The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales

by Chris Smith

Never forget that conversations create closings.

Your job on the phone when talking to leads is actually very simple: to be so enthusiastic about the product you sell that you get them over that buying line. Then and only then can you close them. The same drawing also applies nicely to marketing. It's just that you have to get them more excited than the “cost” of them giving you their contact information. Then and only then can you capture them.

Having worked with some extremely talented people during my career, I noticed that the BEST inside salespeople have the following trait: They have a very positive mental attitude. In fact, they have a “black Lab mind-set”—they are happy to see every lead (thanks to Estately CEO Galen Ward for sharing that great analogy with me).

The Conversion Code Marketer's Creed Leads are people too Image is everything Facebook is the Internet Analytics are overrated Every word counts The Conversion Code Scheduler's Creed Every second matters Zero cold calls Human companies win The fortune is in the follow-up Every word counts

The Conversion Code Closer's Creed Yes is not an accident Conversations create clients Dig deep or go to sleep You're in charge Every word counts

Great design builds trust and trust is and always has been why people buy things, online and off. As Zig Ziglar once said, “If people like you, they'll listen to you. But if they trust you, they'll do business with you.”

Because our brains process visuals 60,000 times faster than they do text, a critical component of cracking The Conversion Code is to understand that design, not words, builds trust online.

“Successful landing pages grab attention quickly by matching the promotional copy in the email's call-to-action that yielded the click. Yet 45 percent of the landing pages evaluated failed to repeat the email's promotional copy in the headline.” “Catapulting a clicker to a Web site's home page generally fails to deliver on the promise inherent in the email's call-to-action. Yet 17 percent of email campaigns dumped recipients there.” “Recipients can be taken aback when they click on a link and end up on a landing page without the same look and feel as the email that captured their attention. But three out of 10 marketers risked confusing customers and prospects by sending them to landing pages not matching the email.” “Asking too many questions can lead prospective customers to become wary and frustrated enough that they abandon the process. Nevertheless, 45 percent of landing pages that included forms required more than 10 fields to be completed.” “While the presence of a navigation bar on a landing page can be a distraction that pulls visitors away from the primary conversion goal, nearly seven out of 10 landing pages included them.” “Professional writers know it's a lot harder to write short copy than long. Apparently some marketers are taking the easy way out, since 25 percent of the landing pages reviewed by Silverpop required scrolling through more than two screens of text.”

Here are the nine key elements Kissmetrics identified that make a perfect landing page (with my take on each): 1. Headline: Make it clear, concise, and “coupled.” The headline of your landing page needs to be an extension of the ad, email, or link that brought them to it. If what brought them to the page was an offer to “Get Your Home's Value” or “Free eBook about Facebook Ads,” you would basically want to repeat that as closely as you can with your headline. Remember, you have eight seconds (four seconds less than you had a decade ago) tops to keep their attention. Don't get too cute with the copy of the headline, or the rest of this list won't matter. Figure 1.3 2. Subheadline: With the subheadline, we simply want to continue them down the path the headline started them on. If “Get Your Home's Value” or “Free eBook about Facebook Ads” were the headline, a good subheadline would be “Home Value Report Will Be 100% Accurate as of Today's Date” or “27 Facebook Ads You Can Run Today for More Leads.” 3. Description: Make sure you triple-check all grammar, punctuation, and spelling (Grammarly can help with this if you know you screw up often). This holds true of ALL copy I will cover in this book. Landing page descriptions, Facebook ads (page 48), blog posts (page 21), emails and SMS messages (page 91) should all be looked at with a microscope before being published and promoted. If you want someone to buy from you, or at least pick up the phone when you call, words matter. All...

One of my favorite parts of LeadPages is that you can actually sort all of their landing pages by Conversion Rate. You are able to practically apply lessons that others learned without having to build an ineffective landing page yourself first. Take one of their highest-performing templates from your industry and quickly edit it to make it your own. This does not ensure that you will have success, but training wheels and “big data” can be truly helpful here. You will find that many of their top performers follow most, if not all, of these nine key elements.

Once the headline is nailed, storytelling is a must. In fact, when Alex Turnbull and the Groove HQ team tested introductions for their posts, they found that storytelling led to 296 percent more full-page readers and a 521 percent increase in average time on page than a post without storytelling.

SerpIQ and Medium both released some fascinating and helpful data regarding how long a blog post should be. What they discovered was that longer-form content does better in search engines and social media. The average piece of content that reaches page one of Google has more than 2,000 words! You can also see how the ranking of 1–10 was also nearly directly proportionate to the length of the content.

With social media sharing, one might think a blog post should be short and sweet in order to get shares. Wrong. Look how the word count increasing actually correlates with increased shares on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Do not overthink what your lead magnets should or could be. In real estate, the best lead magnets are listings and home value reports. These are the same things that have always been lead magnets for real estate. It's just that pre-Internet they were dangled as a carrot in print. If you sell loans, the best lead magnet might be accessing today's interest rates or calculating your new lower payment. In the past, leads had to call in to get this information. Moving forward, they may download an app or complete a form online to get it. Either way, a conversion has occurred.

Demand generation, direct response marketing, and social media advertising are the future of lead generation, not SEO.

When I started my first blog, I never once thought about search engines. I wrote only things that I knew my audience would love. Inevitably, much of what I wrote had strategic keywords in it. As an example, if I published a blog post entitled “Best iPad Apps for Real Estate Agents” and then I promoted the article on my Facebook page and to my email list, I quickly found myself ranking for Google searches with the same keywords. Imagine that.

The best Facebook marketers are the ones who are willing to share genuine moments of their lives, the good and the bad. When it comes to Facebook profiles, lurkers lose. Consistency matters. You need to be either semi-interesting daily or really interesting weekly, at a minimum. You can't expect to hop onto Facebook once a month and share what is happening in your life and get any traction or business from it.

Even if you do not use Twitter, what I am really doing here is waking up, reading what I love, and then sharing things I read with those who will also love it. This could be the morning paper or my favorite blog, not just a Twitter list. The point is you are already consuming content every

Posting once a week is not enough, but posting more than once a day is semi-annoying (citing a 2011 Socialbakers study). Best time to post for getting click-throughs is 1 to 4 p.m. (this makes sense as we have gotten some work done, had lunch, and can now check Facebook more deeply). Wednesday at 3 p.m. (hump day, anyone?) was the peak time/day combo. Worst time to post for click-throughs was on the weekends before 8 a.m. and after 8 p.m.

One semi-scientific way I have found to calculate your peak time for posting is to keep an eye on the number of your friends that are currently available on live chat. Take note of the days and times when that number is at its highest and its lowest. This should be a solid indicator as to when the most people in your network would see an update.

We use people's names when addressing them almost everywhere, but we don't on social media. We do it on letters, in emails, and on the phone. But rarely do we say when commenting on Facebook. “Looks like you are having a blast on vacation, Steve!” Compare that to “Looks like you guys are having a blast on vacation!” and you can immediately feel the difference.

Another small thing I do that shows people I am listening to them and that I care is to Like or reply back with a comment on every comment someone leaves on my posts. If they leave an in-depth, well-thought-out comment, I reply in the same vein. If they leave a quick comment, I at least hit Like on it to let them know I read it. Facebook is like tennis: It's pretty boring when only one person is playing.

While Facebook makes it easy to write on someone's wall for their birthday, think outside the box. Hundreds of other people are likely doing the exact same thing. When I see that it is someone's birthday on Facebook, I actually mail them a handwritten note (I love using Bond.co for these). I always include my cell phone and email address below my signature. Time and time again, I get a THANK YOU message immediately upon it hitting their mailbox. I have even seen people post a picture of the card I mailed them.

When you use social media to ask why, it can take deep thought. More thought than most people will give in our microwave-mentality, :08 attention span world. When you ask when, or who, or how many, it takes a lot less brainpower to respond. Best of all, when you ask simple, easy-to-answer questions, you're going to learn interesting things about your network. Zillow does a great job of this with their Facebook business page. Every week, they run a post called “Taste Test Tuesday.” They put two homes side by side in an image. The homes are listed at the same price. All they do is ask which of the two you'd rather have. Countless comments come pouring in. A or B? Yes or no? How many? Not hard questions to answer. On Facebook, the calls to action that work are the ones that play well within their established ecosystem.

What's the 3-3 Technique? Like I said before, lurkers lose. So log into Facebook with an active mentality and a plan. The 3-3 Technique consists of doing these two things without fail: Write on three of your friends' walls each day. Most people use Facebook only as a “one to many” tool. I use Facebook as a one-to-one tool (that many can still luckily see). When you write on someone's wall, they get alerted instantly. They don't when you simply update your status. These are your colleagues, classmates, friends, and family, so it shouldn't be too hard to “drop by” and make three people each day feel special. I will often leave a link to an article I know they will love or sometimes I just pop by and write, “Hope you are well. Let's catch up soon!” Try it right now. I guarantee you will get some conversations going, today. Start three private Facebook chats each day. Again, just updating your status is not enough. People open and read their Facebook messages at an even higher clip than they read their actual email. If you are not using Facebook's inbox you are really missing out. I will usually make the private messages a little bit more about business (without being spammy). I usually just send something like “Hey, I am working on a big project for work—can I pick your brain?” Use these messages to get on the phone with your network! There are about 260 weekdays in a year. With the 3-3 Technique, even though you are reaching only six people per workday, over the course of on...

Even if you do not update your status each day, inevitably your network is updating theirs. One simple best practice for getting your edge rank up and increasing your Facebook presence is to live in the comments. Comment on 25 people's posts per day. I use a Facebook list called my “MVC” (Most Valuable Connections). By taking the time to set them all up on one list, I can see just what they are sharing, which makes commenting much easier and quicker to do. How do you determine who your MVCs are? Ask yourself this question: Of your Facebook connections, who are the 25 percent who matter the most to your business? Put them on their own list and check it like crazy. But don't just lurk! Leave comments. Live in the comments. You should be commenting on other people's Facebook posts 10 to 100 times more often than you are updating your status. Also, with the way email notifications and default settings work, commenting (across ALL social media platforms) is much more likely to trigger a message being sent to them than simply liking their posts will.

Facebook groups are probably THE most underutilized tool on Facebook. I have been an admin of groups with 20,000+ members for years now, and it is a consistent driver of traffic, leads, and sales. You have to think bigger than just a Facebook profile and page (which I will cover ahead). You need to also build a Facebook group around an idea, not around your brand. Our Facebook groups are called Tech Support Group for Real Estate Agents and What Should I Spend My Money On? These topics are related to what we sell, but it was a purposeful decision not to start “The Chris Smith/Curaytor Fan Club.” Don't get me wrong, we do also use a secret Facebook group for our paid client-only Mastermind. But by having these bigger groups that are help focused we get traffic leads and sales from Facebook groups while most companies are ONLY using groups for support and service.

I sincerely recommend that you ask yourself the following question before starting a Facebook group: Will this group be relevant five years from now and will I want to wake up every day and post to it? We felt that agents would still need tech support and still have questions about their spending five years from now, and we know that we will still love technology and helping people, so we did it.

Gary Vaynerchuk calls it “The Thank You Economy.” The more times you give someone on Facebook a reason to say “thanks,” the more likely they are to share your stuff, buy from you down the road, or even refer people to you.

When done right, it becomes a culture. It becomes bigger than you, so make it special. As an example, we have a custom header image, stating our group's purpose, rules, and admins. These small touches can lead to big growth. There are plenty of little things that you can do to make your Facebook group take off: Change the URL of your group (you do this by changing the email address of your group). I'd even recommend buying a unique, non-Facebook URL for the group, and then have it forward to the group page. As an example: WarrenGroup.com is much better for mailers, business cards, and just saying out loud versus having to print or say, “Go to facebook.com/group/7472548.”

I have found that images or custom-designed ad pieces with white/negative space and bright colors mixed in perform great. In fact, the brighter the colors or image, the better the results. Dark, dull images get terrible click-through rates compared to bright, bold images. While analyzing some internal data at Curaytor, I discovered that campaigns we managed featuring professional photos of homes produced a 3x higher CTR versus those using amateur or cell phone photos.

The goal and progression of the C3 Facebook ad funnel are simple. Step 1: Use content marketing to create traffic, awareness, and tracking pixels that trigger more ads. Step 2: Use conversion marketing to better identify who will put their toe in the water by registering and becoming a “lead.” Step 3: Use closing marketing as an attempt to make a sale.

For example: One of my closing ads that performed well when targeting my sweet spot was “We're not stalking you, we just want to talk.” It linked to a tool I use called ScheduleOnce (also known as MeetMe.so), which lets people book their preferred date and time for a one-on-one sales demo (while syncing with most online calendar programs, ensuring it doesn't conflict with my existing schedule). An ad this focused on closing might be a HUGE waste of money if I targeted it at the Magic Million or Chunky Middle, but because I am targeting only the leads in my database who have already shown intent in buying, it works.

Pro tip: Try using multiproduct ads in super creative ways by using a panoramic shot or design elements that work together even though they are on different tiles. I ran an ad where we connected the tiles visually using plus signs and then an equals sign to end the ad, and it got rave reviews and results.

Snip.ly makes it very easy to “attach a call-to-action to every link you share.” Even though you are sharing content from someone else's site, you can drive traffic back to yours using cleverly designed buttons and banners. Snip.ly is like a Hello Bar or Kissmetrics Engage tool, but instead of it being on your website, you can add it to any site! Not only can you drive traffic like this, but also you can strategically place your brand on the most respected websites in the world, for free. The next time you share that insightful article from the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, anyone who clicks it will also see your “ad” (see Figure 5.1). You can even add the Snip.ly plug-in to Chrome so you can do all of this with just one click. Figure 5.1 Another great platform for curating (and benefiting from) other people's content is Genius.com. Originally a website where you could add annotations to rap songs (the original name of the site was actually Rap Genius), the site has evolved and recently become much more useful to marketers by allowing you to “add line-by-line annotations to any page on the Internet.” Imagine reading a well-written summary of your industry's current trends and being able to highlight and add your two cents before you share it. By doing so, the additional insights you added will be highlighted and clickable in the text. Conveniently, you can also add links back to your website, social media profiles, or blog posts inside of the annotations you add.

Here is a quick hack you can do today to start making YouTube a referring source of traffic and leads for your business: Go into your YouTube analytics and sort your videos by the most viewed. Be sure to note the average length of a view on these particular videos. Next, you are going to add what YouTube calls a “card” to the videos at a time interval that is about 25 percent of the average view length. So if I knew the average view of a video was four minutes, I would add the card at approximately the one-minute mark. The idea here is that if you show them the YouTube card (which is really just a nice way to say pop-up ad with a link to anywhere you want) too soon, they won't click it. And if you wait too long, they may never see it. There is no exact science here. Just be sure that at a minimum you are showing the card within the average length of that video's view. Use the cards to link to your lead magnets that are most related to that video's content. So if I had a YouTube video about Facebook ads as an example, I would use a card that linked to a landing page where they could also download “27 Proven Facebook Ad Templates You Can Use Today.”

Here is the nice thing about retargeting and having our Facebook tracking or AdRoll pixel installed on our website and all landing pages: The click is enough. I can drive thousands of clicks from Twitter to an article and couldn't care less about how many I capture while they are there because I know that just based on their visit, a Facebook newsfeed ad and a web retargeting campaign will be triggered. I am especially bullish on Facebook newsfeed retargeted ads. You can set up a retargeting campaign for someone who visits your blog so that the next time they log into Facebook, they could see an ad in their feed that says, “Thanks for checking out my blog. Here is a free download of X that you will probably enjoy, too.” So you'll have cultivated the lead on Twitter and sent them to your site, and their site visit triggers an ad in their Facebook newsfeed and across the web as they browse that links to a landing page. Boom!

I've also found images with quotes over them do exceptionally well on IG and can help increase your follower count and engagement level. Try using a simple free tool, like Pablo from Buffer, or a mobile app, like Over or Retype, to build professional-looking versions of these in seconds.

Today, you can hop over to Medium or LinkedIn and publish a post that can be seen by their readers, not yours. The first time I published a post on Medium, it got over 17,000 views—99 percent of which came from their community, not mine. Of course, inside of the post I had several links back to my stuff, which got me some solid referring traffic. Here's the catch: I studied the Medium ecosystem and thought critically about what I should publish there. I knew my typical “how-to” articles would not go viral. So I wrote a very heartfelt piece about my wife and kids being away for the summer and how much harder that was than not having my phone for a day or two. The Medium community loved it and recommended it, and Medium featured it on their home page and a few other key places on the platform.

There is just something about repetition combined with auditory ads that really make them stick. Sell things in Boston? I am sure there is a HUGE podcast right now with a rabid Boston fan base, and I am also sure they need some sponsors. If YouTube ads are the new lower-cost/results-based television ads, then podcasts and Pandora ads are the new lower-cost/results-based radio equivalent.

For additional insights into using this bridge role and the upside of not making your highest-paid commissioned salespeople call leads and instead spend most of their time on pitching, check out Aaron Ross's great book Predictable Revenue, where he shares how he grew the inside sales team at Salesforce.com to a $100 million a year channel using this same methodology.

Plus, you can increase the percentage of leads you contact from 48 percent to 93 percent by calling six times, not once. Don't call once the first day and again on day two. Call on minute 1, minute 10, minute 30, hour three, and day two, as an example. Meanwhile, the median time for a company that does call back is three-plus hours and 47 percent of companies never even respond, yet we always blame the leads for being “

It's also helpful to know that calling leads during certain hours and on certain days works best (see Figure 6.5). The ideal time to call leads in order to convert them is between 8 and 10 a.m. and 4 and 6 p.m. Calling on Wednesday and Thursday gives you the best chance at reaching someone. This makes perfect sense. You can get someone on the phone BEFORE their day gets going or as it is winding down. You also have a much better chance of contacting someone during the middle of the week than you do on a Monday or a Friday. Basically, when people are driving to or from work during the middle of the week is when you have the best shot!

When I get a new lead through one of our landing pages that collects a phone number, I use an auto SMS with merge codes that says, “Hi [lead first name]. I got your information from [lead source name]. Can you talk now?” We often get more replies to that text than we do opens of our first drip email. Why? Speed matters, so does personalization, plus our inboxes are clogged when compared to our SMS messages.

Instead, craft initial drip emails that are more human, ask for a reply, and sound less canned, like, “I just got your information from Zillow. Is now a good time for you to speak?” or “I appreciate you filling out that form on our website. I know it can sometimes be scary to do that. Is now a good time for you to speak?

Don't think of your new lead drip emails as converters—think of them as conversation starters. They'll ultimately lead to conversions more quickly anyways because conversations are what create closes. Not drip emails.

When I get a new lead, I send them an automated email on days one and two, and then again on days four and seven.

Another solid message to add throughout your new lead campaigns (or to send to all of your old leads all at once) is the “just checking in” email. This one crushes it for us: Subject line: Checking in Body: I was just checking in to see if you needed anything from me today. That's it. I'm not kidding. I have spent hours and hours on longer, more well-written emails that tried to impress leads. They never do better than this bite-sized, conversation-starting approach.

This design-less email ideology even applies to your automated drip emails (covered in the previous chapter) that you will be sending to new leads as they come in.

Remember the study that taught us people have eight-second attention spans? Well, it takes me only one second to look at an email in my inbox and mentally dismiss it as an “ad,” ensuring I would NEVER reply, simply due to the formatting. How about you?