Hello! Welcome to a new episode of Coffee Break Blogging!

Today we are going to talk about the perfect opt-in Confirmation Page. So this is that page that they are going to see as soon as they opt-in to your email list; as soon as they opt-in for one of your lead magnets. The question is going to be, what do they see?

Your opt-in confirmation page is the very first page your subscriber will see after joining your email list. So, it is a highly important page and you want to optimize it for maximum results.

In this episode, I share 7 important tips and tactics for how to maximize the marketing impact of the confirmation page.

You’ll learn:

• Why you might want to put an offer on this page (and how to price it)
• 3 tools for giving an immediate survey to your new subscribers
• How to get your new subscriber to SHARE your squeeze page on social media and get more vital impact
• A quick tip to get more people to actually confirm their email address
• How to give them a “hook” to also follow you on Twitter or Facebook.

Now the big thing there is that this is a very important page on your side. They have actually executed what is likely their very first transaction on your site. Now it is not a monetary transaction, but still a transaction, nonetheless. They paid for whatever it is that you promised them with their email address. So you need to treat it like it is a transaction.

There are a lot of really crappy Confirmation Pages out there because, you know… the worst kind is if you just used the one that your email list host gives you by default; the kind that says, “Hey, you know you are my list now, go check your email inbox” and that is pretty much it, like a total “get-in.” And I have seen people create custom Confirmation Pages that actually are a hell of a lot better than the ones that you get by default with these accounts. It basically just says, “Go check your email.” Well, that is a big mistake! You basically just stood them into a dead end and you really lost an opportunity.

So what we are going to do here is I am going to go over 7 Different Tips on what to do with a perfect opt-in Confirmation Page.

Now, I will say upfront here that these are not 7 things that I recommend that you do simultaneously. They are just seven good ideas and obviously, if you put them on the same page it would just be a real big problem. So I am not recommending you do it all simultaneously; you have to look into what your intentions are, where you want to take them and then you decide what makes sense.

So without further ado, let’s go jump right in into the 7 Tips:

Tip no. 1: Acknowledge the action that they just took.

The first one; and this is the most important and goes with whatever other tip that you decide to implement, but this is to acknowledge the action that they just took. That might seem really obvious but sometimes; you do see Confirmation Pages that do not properly acknowledge the action they just took. So it is really as simple as saying, “Thank you. Everything that I had promised to you is on its way to your email inbox right now.” It is that simple. You just want to make sure that the thing that they just did has been properly and fully acknowledged, shows that you are appreciated and shows that they are going to get what they just opted-in for, because again, they paid for something “with their email address”. And so, just like any other transaction, you do not want them to feel shortchanged or even have that idea enter their mind by thinking like “Oh, what just happened here?” You don’t want them to worry about that. You want them to feel much fulfilled that the thing that they just did, they are definitely going to get what was promised to them. So that acknowledgement is very important. I just want to put that here as tip no. 1 in case you overlook it.

Tip no. 2: Put in a front end product for sale.

That means, turn them from a free subscriber into a customer by selling them something. Now this one is different because some of the other tips that I am going to give you here; you are not going to do that simultaneously with presenting an offer. If you are going to present an offer to them then your focus is going to be the offer itself, not any of these other things I am going to be mentioning here in this episode but in my world, ideally, the best thing that you would do on a Confirmation Page is to give them something to buy.

So what you would do is you would do Tip no. 1 and Tip no. 2 at the same time like a sandwich style or a hybrid sales page. So at the top of the sales page is going to be the acknowledgement of what they just did. It is going to be something like, “Thank you, everything that you just subscribed for is being sent to your inbox but while you wait for that email to show up, look below.” It will be something along those lines and then you present your offer.

Now if you are doing a video based lead magnet, well then you would probably give them that video right there on that page. Okay? But you can still turn that content oriented lead magnet into an offer for a sale or you give them a call to action at the end of that lead magnet and that little button will pop-up and you can take them into a front end offer.

If you look at the Blog Monetization Model which you can find at the blogmarektingacademy.com, you will see that the ideal thing to put behind the opt-in is going to be an offer. It is the whole idea of moving that relationship to the next level, from a person who is seeking something for free from you and moving them up to a customer. And obviously not everybody is going to make that jump right off the bat, but if you set this into an impulse buy territory; and I am generally a believer in $10 or less for most consumer markets, then you are going to convert a certain percentage of those people to a customer right off the bat. And this is good real estate. They just executed one transaction with you, so they are a lot more likely to execute a second one. So that is Tip no. 2, put in any front end offer for sale.

Tip no. 3: Give them a survey.

It could be something really simple like, “What are your biggest challenges right now?” You could ask them how they found you or any information that would help you deliver more value to them and learn more about your subscribers. Now I do not recommend you make the survey long, because again, this is a person who just opted-in for something for free, so one or two questions is probably best. You do not need to make this thing long, but it is a matter of having that survey there because they are a lot more likely to fill it out especially if you link it up to the fact that they are now a subscriber. You are saying, “I want to give you as much value as possible so please tell me what I can deliver to you to make your subscription to my list as awesome as I possibly can” and then give them a short survey. Do not make them click on an external link, by the way. It is best if you embed the survey right on that page.

Now a few tools that can help you do this: One is a plug-in called “Gravity Forms” I personally love this plug-in; it is by far the best Forms plug-in I have ever seen for WordPress, and it can enable you to do just a ton of things, but it is child’s play for this plug-in to set up a simple form; one or two questions, you can embed that right on that page and then you can have it send you the entries, you can have it record the whole database the whole nine yards so it is a really, really great plug-in. Another option is a service called Poll Daddy. I have used Poll Daddy before. It is basically a poll and survey system done by the same people that created WordPress itself. It works really well with WordPress because they obviously built the thing in the end comes with the plug-in that will allow you to take any Poll Daddy poll or survey and embed it right in to any page on WordPress.

The third one is simply Google Forms. So this is just something that comes with Google Drive, it comes with a quick form there, and basically anything that they type in to that form into your questions are going to be stored in a spreadsheet on Google Drive. So the Google option is totally free, it is a little genky, in my personal opinion… It is not ideal but it will work. Your best bet is… I like Gravity Forms, personally. I think that is the best option for this kind of thing.

Tip no. 4: Incentivize the “share.”

What I mean by this is you can magnify the impact of your opt-in process by inviting every person who opts-in to share on Twitter, on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest; whatever makes the most sense. But the way to really maximize the chances in doing that for you is to provide an incentive for doing so. So by saying, “If you re-tweet this, you are going to unlock an extra bonus” or something to that effect.

Now there are many different ways to do that; a lot of different plug-ins, but one that I had used before is simply called “Paywithatweet.com” Very simple, they do all for a free level of account that will allow you to set up a basic campaign. But it is essentially exactly what the domain says. They tweet something and then they get something for doing that. And that is paywithatweet.com.

You can provide options to share without any incentive and there are going to be those people who would say, “Well, I am not going to re-tweet your stuff if I do not know if your stuff is any good, yet.” And it is a valid viewpoint. So you could just put a few re-share buttons on the page with no incentive and just see what happens. Now one thing is, do not just use a standard Social Share Plug-in on there and put it on that page by default because what is probably going to happen is it is going to try to re-tweet the link to the Confirmation Page which obviously defeats the point because anybody who comes over from that tweet is not going to yet be an email subscriber. So you are going to want to rig those share buttons so that they share out the original squeeze page, not the Confirmation Page. That way, if any new subscriber does re-tweet, then you will actually build your list because it will be coming on in your squeeze page. But you will generally get more activity on these buttons if you incentivize it.

Tip no. 5: Show them the exact email to look for in order to confirm.

Now, obviously, this goes to whether you are using double confirmation to build your list. Now I might have mentioned this in the past, there are strong arguments to be said for not using double confirmation to build your list. Because if you practice good list hygiene, you actually do not need to use double confirmation and your delivery rates will still be totally fine. And in fact, if you are using double confirmation it actually makes it really difficult to do front end sales and stuff after the opt-in. So I generally recommend that you go with single confirmation if you can and as long as you know how to do good list hygiene. But if you are going to ask them to confirm their email address; one way to do this is to show them what the actual email looks like. What the confirmation email looks like; and what this will do is it will maximize the chances that they will actually confirm because it is just is what it is, not everybody is going to confirm their address. Even if they wanted the thing that you are promising them, they just won’t. Maybe the confirmation email never got to them. Maybe they need to check their spam folder, whatever it might be. But if you show them literally a screenshot of what that email is going to look like and show them the subject line, then you can help them go in and spot it. Okay? I have done this before where I actually will literally take a screenshot of the email and I will embed it on the Confirmation Page and show them exactly what it is going to look like. And you can just blur out any sensitive information in there that you do not want them to see in that image but then show them the email.

Tip no. 6: Link directly to the top inboxes.

So what I mean by this is that you can literally put a hyperlink right there on that Confirmation Page that points right to their Gmail inbox, right to their say, maybe Hotmail or Outlook.com or Yahoo.com and point right there. Most of us these days are probably using web-based email of some kind. And those are the big top 3. So if you can put links on the Confirmation Page to just point right to the inbox so you are making it just easier for them to perform that extra step of confirming, then you might increase your confirmation rate on these emails. So you can go and get logos for Gmail, and Yahoo mail and all that or you can just use simple text links and just link right to those inboxes.

Tip no. 7: Give them more options to connect with you.

So this would be something as simple as asking them to “like” your page on Facebook or asking them to follow you on Twitter. Now the big thing there is you want to give them a reason to do that. And the most obvious one that comes up is the idea of “not” missing anything. It is kind of like the idea of you’ve linked the idea of connecting with you socially with their original transaction that they just wanted to get something from you. And you could be like, “Listen, I offer a lot of ongoing value to all my subscribers all the time but sometimes, email being what it is; sometimes, emails might not get through, and also sometimes I share things more instantaneously with my subscribers but not via email because I do not want to barrage your email inbox. And so in order to make sure that you do not miss anything, why don’t you connect up with me on Twitter and my Facebook page?” You know… something like that. That could be a good hook to get people into your social accounts and that way, you are increasing the touch points. You are increasing the amount of places that they connect with you.

And the more places they are connected with you the more they get embedded into your community; and from a business perspective, they are more likely to become a customer either now or sometime later down the road.

So let us quickly review the 7 Tips:

1. Acknowledge the action that they just took.
2. Put a front end product for sale. Try to sell them something right away and price it at the impulse buy territory like something they do not have to think a heck of a lot about.
3. Give them a survey of some kind.
4. Incentivize the “share.” Give them something as a bonus for sharing your squeeze page to their followers.
5. Show them the exact email to look for in order to confirm their subscription. You can just simply take a screenshot of it.
6. Link directly to the top inboxes.
7. Give them more options to connect and give them a reason for doing that.

Now again, I want to reiterate one thing, and that is you are not going to do all seven of these things simultaneously on one page because it would just be an overloaded page and you will be asking them to do too many things. So you got to pick the one there that is the most useful to you. If you are going to give them a front end product for sale, you probably are not going to ask them to fill out a survey or you are not going to incentivize the share. You probably are just going to go right to the point to try and make the sale. But some of these other things, you can figure out the right balance and what makes the most sense for you.

I’ll end off with this one thing; and that is, this whole thing about having a good opt-in process and even getting the opt-in process set up can sometimes be kind of daunting for some people. And I’ve had many subscribers who struggle with the basics on how to get their opt-in funnel set up correctly. The technical part of it just rubs them the wrong way and causes them some really big problem. And so I went and created a course for this and it is called “List Building Simplified” and the whole idea of this course is to jump in to the mechanics of building your email list and walk you through everything.

And I do not assume that you know a bunch of stuff; we get down to the basics of setting up your email list, setting up your opt-in forms, hooking everything together, setting up your Thank You emails, your Confirmation emails; yes, the Confirmation Page itself, all of it. And I help you get the entire process working in plain English fashion.

So it is called List Building Simplified and the way to get this course is by being a member of The Blog Monetization Lab over at the Blog Marketing Academy. That is the only way, currently, to get this course. So if you want to learn more about the Monetization Lab, head on over to blogmonetizationlab.com and I hope to see you inside the community. We got a great community there, very active community, actually. It is getting more active day by day. And I would love to see you in there as soon as we can.

I hope you enjoyed the episode and found it valuable. If you did, hop on over to iTunes for me. If you can do that at blogmarketingacademy.com/itunes; and leave an honest review for me and let me know of what you think of this Coffee Break Blogging podcast, and it will also help me spread the word and I very much appreciate it!

With that, have a good one and I will see you on the next episode. 😉