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Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

Posted By Guest Blogger 6th of August 2013 Writing Content 0 Comments

This is a guest contribution from  Stephan Spencer.

Web entrepreneur and founder of hugely successful ShoeMoney Media Group and the Shoemoney blog, Jeremy Schoemaker has found incredible success in the use of long form sales pages. Although at an early point in his web-marketing career he questioned the effectiveness of such approaches, once he actually started using long form sales pages to market his online products, he was amazed by their success.

Surprisingly, they work.

People actually take the time to read the page and become familiar with the product you are offering. And if you’re still hesitant to believe this, consider that Jeremy uses these pages to generate well over a million dollars in annual infoproduct revenue.

The long form sales page alone won’t necessarily make you millions, but the use of Jeremy Schoemaker’s personal Ninja tricks to optimize your page will take you well on your way to online riches.

Jeremy Schoemaker’s Ninja Tricks for Long Form Sales Pages

Ninja Trick #1

Pre-populate fields on your sales page 

Pre-populate your sales page using information you have already gathered from people visiting the site. This will shorten the time it will take to fill out the form and decrease the amount of effort visitors to your site will have to put forth.

Some information you can gather from affiliates, like the visitor’s email. The affiliate will encode it, you can decode it, and then on the actual form when people submit it, you can pre-populate their name and their email. You can do that for all sorts of information based on whether the user sends that information.

You rarely see pre-population in action, but it helps conversion incredibly because of the amount of people that type in their email or name wrong or make an error filling out the form for whatever reason.

In addition, you can use geo-targeting data to help you pre-populate location-based data. You can fill in the state they live in and the city for the most part. By the time you are done pre-populating fields for the visitor on the form there are only a small number of boxes they will have to do themselves. It makes signing up convenient and simple, thus increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Ninja Trick #2

Take actions based on the merchant response code

In addition to information you can gather from affiliates, be sure to take advantage of the information you can gather from your merchants. When you’re logging this stuff in real time, you can see that some of the merchant response codes give you valuable information. For example, a 201 code means “insufficient funds” and a 202 code means their “credit card is over the limit”.

This is interesting in that you can pitch that potential customer instantly at a lower price point if they qualify, offering them a special deal, knowing that they would be unlikely to purchase at full price. A message like “Congratulations! You’ve been randomly selected to receive 50% off!” would help to legitimize your offer.

In addition, if you see a number of visitors fail to sign up due to language difficulties or for whatever reason, it may be beneficial to automatically take them to a PayPal checkout or to show them a PayPal icon on the page. These consumers may not have a credit card readily available, but they tend to have a PayPal account.

It is important to use the merchant codes to your advantage, so you can take advantage of otherwise lost sales.

Ninja Trick #3

Include international traffic first

If you are going to do an offer like this and you’re going to optimize it, Jeremy highly recommends including international traffic first. This is because you can get it for around 12-13 cents CPM and it will actually help you to optimize, using very cheap traffic.

You could look at this like a “cart before the horse” scenario: you can’t really optimize until you have traffic, but you don’t want to buy traffic until it’s optimized. International traffic helps you solve this conundrum.

Ninja Trick #4

Make use of Visual Website Optimizer 

Visual Website Optimizer is Google Analytics Content Experiments (formerly known as Google Website Optimizer) on steroids. You can tell it which URLs you want people to go to and assign goals to it just like you would do with Google. However, while Google’s tool has problems with delay and cross-domain tracking, Visual Website Optimizer excels at those things.

The best thing about Visual Website Optimizer is that it is amazingly simple to set up.  It offers a simple interface to continually edit and optimize your pages through real time multivariate testing. Changes are made as soon as you save, so it eliminates the painful delay you can have with other testing tools.

Once you load in everything you want to test, Visual Website Optimizer will try out all your variables in varying combinations and then hone in on the very best performing combinations and only run those, cancelling out the poor performers.

This is really what Google Analytics Content Experiments should be, and it will help your optimization efforts incredibly.

Ninja Trick #5

Make use of ClickTale

ClickTale tells the story of what your visitors are doing. It records the sessions of each visitor to your site so you can see exactly how they interact with its elements and its sales form. You are also able to create funnels and perform form analytics that identify the stumbling blocks on your form (where people are constantly having trouble) and demonstrate how your form converts.

ClickTale records each person that visits your site, allowing you to watch their session and see in real time how they interact with your page.  It also combines all of those sessions into heatmaps so you can see where people are moving their mouse on your site.

In addition it shows JavaScript errors that your sales pages may exhibit. It will show you the error, what page it was on, and offer you a chance to replay that and see the popup box the visitor received. This will help you build a bulletproof sales page that works on every browser.

The online world is very competitive, so every little advantage helps. Whatever gives you that extra edge, use it, because the competition doesn’t play by the rules. Jeremy’s aforementioned Ninja techniques will help you gain this advantage and thrive online.

Stephan Spencer is co-author of The Art of SEO, now in its second edition, and author of Google Power Search. He is the founder of SEO agency Netconcepts, acquired by Covario in 2010, and inventor of automated pay-for-performance SEO technology platform GravityStream. He is a contributor to the Huffington Post, Multichannel Merchant, Search Engine Land, Practical Ecommerce, and MarketingProfs.

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Comments
  1. A nice share Stephan!

    I like your Ninja style presentation :) and visual website optimizer looks a great tool to work with.

  2. This is a nice post Stephan thanks for sharing this with us at problogger i really appreciate bro

  3. Great tips Stephan, your first tip stood out the most for me, you’re right, pre-populating forms would save an incredible amount of time and could increase conversions… I’d actually be interested in reading a post that talks a bit more about how to do this properly. Thanks again for the tips.

  4. It is like an becoming an expert in lead marketing…..
    Superb
    ……… :)

  5. yes nikhil i am agree with you… This is the perfect tips to increase sales.

  6. hey Stephan

    I do get your points, however, people should know that not all long form sales letters work, some are really boring. One thing is to read a letter coming from Jeremy (he has built a brand, and is a funny guy anyway) compared with another guy’s sales copy who may not be as funny or “authoritative” as him.

    The more entertaining and inspirational a person is, the more he can write and engage his audience – that’s what sells, not necessarily the length of your copy.

    However, those ninja tricks you’ve well done shared may boost conversion – it’s worth split testing them: have page A with none of these tricks vs. page B with all or part of the ninja tricks described… see what happens.

    By the way, it’s the first time I’m hearing about ClickTale, will check it out soon, it may be ideal for my network of 200+ mini sites and authority blogs! :)

  7. I ran into the website Click Tale once and tried it out and have to say its really interesting watching the replay of what someone is actually doing on your website.

    Really helps you get a feel of what they are interacting with and where their mouse tends to drag too.

    Chris

  8. I’ve been following Shoemoney as well. It’s not easy to achieve his success. It seems simple but he really work very hard behind the scenes. Have to give to this man his successes….

  9. Thanks for sharing these tricks and it will definitely help in filling long sales form and increasing sales.

  10. These tips are helpful and effective for the internet marketing. Internet marketing with these tips is helpful.

  11. Nice post!

    Some ideas were very unique.
    Will help me a lot.

    Thanks.

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