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The Coolest ("Sneaky But Ethical") Landing Page Trick I've Seen In A Long Time

By The Leadpages Team  |  Published May 22, 2013  |  Updated Mar 31, 2023
Leadpages Team
By The Leadpages Team
Og Brand
  • Go here to check out our Landing Page Software (Leadpages)
  • For Leadpages users . . .
    • To pre-populate, the email field, just "regenerate" your Leadpages page and add "?leadpages-e=[email merge field here]" to the end of your URLs
    • To pre-populate, the name, and email fields, just "regenerate" your Leadpages page and add "?leadpages-fn=[first name merge field here]&leadpages-e=[email merge field here]" to the end of your URLs
  • Leadpages customers, if you have any additional questions, please ask them via our customer support desk

In this article:

Clay Collins here, co-founder of Leadpages, and I want to talk about one of the most significant findings that the Internet Marketing Testing Community has found over the last few years. This is an incredibly robust result that I’m going to talk about, and if you watch and read sites like Abtest.com, whichtestwon.com, and The Marketing Show, and also the LeadPages blog, you’ll find one result popping up over and over again. And the result you’ll find over and over again is this: If you can prepopulate landing page fields, you’re going to get a much higher opt-in rate. So if someone arrives at a landing page, and it’s already filled in with the data that you want them to submit, then they’re much more likely to submit that form, right? We all do our taxes a lot earlier if someone just filled out the tax forms for us. In some cases, folks have found an increase in the conversion rate of 36.4% because they did things like prepopulating the landing page form with the data that they want users to submit. So with that in mind, we added something very special to Leadpages. Here is a Leadpages page, and on this page, the default text says to enter a valid email here. However, when you take this normal URL and you add this URL variable to the end, ?Leadpages-e=u@domain.com, you can prepopulate this form with your user’s email address. So let’s say you’re using whatever email service provider that you use, whether that’s AWeber, or MailChimp, or Infusionsoft, or OfficeAutoPilot, or whatever you’re using, GetResponse, iContact, and you’re going to send out an email. So you might say download my free report or something like that. And in the body, you might say just click here to check out my new special, special report. And then here, you might put a link like this. Now when you send someone to a link like this, they get a form where the email address is not populated. Then again, if you add to the end of this URL? Leadpages-e=u@domain.com, and you reload that page, you’ll see that it prepopulates. So how does this apply to you? Well, when you’re sending people to this page, all you need to do is add this? Leadpages-e=, and then you delete this, and you insert a form field merge for the email address. So I’ll just finish this up. I’ll just sign this at the end, Clay. Now 99% of email service providers allow you to do this mail merges where the email address of every single person that the email is being sent to merges and inserts their email address right here so that when you send people to this page, this populates with the email address of the person receiving the email. Let me show you what I mean. Here I am in my inbox, and I just received this email that I constructed for myself, and as you can see, when I click here, it prepopulates this with the email address and all I need to do is click here on free instant access to get this tutorial. You can also do this for a webinar registration page. Here’s our usual webinar registration page and it says to enter a valid email address here. But if you add to the end Leadpages-e=, you know, whatever you want this to be prepopulated with in terms of email addresses, when someone clicks on claim my spot now, it prepopulates with their email address. So let’s go back into AWeber. This email is going to be called Join Tonight’s Webinar. Text is going to say go here to join me on tonight’s webinar, then we go ahead and add the URL here, but we also want to make it prepopulate. So we’re going to add to the end of this? Leadpages-e=, and then we’ll do a mail merge, and we’ll post the email address here, and then I’ll just sign this out as Clay. So I’ll go ahead and send this email to myself, and as you can see, when I go here and load this email and I click on the link that was sent to me in the email, it prepopulates with my email address, and every person who receives this is going to have this field prepopulated with their email address. You can also prepopulate the first name field as well so you can prepopulate both the first name field and the email address. Now here’s where this gets really, really, really interesting. If an affiliate is mailing for you, let’s say you’re doing a webinar with an affiliate, that affiliate can mail to your Webinar registration page and do the mail merge so that when someone arrives at your page from your affiliate’s list, it’s prepopulated with all the email addresses, which means that affiliate is going to get more signups to your webinar, and you both are going to make more money. Anyway, Clay Collins here, co-founder of Leadpages, and I hope you enjoyed this conversion tip, and I hope for those Leadpages users out there that you enjoy this new Leadpages feature. If you’re not a Leadpages user or member, you know what to do. Take care.

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Leadpages Team
By The Leadpages Team
Og Brand
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