More Conversions Than a Kool-Aid Cult: Using Mind Control to Boost Your Lead Gen Conversion Rate!

Put on these sneakers, drink this nice drink, and submit to the conversions.

Listen, you run a classy business. You want to stick to above-ground marketing strategies. Protect your brand, do an honest day’s work, sleep like a baby.

You’re in luck! Because these tips are designed to beef up your conversion rate and leave you with a throng of admiring followers!

No one will suspect that beneath the shining facade of your marketing is a dark secret: you’re using classic mind control tactics to increase conversions.


First: Watch this video…


(Editor’s note: Make sure you watch all the way to the end ;)

1. Time control

Pop-ups. Not just for jerks and casinos anymore.

Disrupt the subject’s natural daily routine. With pop-ups!

Everyone hates pop-ups. But they can double your conversion rate, according to a recent non-scientific test. You don’t need to hurl a 900-pixel flashing dietary supplement monstrosity in front of your visitors to get in on the pop-up action. In our unscientific test, we simply enabled “proactive chat” in Snapengage, the livechat provider we use on trada.com. We had already seen a surge in conversions after adding livechat: few leads are as qualified as a guy so eager to chat about pricing that he doesn’t want to wait for a sales rep to call.

But with proactive chat, we can pop a chat window up in front of visitors who’ve loitered on a given page for a designated amount of time. (We chose to trigger the pop-up after 20 seconds on the “all about how we can help your small business” page.)

No, you’re saying? I’m way too on the up-and-up to condone pedestrian pop-ups? How about a subtle, unobtrusive bar that slyly sneaks down from the top? Give Hellobar a shot. It’s like the gateway drug of pop-ups.

2. Isolation

Solitary confinement? More like solitary conFUNment!

Disallow the subject from interacting with others. By removing the navigation from your landing page!

This simple trick – removing any links, clickable headers or footers, or extra information – will do wonders for your conversion rate. Sending visitors to a site with too much information and the ability to click around empowers them – which just distracts them.

For the best conversion rate, keep your landing page simple: some copy, a pretty picture, a testimonial or two, and your lead form. Oh, and a gigantic, brainwashy button with a clear call-to-action.

3. Removal of privacy

See, Ken looks happy even though he doesn't have any privates - er, privacy.

Appropriate your subject’s sense of private identity – by being super personal and witty in your email copy!

You can dynamically insert a lead’s name into an email – but why relegate it to the salutation? Be creative with your email copy.

Try something like this:

Psst, have you heard that Anna Sawyer hasn’t updated her web security this year? She should download this free trial of web security software!

Or put it into a haiku or a rap or something. Formal salutations are for letters of apology. Embedding the leads’ names in the email copy is the new pink!

4. Reeducation

All the cool kids are washing their brains.

Instill your subject with new beliefs – like that your product is awesome! With testimonials!

It doesn’t take a charismatic evil genius to guess that pretty people all saying they like you will make you more popular. You don’t even need to use pretty people! They can be faceless! For the best testimonials, let’s be honest: write them yourself and get approval from your best customers. This way, you can write extremely self-aggrandizing-but-tenderly-honest testimonials, which will complement your landing page nicely.

Give full names, if possible – for that oh-so-crucial human connection. Don’t waste all the valuable real estate above the call-to-action on testimonials, though. Put them down on the bottom where they can serve as supplementary reading. Your visitors will be so dazzled by your eminence that they’ll have no choice but to complete that lead form.

5. Metacommunication

Controlling you is so easy it's laughab - oh look, an elephant!

Implant subliminal messages by stressing certain key words or phrases.

Uh, are we talking about keyword density here?

‘Cause yeah. Check!

6. Verbal abuse

He's cute... until you're crying (and buying).

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Making people feel bad about themselves is a good way to get them to join your cult – and a great way to get them to download that whitepaper!

In another unscientific Trada test, we held a bunch of webinars with titles along the lines of ‘How to Improve Your PPC’ and ‘Boost Conversions’. Then, we held a webinar called ’13 Ways You’re Killing Your Conversion Rate’. We tirelessly berated our registrants in the email marketing and the event itself, and the slides depicted grisly scenes and scary font. And guess what? Record turnout!

You can verbally abuse your subjects in your PPC ads, too.


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In the immortal (no, seriously) words of L. Ron Hubbard:

“If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.”

I like to think he was talking about lead gen conversions here.

To the conversion mothership!

— Anna Sawyer

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About Anna Sawyer
Anna Sawyer is the marketing manager for Trada, a crowdsourced paid search marketplace that connects advertisers with PPC experts. When she's not running integrated vertical and demand-gen programs and producing episodes of MasterPPC Theatre, Anna likes to ride her bike around in Boulder and rock the mic at karaoke.
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