines up well to your optin page.
A helpful tip. This is also essential if you are running Facebook or Instagram ads by the way. They won’t approve ads that don’t align with the optin page, and even if they align partially and do get approved, you’re probably going to get a low relevance score (i.e. a low performing, expensive ad).
#Fix 5: Your testing
I mentioned split testing earlier, but here’s a bit more detail if you aren’t familiar with it.
Split testing is the feature that most good landing page platforms offer, and it’s absolutely essential to use this when creating a new optin page.
In simple terms, split testing means creating two slightly different optin pages (for example, they might be identical apart from the headline) and testing them side by side. The software will throw 50% of the traffic at optin A, and 50% at optin B, and once you have enough data it will tell you the winner. You do this over and over until you start seeing an improvement in your conversion rates, each time refining your optin page slightly so you can see if those changes make a difference.
Once Your Optin Page Is Fixed – Do This
Imagine you want to master the art of cooking an amazing lasagne, and so far you have a fantastic go-to recipe for a white sauce. A white sauce might be a key component of a great lasagne, but on it’s own it isn’t enough to guarantee you can cook the entire lasagne perfectly.
The same rule applies to optin pages. Don’t fall into the trap of having a fantastic, high converting optin page, and think that it is going to automatically mean more paying customers for your business. An optin page is a key part of any sales funnel – a really important part – but it’s not the entire picture.
So there we have it. 5 things you can test today to help improve your conversion rate on your optin page. Give them a try – I promise you, they work (but you’ve got to be persistent) and they are hugely valuable to your business – in terms of your ad spend and in terms of how fast your email list grows.
If you have any success with this I’d love to hear from you – drop a comment in below and tell me about your optin pages and how you’ve improved them.
Bonus – Free Sales Funnel Guide
We have a free eBook to guide you through all the steps of setting up a sales funnel from scratch. You can download it by completing the form below:
Love the content, currently working on a page conversion!
I followed your ways and now it’s working thank you! keep up
Wow. Thank you. This is so helpful. I’m not yet a “seasoned” blogger and funnel talk is usually frustrating for me. But here I see some really important things I need to do already. Finally I’m able to understand an adjustment or two that I can do right away.