This YouTube tutorial (published April 21, 2025) explains how accounting firms can dramatically increase website lead volume by improving opt-in rates using an application funnel and a video sales letter (VSL). The speaker demonstrates the opt-in math with a client example ("Tony") using 4,800 visits and a 0.83% current opt-in, shows how raising opt-in to 2–4% multiplies booked calls, and walks through the structure of a high-converting application landing page (targeted callout/headline, 5–10 minute VSL, social proof, scarcity, and a short vetting application plus calendar booking). A second case ("Ryan") reports an 8% opt-in on his application page (Feb–Mar 2025), ~536 unique visitors, and ~95% of applicants completing booking.
Chapters
In this game of business, there's occasionally a few levers you can pull to get outsized returns. And so in this video I want to show you one of them that I think is particularly important for most of you in the accounting industry. And so most of you have a website and it probably looks something like this. And you get visitors to this website and some percent of visitors are going to click your contact page and some percent of those visitors are going to actually fill out this form or they're going to book a call with you. So there's a math equation we use for this. It's called opt in rate. And essentially it's just what percent of visitors to your contact page and actually fill out your application form. So I've got this extension that checks web traffic to different websites. And so if I'm looking at this, it looks like this firm got 4800 visits to their website in February. And so if we just plug that in here, let's say 4800 web visitors and let's say only 10% of those actually made it to the contact page. So 4800 times 0.16. So 480 people made it to the contact page. Now I actually just spoke with Tony yesterday and he said they usually book like three to five calls per month from their contact page. And so let's just say they booked four calls and that means their opt in rate is 0.83%. Okay, now this is abysmal and this is something that we'll probably be working on with Tony in the near future here. But there's a lot that you can do about this and this is a really big deal. So imagine we take those same metrics, but we're somehow able to increase his opt in rate to 2%. Okay? And so that means that they're going to end up booking nine to ten calls per month. So they're over doubling their booked call volume from the website just by improving the throughput on this page. And by the way, 2% opt in is not anything to write home about. A lot of firms could see up to 4%, in which case we're seeing like 19 to 20 booked calls off of the same website traffic. So we're not posting any more content, we're not getting any more referrals, we're not spending any more money on ads. And yet we're full 5xing the volume of leads that we're getting through this website. And I want to show you this. So this is the back end of Another client of mine. So this is his application funnel where people go to apply to work with him and book a call. And if we look at the stats on his application landing page, he's getting on average over the last month, this is February to March of 2025, he's gotten an 8% opt in rate. So let's go back over to Tony. Let's see. If he was getting an 8% opt in rate, he would book like 38 to calls per month off of the same website traffic. That's a 10x improvement on where he's at. So you can see how literally nothing else in his business changes. This one lever gets pulled and suddenly he's making, I mean theoretically 10 times more money. Right. And so I want to show you what this application funnel actually looks like. So you can get your opt in rate up to these levels or somewhere in the vicinity of these levels. And the really important thing here, before we get into it, this is all going to depend dramatically on the type of customers you're trying to get. So str structurally this will work for you no matter your market. But the copy, the pitch, the calls to action, those are all going to need to be modified to match your ideal customer. So just come into it understanding that. But what we've got here is essentially we've got a call out and a headline. So we're clear on who this is for. Real estate investors, we've got a headline of what they can get. So you can save 10 to $50,000 on taxes with a CPA who's built a seven figure real estate portfolio, which is something very exciting to a lot of real estate investors. Right. Because most CP don't get them at all. Then we've got this video here and this is something called a video sales letter. Okay. And this is like a 5 to 10 minute video basically walking through who this offers for what they can get out of this, why it's different from any other CPA firm that they might be looking at. And then the call to action is to book a call. This is a total oversimplification. By the way, if you want to get my VSL template to know exactly how to put this together, just go to the link pinned in the comments below this video and you can go ahead and get access. And what that's going to include is a CANVA template that we use that you can just fill in the blanks here. Basically it includes a tutorial on how to plug this into your marketing funnel. It also includes my filming checklist. With all the equipment you would need to actually film this thing, it's not as much as what you might think. And then we've got a couple examples of, like, what a finished video sales letter should look like. So if you want to check that out first, link in the comments below. But when you put this video sales letter together, then really all somebody needs to be able to know if they should book a call with you is just this, what we call above the fold portion of your contact page. So they literally don't even have to scroll down to be able to say, oh, man, this is exactly what I've been looking for. And so they click the call to action here, the button. And there's just an application form here, which I'll walk you through in a moment. But if they're not sure, or let's say they're, you know, they don't have their audio on, they can't watch the video for whatever reason. We've got some additional stuff down here, so only 30 spots available this month. We use that to just kind of like seed a little bit of urgency, make people feel like they need to get in now while they have a chance. And you can see here we've got a couple of written testimonials. I will say written testimonials are about the weakest type of testimonial, especially when it's literally just text on the webpage. Because, like, it would be so easy to fake this, right? Like, I could just make up a hundred of these with ChatGPT in like, five seconds. So I wouldn't necessarily rely entirely on these. But you can see if you scroll down even further, we've got all of these screenshots from actually from Ryan's Facebook group of people that he's worked with sharing the experience and sharing how great the experience is working with Ryan. And so this stuff is super helpful as well. And so when somebody lands on this page and they're trying to figure out, is this something I want to book a course and learn more about, they can watch this video sales letter. We've got the call out and the headline, so they really clearly understand what's going on here. And then we've also got these testimonials and social proofs so they can see people just like them who got great results from working with this company. And so then if they're not a real estate investor, they're naturally going to go, oh, man, I don't think this is, like, for me, I don't think this is a company that I need to work with, but if they are a real estate investor and they don't have a tax strategy, then they're going to go, this is clearly, obviously for me, this is something that I need to get into. And so they'll go ahead and fill out an application here. And so you can see on the application here, we've just got name, phone, email. And then the two questions we're using to actually vet people are, what is your total income? And so if they're under $200,000 a year, they won't be able to book a call. They just get a message that says, sorry, we're not a good fit to work together at this time. And then how many rental properties do you own? So if they don't own any rental properties, same deal, we can't really help them yet. And so they can go ahead and pick a time and. And if they click that, it's literally just a typical calendar booking widget just like this. So they put in their name, email, and then they pick a time and they can schedule. And so by setting up your application page like this, in the last month, Ryan has gotten 693 visitors, or we'll say 536 unique visitors on his application landing page, this one. And out of those, 8% went and booked a call, which again, is like a huge number. And then once they get to the book a call page, like 95% of people who fill out an application actually go forward and book a call, which again, really great number because that means most people are making it all the way through to the finish line here. That's exactly what we're looking for. Hey, if you like this video and you got some value from it, you'll definitely like this video. Check it out and I'll see you over there.
