Building A Landing Page Using InstaFunnels
Landing pages are one of the most common things in the digital marketing world. Despite that, there are still a majority of businesses do not implement them and one of the major reasons is that they do not know how to build one. Therefore, I wrote this blog to show you how to build a simple funnel using a software tool called InstaFunnels.
Why Do You Need Landing Pages Or Sales Funnels?
Assuming you already had a business running right now, you constantly have a lot of customers to cater to and fulfil their orders. For business owners which do not have a large capital to hire a lot of people, most of their time is spent on almost every part of their business: Marketing, Delivering products or services to each customer, handling any enquiries (You named it!). In the end, you practically have little to no time for yourself to focus on what matters to you. Furthermore, the cost of hiring someone else is not cheap either.
Instead of doing all the work by yourself, why not delegate some of these repetitive tasks to software tools that can be automated and complete the job even without you being present all the time? This is where sales funnels come in to help you out.
Guidelines
I have created a tutorial on building a landing page using InstaFunnels and split it into 3 parts. You can view them using the YouTube links below.
Part 1 => OptInPage and Pop Up Form
Part 2 => Sales Page and Payment Gateway
Part 3 => Email Automation
The video will cover most of the technical parts, hence this blog will focus more on explaining the concepts behind sales funnels.
Part 1=> OptInPage and Pop Up Form
Opt-In pages are designed to let your prospects get a gift in exchange for their contact information. It is also one of the ways for prospects to get to know you. The gift can be either free or a paid offer at a low price, depending on your purpose for the funnel (offer stacking or upsells after this page). In the marketing world, free offers at this page are usually referred to as lead magnets and paid offers as self-liquidating offers (SLO). You can check out the concept of SLOs in detail by reading this blog.
Here are some examples of lead magnet products or SLOs you can place in your opt-in page. If you have other ideas/examples about it, please feel free to comment below and start a discussion.
- Blueprints
- Webinar sessions (LIVE or recorded)
- Short video courses (e.g. Tutorial)
- Email Swipes
- E-books
- Physical books (with shipping included)
- Interview recordings
- Landing Page/Funnel templates
- Checklists
- Newsletters
- Guidelines
- Small samples of physical products (e.g. health products)
- Case study reports
- Community groups
- Online LIVE events (e.g. Virtual summits)
- Routine plans
- FREE-trial products (e.g. software)
- Consultation appointments (If you have the time to do it periodically)
How about Private Label Rights (PLR) or White Label products?
While those products can save you tons of time in creating lead magnets, you have to be careful when choosing them because not all products created by others are of good quality and relate to what you are offering to the public. Therefore, proper research and offer restructuring is highly recommended to promote your originality and uniqueness.
How should my Opt-In Page look like?
As I have mentioned in the videos, I did not cover the marketing aspects on what you should include in your opt-in page. From what I have learnt and observed from many people’s landing page systems (even going through the funnel myself), a common pattern can be seen.
Depending on where you live, your opt-in page will vary based on the market’s behaviour in reading sales letters and reacting to advertisements. For Western countries, the sales letter that I have read are usually long, However, in Asian countries, the sales letter is much shorter since the people here do not have the patience to read long copies. Therefore, it is crucial to understand your target audience’s behaviour when making a buying decision.
On most sales pages, you must begin with a headline that catches the people’s attention. Your headline must be concise and straight to the point, furthermore building curiosity in your prospect’s mind to encourage them to read the remaining parts of your sales letter. Here are some simple examples for you to create a good headline.
- How To “the customer wants” without “pain points the customer needs to go through” within “certain time frame”?
- Most people failed to “achieve something the customer wants”, here’s why.
- The Top 3 Things/Mistakes People Do In “something the customer is currently doing”.
Nothing makes one remember something better through visuals and animations. Therefore, having at least a video and an image will boost your opt-in rate. There are times where using words to explain why the prospect should buy from you is difficult. An image or even a video can provide a better picture to make the prospect understands your product or service in-depth within a short amount of time. Be sure to also add on reliable descriptions beside your image or video to further clarify any doubts of your prospect as a confused prospect never buys from you.
The next critical thing you need to do is to ensure your landing page loads very fast. Long delays will significantly reduce the opt-in rate of your prospects because they will not have the time to wait for your page to load. To optimize your page, using the most common text font styles such as Sans Serif. Your entire opt-in page layout should look neat and tidy for prospects to easily read it. Regarding button colours, it is common for people to use red as the button’s colour compared to other button colour types.
What information the prospect is looking for in your opt-in page?
When a prospect comes to your landing page either through ads or Google Search, he/she should have a buying intent in mind that you need to fit your products or services to.
As you create your landing page, you got to understand what your target customers are looking for. These are the common things a prospect will try to find on your landing page.
- Your contact information (To enquire more about your products/services)
- Product or service information such as warranty, money-back guarantee, quality of product or service, price (if applicable), how product or service benefits them.
- Special offers/Discounts (if applicable)
Sometimes, the opt-in page can be a paid product instead of a free product, as this can increase the quality of prospects you are getting since they already made a financial commitment to you upfront. One common paid product landing pages will be the “Free + Shipping” funnels. Here are some examples that I find worth to learn from (Free + Shipping Funnels) by Russell Brunson.
What information should I get from my prospects?
Getting contact information from your prospects can be tricky. If you ask for too much information, your prospects will run away as they don’t trust you enough. Therefore, make sure you ask for their contact information with a proper reason. Using the example above, I asked for their email address and name so I know how to address them and send them the gift they asked for on the opt-in page.
It is also common for your prospects to create “dummy” email addresses or even contact numbers (if they have more than 1 mobile phone) as they are aware you will try to get them to buy more from you, which leads to low email open rates. This is very common in Asia countries. As of now, there is no proper way to solve this issue in email marketing aside from leaving great impressions on them upfront or utilizing tools such as chatbots or content marketing.
Part 2 => Sales Page + Payment Gateway
After the user fills in the opt-in form, this will be the page that they visit next. In some cases, if your opt-in page already offered a low-price but high-value offer, this page will act as an upsell page. Otherwise, this page will be the first page that contains a paid offer for the prospect to purchase or to leave if the offer is not the right fit for them.
Similar to your opt-in page, you want your headlines to capture the prospect’s attention so they will read the rest of your sales page. You must mention all the important things the prospect needs to know at the top part of the page as that is the first part they will see after the sales page is loaded.
If you have a lot of information to share with your prospect, a 3-minute video will be a better choice to do so. The moment they decide to click the scroll button (displayed in red in the example above), they will be brought to the bottom of this page where they can see the full offer stack you displayed to them. I will explain them in detail in the next section.
Using this demo case, your prospect is brought to this page after obtaining your free offer. If you want them to trust you and buy from you, this is the page for you to tell them why.
What should you put inside this sales page?
As the sales page is where you build enough trust with your prospects for them to buy from you, they must first know who you are. Depending on your preference, you can start off either tell a story of how you came along in doing what you are doing now, your own company history (if you have one) or case studies of how you help others to achieve the success they deserve.
The next critical part you need to remember will be to address their current pain points on the problem they are facing and how your offer can help them out. This will be further supported with relevant testimonials and track records of people actually using your product or work with you on a service. If you do not have enough testimonials or track records to prove your products and services, it will be highly recommended to collect them first before building your landing page with people you know or meet through networking events.
Based on my own experience in Malaysia, I find it really difficult to get any sales online if I do not have enough testimonials to back me up since the market here tends to be sceptical by default when trying out new products or services. This is because the default trust level of the public is much lower compared to those you have met face-to-face and already building a relationship with them. If your targeted location does not have this problem, then it is a great advantage for you but never abuse other people’s trust by offering something that doesn’t help them!
Coming to the offer, if you just offer your core products or services alone, your conversion rate will not be attractive enough for your prospects to take action now. Sometimes, they may think that what you offer is not worth their time or money. To solve this problem, you got to add useful bonuses to your original offer that will further solve their problems especially the ones that will appear after they get your core offer.
In summary, here is what you should have (the absolute minimum) inside your offer stack:
- Your Main Product/Service
- Your Basic Bonuses (Increase your main product/service’s value and relates to your main offer)
- Your Fast-Action Bonuses (Reward for fast-action takers)
When your offer stack value is high enough, it will be much easier for your prospects to accept what you offer and take action right away.
Once the prospect knows the final price of your offer, you can expect some conversions but not as many as those who further offered a guarantee after that. Guarantees give an impression to prospects that you are very confident in what you are offering and willing to bear the risk on behalf of all the prospects. When the prospect feels that he or she has minimal to no risk trying out your offer, they will not consider much and immediately take action as they know they will have an “escape route” for a refund if the offer does not fit them. Obviously, you want to make sure you avoid refunds as much as possible.
Payment Gateway Choices
There are many payment gateway services around the world. I won’t have much advice on which one you should pick since I do not know where you stay. However, if you are from Malaysia and just getting started, I would recommend Stripe since it is free and you do not need a company address to start off immediately.
If you have a company address and some capital, you can try out some other platforms such as BillPlz, SenangPay or even BoldPay.
Paypal won’t be my primary choice since I do find quite a number of complaints on its services from the reviews and it looks complex to set up for me.
The verdict for this is that you have to try out and see which works best for you. Always remember to read their terms and conditions before you make your decision.
What’s next after they made their payment on this page?
You have 2 choices for this part: either upsell them something else or redirect them to a thank you page.
Upsells can be subjective depending on your business nature. If you are someone from the e-commerce or retail industry, then this may be helpful to you. For coaching businesses, you got to be careful to not clash your upsell offers with your first offer as the products and services offered in this business can be similar and confuse the market.
Otherwise, you can choose to go for a simple Thank You page like the one I showed in the tutorial video (adding your own design of course) should suffice. You can unleash your creativity here by allowing them to check out other things you offer as well.
Note: Remember to always do trial and error for every landing page you make overtime because there are no fixed answers on how the market will react to your landing pages.
Part 3 => Email Automation
Once you have the funnel set up, it is time to integrate some automation on it for product/service fulfilment or prospect nurturing sequences. If you are using InstaFunnels, you can refer to my tutorial videos in this blog to know how to set up the automation process.
How to write a good email copy?
A lot of us who are just getting started may not have enough cash to hire a copywriter to help us out in writing a good sales email copy. Furthermore, writing it by ourselves can be a challenge especially when you aren’t sure how to start.
The best way I can suggest to you is to subscribe to other people’s sales funnel or newsletters. As they also want leads and customers to their businesses, they will definitely have good sales copies for you to refer to. You can start by subscribing to those businesses similar to yours and understand their way of writing the copy. Improvise the copy along the way to suit your case.
Choosing the right email autoresponders
For email autoresponders, there are a lot of options available on the Internet but picking the best one may be a problem. As InstaFunnels is integrated with SendGrid by default when you create an account, I am not that motivated to find another email autoresponder to replace it as this is enough for me at my current stage.
However, if you are looking for one, I have seen a lot of people recommending GetResponse for affiliate marketing. If you are doing other businesses, perhaps you can try out some of the other options such as MailGun, MailChimp or even MailerLite.
As long as your subscribed email autoresponder is able to deliver emails to your subscribers or customers on time, this should be fine and you can focus on other aspects of your funnel or even your entire business and work on them.
Testing tips
After you have your funnel set up, be it following my tutorial videos or you build your own funnel from scratch, never forget to test your funnels mechanics before launching them.
Once you passed the checking stage, you will need to install tracking pixels such as Facebook Pixels or Google Analytics to observe how your prospect behaves in your landing page system. Expect this to cost some money and time to run ads and observe the behaviour, there are times you have to go back to the funnel and make necessary adjustments to improve its performance.
Regarding the tutorial on how to set up the pixels for testing, I do not create the right videos to show you for now. I will paste the video links here once I have published them.
Conclusion
I hope you learnt the basics of developing your very own landing page/sales funnel. In case you are wondering where to go from here, I strongly recommend you to practice frequently by building more of them. Mastery can only be achieved through frequent practices.
If you want to try out InstaFunnels, please click here to get started and experience it yourself today!
Before you go, please do not forget to check out my other publications at:-
Facebook -> https://www.facebook.com/MarketSolversIsAwesome
YouTube -> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgd41HgCVaMaLdvTSfRvwDA?sub_confirmation=1
Spotify -> https://open.spotify.com/show/2hLPUkmed4fMBVsrsJ3Fhe
More awesome tools -> https://www.themarketsolvers.com/softwaretools
If you have any questions, you can leave a reply below this blog or email me at support@marketsolvers.zohodesk.com. I will gladly answer your questions whenever I am free to help you guys in your journey.
Till then, take care!
