Increasing Conversions: Quick Wins That Work in 2026

Why is it so challenging right now to get conversions? Obviously, there's a lot of noise. There's more emails being sent out than ever. There's all this AI slop that's going out. So now, in order to get conversions, we actually have to do lots of little things that add up that actually make a big difference. And I think that we are missing the boat on our websites, on how we're doing our marketing, all the little things that help you stand out, because it's more competitive than ever for everybody's eyeballs and ear balls. And the irony that we are seeing actually in what is actually converting is the stuff that is un-AI, the lo-fi content. This is the way you can get the highest engagement on your posts. So conversions are actually tied to humanity, and good news, we're all humans. Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Jay Schwedelson. He is a leading expert in demand generation, and he's got a brand-new book called "Stupider People Have Done It: Marketing Truths, Career Moves, and Life Advice for Doers. " He is also the founder of Guru Media Hub, which hosts large online events. Jay, welcome back to the show. How you doing today? I'm doing great. It's an honor to be back. You are a legend. I'm so excited anytime I get to spend with you. This is going to be fun. Well, I appreciate all your kind words. Today, Jay and I are going to explore how to increase conversions in 2026, and I don't know anybody who is a marketer that doesn't want more conversions. So I'm just going to start. We're recording this in March. This will be coming out in April of 2026. What's been going on in the world that's changing that maybe might explain why this is getting a little more difficult to be a marketer? Listen, obviously there's a lot of noise, right? There's a lot of noise. There's all this AI slop that's going out, and part of the AI slop, okay, is allowing us to just pump out more of everything. We're able to pump out more offers, right? It's easier to get out our offers on social media. It's easier to get our posts do all of that. So, do you feel there might be a little bit of, I don't know, hopium going on a little bit here where people are just hopeful that something's going to work itself out? What's your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think that people... Listen, the irony of all the AI stuff, and I love AI, don't get me wrong, is that we all lean into AI, say, "Wow, AI could do all this for us, so now we can get more conversions. We could do more stuff. " And the irony that we are seeing actually in what is actually converting is the stuff that is un-AI'd, which is so ironic. So the lo-fi content, right? The lo-fi, somebody's out there with their product and they're taking their phone out. They're saying, "I'm using it this way, and check this out. " Or they're having an influencer do that. Or even on LinkedIn lo-fi content. The stuff that doesn't feel like AI was involved is actually what's converting exponentially higher than the stuff that is AI made. I thought it was amazing the other day that Adam Mosseri, who's the head of Instagram, he came out, okay, on Instagram, and he said, "This is the way you can get the highest engagement on your posts. " He said, "What you want to do is if there's a dog barking in the background on your video, if there's a car beeping, that's good. Any signals of humanity is what you want in your videos because that's what people want to engage with. They want to engage with what's real. " So conversions are actually tied to humanity, and good news, we're all humans. Love it. Okay. So, when we were prepping for the show, one of the things

we talked about was the idea of growing a database. And I want you to kind of explain conceptually what the heck we're talking about. And then let's talk about why it's so important, and then we'll get into how we can go about doing something like this. Yeah, I think that this is probably the biggest fail by marketers, consumer marketers, business marketers in general, which is the growth of your database. On an annualized basis, believe it or not, your email database, your database overall, you'll have about 20% attrition. You will lose about 20% of people. Bounced email addresses, people move, people change addresses, 100 different reasons to 20%. So if you're in one year- How often are we losing 20%? Annually. Well, that's important. It's huge. I mean- Let's talk about that for a second, right? You have 1,000 people. That's right. There's 20% in one year, that's 800 people that- Right... you still have 1,000 people on the list, but maybe 800 of them are just only paying attention. And then the next year, you take 20% of that, that's 160 less people, right? That's right. So now you're at 680 people, right? Which is almost 40% less of what the entire thing was. So talk about that a little bit just so people can wrap their head around that. Yeah, and I think that that's the KPI we're not focused on. If you don't have in your dashboard your growth, and your growth is how many people you're losing and gaining, right? If this is not something you're looking at weekly, monthly, quarterly, and you're not having that as a focus in terms of growing, and it's not your center, your North Star, you're going to wind up with nobody to market to. Forget about people that are not engaged, the people that aren't opening or clicking or checking out your social media posts. I'm just talking about people that literally are going to disappear. They're not even deliverable anymore. So you having, as one of your core focuses as a marketer, what are the simple things that you could be doing, the always-on doing to grow your database? If you're not thinking about that, then you are going to have a massive problem in very short order. Okay. But Jay, I'm just going to say the things that I know are true, and everybody's probably thinking about. But Jay, traffic is down on my website enormously because AI, right? Yeah. Right. That's one of the biggest problems. So don't we have to reset our realities now? Isn't it realistic that before AI, it was... I'll be intellectually honest, I was adding 20,000 people a month to my email list back in the day. So let's just address that a little bit. Is this a reset of expectations right now? So I think it's a reset of, or an aggressive- Organic. Yeah... Organic. You need to have a reset of how aggressive of a posture you're willing to take to get those organic, and we'll talk about paid in a second, to get organic growth. So here's what you should be doing, which is what the best marketers are doing now. First of all, let's talk about your website. 100% website traffic is down because a lot of people with Google review, AI overviews, they don't have to leave Google and all the different things. So website traffic is down, but that doesn't mean you're not getting website traffic. Now, on your website, there's two things that you should be doing. Number one, right there on your homepage, not on a landing page or some sort of other destination point, on your homepage, the primary real estate on your homepage should be data collection, right there, smack in the middle. Get on our discounts list, get this free guide, join our newsletter. Not at some bar on the top of your page or on the bottom of your page, but it should be the primary hero thing in the center of your page, where you are doing some sort of incentivized thing to get people to join your list. That's what I mean by an aggressive posture. It used to be buried somewhere. Sign up for our newsletter. Go to our resources area, whatever. No, because we need every single person that's going to our homepage to possibly sign up. You want to incentivize them right there. Now, the second thing you want to do organically, which- Wait, wait. Wait, I want to dig in. Okay. Okay? Yeah. we've got a lot of people that have all sorts of different kinds of products. Now, obviously, if you're selling information, it's very easy to do this, right? Yeah. I run a media company. You run, effectively, a media company as well, so it's easy to do this, to have a newsletter or a report. But what about for e-commerce people? You mentioned- Absolutely... discounts and stuff. Help people that are selling products understand how this would work. Oh. How about people like Alo or any of these other companies that are selling products? Get on our early drop list. Be the first to know. Get on our insiders list. The funny thing about FOMO, okay, that we also used to always sell on urgency, get this before it runs out. That used to be how marketers sold. But the world now is everybody actually wants to be first. They want to be the first one to get that new thing, okay? It's not about will it run out. So if you are selling a consumer product of any kind, right there on that homepage, get on our insiders list. Get on our first to know list. And this is crushing it because that's what we all want. You've got to play into the mindset of what everybody wants. And on the business side, you're right. It's so easy. There's a million different guides, templates, things. Who cares? Yeah, you give your email address, but whatever it is, your North Star has got to be that primary real estate is about data capture because that website traffic is super, super valuable. Okay. Yeah. Just a couple of clarifying questions on this. Yeah. This is really important for some people. I've been on websites where there's an incentive where you can get 10% off if you get on your newsletter, and they'll send you a discount code. Help people understand why that might be worth it. Because if they're selling a $50 product, and I get 10% off, then they're basically paying five bucks for that person. Is that something you recommend, giving them a discount code right there or with a pop-up or... I know we're going to get to pop-ups eventually. Yeah. But is it worthy of giving them a fiscal incentive to get on the newsletter if you're selling physical products? So I think, listen, every company's different, and the lifetime value of your customer, you should know a customer that comes in via discount versus somebody that does not come in via discount. If the lifetime value of the customer who comes in via the discount matches up with the lifetime value of the person that just straight up buys your product they get on your list, beautiful. Fantastic. You've won the offer lottery. If it doesn't, then that's when you want to lean into more of this access type of incentive, where you're not saying you're getting 10% off, you're saying you're getting early access to our first products. Because what you're really saying to those people are, "You're the people who really love what we have going on. You're really buying into our brand. " So I would first say know your lifetime value, about what the discount drives on the back end, and then if the value plays out, then it's a home run. I also think there's seasonality, depending on where you are, and discounts and all of that. So there's a lot of different moving levers, but as long as this is what you're thinking about is, how do I get people onto my list, that's really, really important. Okay. So I stopped you on the first one. You're on a roll, so keep going. Yeah. What are some other ways we can get them on the list from our website? Okay, so the website. So this one's going to make me... No one's going to like me, and that's okay. People don't like me. I'm okay with that. But let's talk about pop-ups for a second. I lost half your audience just now. Uh-oh. Because we all know it works. It works, but let me tell you why you have to do it. The worst thing that marketers say is thisI don't like pop-ups, so we don't do them. They annoy me, so we're not going to do them. That's what every marketer says. But here's the deal. When you go to Nike's website and you're a first-time visitor, they do a pop-up, all right? And you need to buy sneakers. Do you see the pop-up and say, "You know what? I'm so angry at you, Nike, for having a pop-up. I'm never buying from you. " Or do you click the little X in the upper right-hand corner and you forget there was a pop-up three seconds later? Okay. You're not going to be losing business because you have a pop-up. But I'll give you the most wild stat. For first-time visitors to your website, if you have a pop-up that has any kind of incentive, whether it's a guide on the business side, a discount code, early access sign-up, whatever it is, any kind of incentive, you will see roughly 5% of first-time visitors to your site actually give you their email address. Okay? Five-times visitors to your site, if you're still running that pop-up, it'll go up to about 9%. So if you don't have the pop-up, you have nothing to show for that traffic. Great, you're going to cookie them and retarget them and annoy them. That's garbage. Get their data. Now, the other pop-up that everybody sleeps on is timed pop-ups. Here's the game. It does not matter what website CMS platform you use, wherever your website is hosted. I don't care if it's the most inferior tool on the planet. Every website hosting tool can do timed pop-ups. What does that mean? Let's say you sell socks. I don't know. Somebody goes on the pricing page on your website where you're selling socks. They're on there for 10 seconds debating what socks they're going to buy. You can pop up a pop-up after they're on there for 10 seconds and say, "Hey, we know you're really into our socks. We love it so much, we're going to give you an extra 10% off if you buy right now. " Or they're on the pricing page of your SaaS product, your B2B SaaS product, and they're looking on this pricing page, and then after 30 seconds of looking at your pricing, you pop up a pop-up that says, "Hey, we know you're checking this out. We know this is perfect for you. We want to give you this extra doodad if you sign up right now. " It doesn't have to be just your pricing page. It could be on your resources any page. But timed pop-ups based on the person's activity crush it. You're talking about over 10% conversions on those pop-ups when they're on the timed units. It's incredible. Okay, this is coming out just days before "Social Media Marketing World," so I can expose this, if you will, to the world right now. But if you go to our sales page and you click on the page that's got all the prices for all the different ticket types, and you're there for a certain period of time, we pop up $100 extra off. And it really does work. Now, there's some people saying, "Yeah, but if I didn't pop it up, they might have paid $100 more. " What do you want to say to that? Okay, great. And you know what? Maybe they wouldn't have. Yeah. This is a complex purchase. They might have come back later, right? Right. A lot of things might happen, but the bottom line is we're trying to get as many conversions as possible, and you're like, "I don't want to annoy people. Maybe they would have paid more. done seven other things. " Guess what? We need their business. We need them on our list, okay? If you want to play a game of what ifs, that's great. Go out of business, and that's a fantastic way to operate. We need to do everything we can. That's why I say aggressive posture. And then, one other thing, just to talk about bringing people back to the website, okay, before we get into any kind of paid media or any of that stuff. The secret sauce thing that we are seeing right now in terms of getting traffic back to your website from all the AI tools, right, the one simple thing that you could do everybody's sleeping on is everybody's got evergreen stuff on their site. We have evergreen content, right? The 10 best running shoes, HR software tools. Everybody's got evergreen content and offers. The AI tools, doesn't matter if it's ChatGPT or Claude, or you name it, what they want is recency signals. That is the number one thing that they want. If you go back to all of your offers, content and you just add in the month and the year, okay, the 10 best running shoes, April 2026. The 10 best HR software tools, April 2026. You add it back to all of your old blog posts. You add the month and the year. AI tools are picking up anything that has a recency signal. All right? Sales, right? The Nike sale for sneakers, our summer sale 2026. Anything that has a recency signal is getting picked up by the AI, is being included in AI answers more than 50% of the time as compared to those that don't. So there are games to bring people back to your website, grab more of that traffic if you just play the game a little differently. If you're just doing the same old, "I hope people sign up for my newsletter, they find it. I hope my stuff shows up in AI and they find it," you're not taking that aggressive posture in order to really generate that activity. Okay. So just to bring everybody back, we're talking about how to grow your database. Yeah. And we talked about how on your homepage, you should have some form at the top for some offer. Then we talked about pop-ups, and this content recency thing. I want to get back to pop-ups for a second. Yeah. Do you have any insights as far as the kind of language that seems to work or any kind of tips on how to phrase the pop-up that you've maybe done in your own experience so that we can get someone to act right now? The one version that I think works the best, but you have to really... I think everybody needs to add more humanity to their marketing, everybody. And this one works really well across any kind of brand. And it's this idea of the negative option, meaning I'm not talking about a pre-checked box or- Oh. Yeah. You mean like you can opt out if you don't care about saving money. Is that your thought? That's exactly right. It's exactly right. So it says, "Hey, do you want this thing? " "Yes, I want to be smarter," or, "No, I like being a doofus. " Right? When you make the no option a negative, whatever your offer is, right? "Do you want these comfy socks? " "Yes, I love when my feet are comfortable. " "No, I like cold, and I can't sleep. "When you make, and it's the same thing for business. Do you want the HR software? "Yes, my team will get better. " "No, we don't have HR. We don't believe in human rights. " I don't know, whatever. When you make the no option a negative, the conversions skyrocket because you're adding in this human lazy- Nobody wants to click on that button, right? Nobody wants to be a doofus. Nobody wants to click the thing that says, "No, I'm a doofus. " And so that is the number one secret sauce to actually getting a higher conversion rate on pop-ups that people aren't doing enough. Okay, and for folks that are not active on AI, just take a screenshot of your pop-up, plop it into your favorite tool, mine's Claude, and just say, "Help me create a negative option" or "Give me some options," and then pick something that you feel like is on brand for you. You know what I mean? Right. But the easiest one for discounts is, "No, I don't like saving money. " That's the best one. That is the best one, always. I love it. Okay. So, we've hinted a couple of times about how you can actually pay to acquire- Yeah... grow your database. So talk to me a little bit about your thoughts on that. Yeah. Listen, there are, on social media specifically, and I don't work for Meta or Reddit or any of these places, okay? I'm not incentivized to saying this. But my agency business, this is what I do all day long, is I'm trying to figure out what is the lowest cost way to grow people's databases, get people on their newsletter file, their special offers file, whatever, so I've tested everything. And right now, what is working the best, okay, let's talk about trying to get people onto either your consumer or your business newsletter file. There are two spots that are absolutely crushing it, coming in well under $5 per subscriber, oftentimes in the $2 to $3 range. And those two things are on Instagram, doing paid reels or story ads where the person, and you've seen them, "Hey, do you want to subscribe to this thing? " "Yeah. Yes, register. " Pops open two fields. You fill in the two fields, and you hit submit. Those ads on Instagram, reels, and stories- Is that like a lead ad or something like that where you stay on platform? Is that the idea? You stay on platform. And here's a secret for everybody for social media, paid social media, period, end of story. When you are trying to get people to subscribe to something, to give you their information, never take them off the platform. Nobody wants to go on Instagram, see your ad, and say, "This is the greatest ad of all time. Let me stop doing brain rot and scrolling and leave Instagram to look at this garbage newsletter I was barely interested in. " Nobody wants to do that. What they want to do is say, "Oh, I'm scrolling. I see a bunch of stories. Oh, this newsletter looks good. Yes, three fields, and I keep on with my brain rot. " Keep them on platform. You get the data. That's how you keep it the lowest. And by the way, this is not just a consumer thing. Business to business is crushing it on Instagram. Your audience is there. Three billion monthly active users. They are there. So whether you're a business marketer or a consumer marketer or a nonprofit marketer, does not matter, e-commerce, using Instagram reels and stories to grow your database, sub $5 growth per. The other one now is Reddit. Wait, real quick. Yeah. Before we go to Reddit. How- Yeah... do you get those leads into your database? Because that's a question I have and maybe others have as well. Oh, yeah. No, it goes right in. You got a file right there. You give an API right into your CRM and hook it to a Zapier connection. This is not hard. Most of the arms of choice have some sort of connector- Yeah... whatever we're doing. So you don't have to go into Messenger- No... and grab it or anything like that. No. Okay. You can automate all of this. Well, the next question is, are they pre-filled, typically or not? It really depends on what you're collecting. Usually, the email address field is pre-filled with whatever the email address is that you're using on Instagram, and then you have the option to ask whatever other things you want to ask. Obviously, the less you ask, the cheaper the cost per acquisition's going to be. But usually, we try to max out at about three fields on things like Instagram, because if you go too much further, you're just going to lose people. The cost goes into the stratosphere. And listen, I love LinkedIn. I'm a LinkedIn guy, but running the same program on LinkedIn, you're going to be looking at four or 5x the cost going after the same audience. Mm-hmm. It just is what it is, for B2B and B2C. So that's why I'm a bigger fan right now of Instagram and Reddit, too. I can take it through Reddit. Okay, cool. Yeah. So for people that are mostly focused on organic- Yeah... this is a way to acquire people, but it sounds like the benefit here is you can do super specific targeting, right? Super targeted. If you're low budget. I don't want to have to pay $3 to $5 because that could get really expensive is what I'm thinking. But at the same time, I guess if it's super targeted, and I track them really, really well inside my database, that could be a lot. Those could turn into a pretty big return on investment down the road if those are qualified, right? 100%. And listen, maybe $3 to $5 is expensive, but really, you have to see what the value of your newsletter is, what you are putting out. I wouldn't say you want to start doing this until you knew that you had good content, you had a good funnel, nurture cycle, all those different things with your actual newsletter or whatever your VIP list is that you're building. But growing your list organically is just hard. Yeah. So you've got to find a few levers that you can- This might be the future of the way we have to do it. Let's be- Yeah... honest. Yeah. Organic social is half dead. It really is. Yeah. And organic traffic coming in from Google is dying as well. Yeah. Right. This is the reality of the situation that we're in, is that we're going to have to do something that costs money, that we'll have to pay to someone else in order to be able to do this. Just out of curiosity, what's your thoughts about ads in other people's newsletters? Does that work or is that kind of a waste of money? So ads in other people's newsletters. First of all, I'm a big fan of swaps. Swaps with other newsletters all day long. But the ads that work in email newsletters are endorsement style, period, end of story, hard stop. Where whoever that newsletter's coming out from, if it's coming from a creator, like a person, like you're in somebody's newsletter that has a big following, you want an endorsement-style ad from that creator. That will exponentially do better than whatever it is the boring copy that you wrote. For a lot of generic publisher ad, if you're a regular magazine-type publishing type of a newsletter file, endorsement style is going to be a little bit harder to do. But if you are working with a creator's newsletter, you want to push for the endorsement style. It'll do a lot, lot better. But email- What does this mean? Explain to people that don't know what that means. Okay. I'll give an example. Like my own newsletter. So we get ads in my own newsletter, and they'll say, "Oh, we want endorsement style. " And that'll mean that, okay, so let's say I'm doing an ad for some sort of design platform or something. In the newsletter, I'll say in first person, "This design platform's amazing. I was able to create an ad in three seconds. You got to try this thing out. " You are using your voice to endorse a thing. In the same day on the consumer side- Got it... "Oh my God, I wear these socks every day, and if it weren't for these socks, I think I'd drop dead. " So that works so much better because the readers already bought into you. That's why they're subscribed. Got it. Okay. Reddit. So people were sleeping on Reddit. Reddit, in the last four or five months, has changed their ad units. Reddit used to be really, really tough to do anything on there that would produce any type of meaningful results with paid ads. But they launched new ad units. The one ad units I love is called their lead gen ad unit. Identical basically to what's going on in Instagram, that you could be in some subreddit community. the pop culture subreddit community, or Star Trek subreddit community, or the IT security subreddit community, and you could have a pop-up ad there that says, for your newsletter, your special offer, your guide, your VIP list. And just like on Instagram, it pops open the little thing. It says, "Hey, you interested in this? " And then you put in your information, your email address in two fields, you hit submit. Again, you don't leave Reddit, and this can go right into your CRM or email sending platform. So this only happened in the last few months that Reddit actually did this. And then about in the last few weeks, they launched another ad unit called their reminder ad unit, where while you're on Reddit, you could actually run these ads that you remind people about a sale. "Click here if you want to be reminded about Nike's upcoming sale. " You click remind. Okay, and then what they do is Reddit will actually send you an email reminding you about that sale as it's upcoming, and it'll actually do a push notification on the app as well on your phone. So this reminder ad unit has also been really, really great. So bottom line, if you haven't really seen some of Reddit's new ad units, I think it's worth looking at to grow your database, to grow your reach, to do all the things. How do you feel like Reddit compares to Instagram as far as pricing and stuff? Instagram is still less expensive, but what we found is that Reddit's further down the funnel from a buying cycle. And what I mean by that is Reddit's really good for way top of the funnel. Get on a newsletter, get on a VIP list, something like that. People that are going to Reddit, by and large, are really going there to solve for something. Like, "I'm trying to figure out how to do X," or, "How other people are doing this," or, "What's going on with that? " And so from what we are seeing, if you're actually trying to sell product or sell service instead of just growing a list per se, Reddit users seem to be more mid-funnel than top-of-funnel, which is what Instagram is. Okay. So we have talked about you can add something to your homepage. We've talked about pop-ups. Yep. We went off on a little thing on content and- Yeah... you talked about paid real story ads, and then Reddit is very interesting to me, just because there's so many communities in there that sounds like you could

target. So, okay. Let's talk about our landing pages. Yes. And when I say landing pages, I mean, well, generally, we're talking about a page with an opt-in on it, are we not? What do we mean by landing pages and from your perspective, and what can we do to make them better? Yeah. I love this topic because when we talk about a landing page, it could be a destination page. It's any place where you are taking somebody that just clicked on something, you're trying to convert them. It could be somebody clicked on a search ad. You're taking them to a specific page, trying to convert them. They've clicked on an email offer. They go to a specific page. You're trying to convert them. A consumer offer, a B2B offer, a social media post. You're trying to convert them to a webinar registration, to a discount, to buying a product. Whatever it is, you're taking them to this specific page. The thing that boggles my mind, the thing that is unacceptable, and we're going to solve it right now for everybody, is that we think it's okay. We think it's okay that you get 100 clicks on some email offer that you send out, and they go to this destination page, this landing page, and then 95% of these people bail. They bounce. And you convert on maybe 5% if you're lucky. And we think it's normal and acceptable that a second ago, 100 people were interested in this thing, and then collectively, like they were on a party line on a phone, and they said, "Bah, everybody bail on it. I know we clicked on it, but just bail on it. " And only 5% of the people convert. It doesn't make any sense. They were just interested. So what are the little things that you're not doing right on your landing page that's causing to turn people off so fast? So let's go through some of the things that you probably would never think of. First off, the big hero image on that landing page. You got this big image on the landing page. Here's a secret sauce thing. Wherever you just took them from, let's say you sent them out an email, and the email had an image of me waving hello, and then they get to the landing page. You want to have the same primary image, that image of me waving hello again on that landing page. Same thing with a social media ad. Same hero image from that social media ad right onto that landing page. You want the same hero image. Why? Yeah. Because we're a simple-minded species. We get nervous in our subconscious. Are we in the right place? And when we see the same picture from the email on the landing page, we're like, "Oh, good. I'm in the place for the thing that I want. " So having that same primary image will actually increase your conversion rates over 10% just by making sure that people feel comfortable. Okay, wait a minute, Jay. Yeah. Hold on a second. But Jay, Andromeda, which is the new update from Meta, they want a whole bunch of images, and they're going to decide which image goes with the ad. Or Jay, I'm testing out a bazillion images, I don't know which one's going to convert. Talk to me a little bit about what do I do in that situation? Yeah. Listen, it's not going to be a perfect science, a perfect thing across the board, right? But it's something that you need to keep top of mind. Because even if you can't say it's this exact image, it needs to look like the same feel, the same vibe, the same place. Okay. Okay? You need to create that comfort zone. It can't be this radically different spot and you're like, "Okay, I hope it all works out. " Right? Because that's why you're turning people off. They're confused. Got it. Okay, cool. What else? Okay. Now let's talk about the number of fields. Okay? The number of fields that you're asking. Wait, wait. What are you talking about fields? You've got- Okay. You go on a page and it says, "I want your first name, your last name, your pet's name, your zip code, everything about your life, your-" Like a lead generation, like a page that says lead generation. Yeah. The page where you're asking for all the different fields, okay? In general, first off, for every additional must-fill field that you require, you'll lose about 8% of your registrants. And I share that because you may want to collect a lot of data on people because you want to have all this information, but the more that you are asking for, your form is looking visually boring. They get to the page, they're like, "Nah, too much work. " So first off, you want to think about how many fields you have. Now, you may say, "But we do need to collect a lot of fields because of this, that, or who cares, whatever. " If your form has more than eight fields, okay? I tend to lean towards five, but if your form is more than eight fields, you want to go to a multi-step form. That thing that is step one, step two, step three. You don't want somebody to show up to your page and see eight fields that they have to fill in. Because it doesn't matter. They look at it and it feels like work to them, and it turns them off, and that's why they're part of that 95% that's leaving. So if you've never tested that multi-step form and you have more than eight fields that you're collecting, this is probably the primary reason that you're losing conversions. And everybody out there knows this. Once you've given a little bit of data, you feel kind of half screwed. You're like, "They already got half of it. I might as well keep on going because what else am I going to do? " And it gets you to convert. So think about if your form is visually boring, because that's actually what turns people off. Okay, this is interesting, and I'm thinking creatively. First of all, I have tested this, and I don't know if you found this to be true- Right... but I found that first you have a button, and then you reveal the form. So for example- Yeah... get the thing, and once you click Get the Thing, that's the first micro-commitment, and then typically, I would imagine if you really wanted to, and I've seen some sites do this where it's simply name and email and then, send me the thing. But then afterwards, they give me another incentive to fill out the rest of the form. Have you ever seen this double incentive kind of thing? Yeah. I don't know how in the world they do it, but it's like, "Hey, and by the way, we'll send you this extra thing if you answer all these other questions. " I don't know. I'm just thinking creatively, but does this even work? Yeah. No, it works. But sometimes the problem you have is your database gets a little clunky because some people do parts of it, some people don't do other parts of it. Like, okay, we have 47% of the people that did this part, but not this part, and you're like, "What do I do with all that? " Right? What do you normally ask, then? You said you ask five. What are you asking for? No, when I say five, I'm saying if I go beyond five fields, that's when I go to multi-step. Right. What are you typically asking for? Well, it just depends on what you're doing. If you're selling product, right, you know what you have to ask for. for all the shipping address, all that stuff, email address, whatever. It's when you get into the variable ones, the ones you do have to ask. What are your interests? How often do you do X, Y, and Z? Right. What do you really care about this? Or if you're a business one, how big is your company? How many employees? What's your job function? What's your title? Really, if you really want to get the most data out of somebody, and now we're going kind of off the beaten path a little bit, quizzes are secret sauce. Everybody loves filling out quizzes. You use a quiz as your lead gen play, and people love quizzes, and then you tell them about themselves. You spit out a stupid thing at the end that says, "Oh my god, you're a dinosaur lover because you told us all these different things," or whatever. But quizzes actually crush it because then you also have all the information you could ever need about that person. But let's come back to what else you could do on that landing page to get conversions, because enough talking about dinosaurs. So we've talked about the number of fields. I want to talk for a second about what happens at the bottom. You have a button at the bottom, okay? You have that conversion button. And if anybody out there on your destination page or landing page, if you have your button language, it says the word submit, you probably should stop listening, get a new job outside of marketing, because that's ridiculous. It's the worst word in the history of marketing. I don't even know how it got into marketing. It's actually weird if you step back and think about it. Yeah, I know. It's like, what am I submitting to? Exactly. Right. It's just very, very strange. So what should it say? Okay? What you really want it to say is two things. Number one, it should be written in first person, and it should repeat the awesomeness of the offer. It should say, let's say you're selling insurance quotes "Yes! " Exclamation mark. "I want my three free quotes. " "Yes, count me in for this awesome webinar. " Have it written in first person and then repeat the offer. Because what you're doing is you're building that last vote of confidence where the person's like, "Yes, that is what I want. " And they're not going to look at the button and be like, "This button rocks. I love this button. " But quickly, as they're moving fast and their subconscious is like, "I like this. This is what I need. " Yeah. On Social Media Examiner's homepage, our button says, "Yes, I want to be a better marketer. " And when you click on it, then it pops open the fields, and then it says, "Send me a copy. " Only, it probably should say, "Send me my copy," but, you know. But that's it. First person. Yeah. So, okay, what about social proof? Okay. Let's talk about that and testimonials, all that fun stuff. Yeah. So, okay. So now we figured out the button. But now, the other secret sauce thing that you want to have right near that button, either right below that submission button, we won't call it a submit button. Right below the submission button or on, let's say, the left of that button, you want to have one hero testimonial. Every company on Earth has a testimonial. You could write one testimonial and build the greatest company of all time, and you want to put it right near the button. It would say something like, "These are the most comfortable socks ever," said a recent buyer. "This software saved us 50% of our budget. " One testimonial in quotes right near that button. It is that final vote of confidence that the person's like, "Okay, somebody else likes it. " And then the other thing that you want to think about, the two other things about is have logos on that page, on your destination page, on that landing page. Have logos of other major companies that you've partnered with, that your brand has done anything with. Any type of logos on that page. Because when the person gets to that page, they're like, "Is this company legit? Should I work with them? " And then they see this testimonial, they see these logos. And then the last secret sauce is awards. People sleep on awards. I don't care if you won the MVP award on the softball team when you were nine. It doesn't matter. You put any awards that your company has won of any kind, and you put it on that destination page. Because when that person's like, "Should I buy this thing? Well, they won some awards. " Nobody actually cares what the awards are. I have no idea what any award is. I just know, oh, they won something. They're legit. They have logos. They have a testimonial. If you do these things, this is how you increase your conversions. It sounds gimmicky and cheesy, but welcome to marketing. The people that are successful are the ones doing the tiny little things. They say the riches are in the niches. It's all about doing these little things, and that's what we have to focus on. How long should this landing page be? As short as humanly possible. No-scroll landing pages. If you could have a no-scroll landing page, it's all right there. Amazing. And then the last piece of it is if you have a navigation bar on your landing page, again, horrendous, unacceptable. You need to trap them. these people. It's like "Love Island. " They bring these people there, they can't get off. They don't like each other when they get there, but by the end, they're in love because there's nobody else to look at. It's the same idea on your landing page. They get to your destination page. If you have links going off of that page, if you have your standard nav bar on that page, they're going to leave. The only thing they should be able to do on that page is convert. That's it. That's how your conversion rate goes up. Okay, what about mobile versus desktop? Because obviously it's almost impossible to get it on a page if it's on a mobile device. Yeah. So what's your thoughts on that? Do you have any insights for mobile stuff? Listen, obviously, everything's mobile first. And the most important thing is you're not going to be able to do everything we just said. It's very hard mobile first. But what I will say, the mistake that people make is when they're testing things, when they're setting things up, they look at all their pretty pictures on their computer. Don't do that. Right. Test everything on your phone. Look at your emails you're sending social ads on your phone. On the email side alone, to give you an example, over 70% of primary opens, which is the first time somebody opens up an email, business or consumer, is on their phone. So whenever you're setting up any of your marketing, your landing pages or whatever, look at the experience mobile first, because that's where the majority of things are happening. Unless you're selling to people that have an AOL address and are 900 years old. Hey, man, I have one, but I don't use it anymore. You probably have one. I live in Boca Raton. I could say that type of stuff. So

what happens after they hit the submit button? Is there any tips that- Yeah... I called it a submit button, but we know what I mean. Yes. What happens after they either purchase or after they've completed the form? So maybe under-thought about things that we can do after that. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. It's probably the most underutilized real estate on your website. You go ahead and you buy. So recently, my son just went off to college, and we got him this filter, this big filter thing for his dorm room because there's no good airflow or whatever. And then after we bought this filter thing on this website, which whatever, there was another page which had all this other stuff that we could buy that could make a healthy air and whatever. I ended up buying all this other junk that I was like, "Oh my God, why'd I buy all this? " But the reason I bought it is because what happens is you get excited, like, "Oh, I'm into this brand in this moment, in this second," and you buy it, and that real estate, that thank you page, the worst thing that you can do is just sayThank you, and your thing will ship out soon. Right? Horrendous. You want to say, "You got that? Well, you'll also love these three things. " Okay, and this is for business marketers and consumer marketers. They sign up for a webinar, "You love that webinar? You should download these three guides. You like this product, you'll love these products. " There is no higher click-through rate, no higher click-through rate that you will have anywhere on your website than on that post page, than that post-submission page, for the offers that you put on that page in that moment. If you're not intentional and thinking about those offers lining up with where the person just came from, you're leaving the best real estate that you have on your website untouched. What about on a freebie? Like a resource or whatever. Any thoughts on what to do after they get to that quote-unquote thank you page? Because they're not ready to buy, obviously, because you're going to mail them something free. How can we take advantage of that without selling them on something? Any thoughts? Yeah. I think that there's more freebies to give, and then this is where you start to get into a little bit sophisticated marketer. You'll have other freebies, and then you'll see those people that take advantage of the other freebies. And then what I would be doing is tracking, okay, if somebody took advantage of two freebies versus just the original freebie, what is the difference in that person? Right? Is the two-freebie person converting two X versus the one-freebie person? And then you start to kind of play that game and see how you could segment your database. But, there's no scenario of what you are getting somebody to convert on that you shouldn't be giving them additional offers on that page. Okay. Last question. One-click actions in the email inbox. A lot of email providers allow someone to simply click a link to get something. Yeah. And it triggers an action behind the scenes. Any thoughts on using that? Because the friction is almost nothing, right? Yeah. Do you use them? Do you recommend them? Yeah, no, I'm all about... The reason that the one-click thing is very, very important, taking a one-click action, is that in order to stay in somebody's inbox nowadays, it has nothing to do with if you put the word free in the subject line or something nonsense like that, it's the person's engagement with the emails that you're sending to them, right? And the problem is opens are viewed as very limited engagement by email providers, right? By the email inbox providers. But clicks are magic. If somebody clicks, then the next time you send them an email, it's going to stay in that person's inbox. So getting them to click on anything is critical now, and these one-click motions work really, really, really well. One of the things that works well, if you've never tested, is one-click quizzes. Give people two options as if it's a quiz, this one or that one, and hit- Oh, and it can track them on the back end, huh? And then you got it. You won. And you also have the data, right? You know what they're interested in. So the one-click motion is helpful for data as well as deliverability. Jay Schwedelson, we have covered a goldmine- A lot... of stuff here, and I know there's so much more where that came from. So I want you to tell everyone where they can connect with you on the socials, if that's an option. Yep. And also where they could maybe reach out if they, I don't know, want to work with you or buy whatever you have to sell. I appreciate that. Well, first off, I have an inferior podcast to this one, but it's called "Do This Not That for Marketers. " I'd love if you check it out. I can't believe I forgot to mention that. No, that's all good. I'm making the formal endorsement. It's a great show. I've been on multiple times. Strongly recommend it. Yes. Michael has been on multiple times, which don't take that as a negative. No, I'm kidding. He's been incredible always. So that's "Do This Not That for Marketers. " jayschwedelson. com is where you can find out how to work with me and my agency and partner with me and all the things. And my primary socials, I'm all over LinkedIn. I share horrible memes. Please connect with me. And I'm also on Instagram, so you could find me there. But jayschwedelson. com has got all the jazz, and it's an honor to be on the show. You are the absolute best, and this has been fun. Thanks, Jay.