This week I did a guest post over on SEOmoz called: The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program. It presents a guided visualization of the conversion funnel and where (and how) you can apply optimization and design techniques to improve the conversion rate of your landing pages.
Each step provides a lesson that can then be implemented via the doctors orders at the end of the step.
This post is the first in a series exploring the Landing Page Manifesto – which is a set of guiding principles for producing effective landing pages. The idea is to recognize the various elements required to address the complexities of conversion centered design, and teach it through the use of metaphor.
Each follow-up post in this series will take one idea from the manifesto and explore it via example and metaphor for greater comprehension.
If you like the typographic treatment of this concept, please comment below and I’ll make a poster sized version.
Nice T-shirt. Terrible way to spend your inbound marketing budget.
There’s a simple point to be made here. When you’re sending multiple streams of inbound traffic to your homepage (or registration page, cart page) the original upstream ad message gets lost in a flood of generic multi-channel multi-product communication that dilutes the experience to the point where the visitor just does the browser shrug and leaves.
For the record, the browser shrug is the physical embodiment of real-life disappointment, akin to a simultaneous clicking of the back button whilst saying “meh” out loud.
It sounds a bit like a modern-day women’s tennis match.
At the recent Launch Party Vancouver 9 (#LPV9 on Twitter), Unbounce got a great surprise by taking home the judges choice for startup most likely to succeed. It was a great event with a massive turnout from the local Vancouver startup and investment community and a strong contingent from Silicon Valley including Flowtown’s Dan Martell.
Huge thanks to the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society who puts on the Launch Party events, and to the 8 judges (Michael Arrington, Jason Bailey, Katherine Barr, Rob Richards, Amar Varma, Stewart Butterfield, Debbie Landa and Dean Prelazzi) who gave us the nod.
You can read more about the event at Launch Party HQ – and photos from the event are up on Flickr.
Check out the Unbounce video we submitted to Launch Party.
While we don’t yet have a grouping feature, you can achieve the same functionality by adding a box element to your page (then making it transparent with no border so it’s invisible if required).
Now you can select this box by clicking on it and other elements you add (text, image, form etc.) will become children of the box – which means if you select and drag or copy the box, all of it’s contained elements will follow along.
Example
If you want to create a feature or benefit list with a title, description and bullet list graphic icon, you can dump them all inside a box (you can’t drag them in to make this work, you must select the box and add the other elements after). Now you can select the box ad click the duplicate button to get a new copy of the whole structure.
Sometimes you can lose an element on your landing page as you work in the editor. Often it’s become too small to find or grab (for moving around) – or maybe it’s moved behind another object.
The simplest way to deal with this is to open the “Page Contents” panel on the left side of the editor.
It’s a little bit hidden away, but if you look to the left when you are editing a page you’ll see a black line with an arrow – click this to expand the left panel.
Now you will see a tree structure which shows the hierarchical layout of your landing page in terms of the elements on the page.
You can double-click on them to edit the name (for organization) – or you can click them once to make them selected. Now if you mouse back over the central editing area, you’ll see your page element highlighted with the familiar dashed line – enabling you to move it around (drag or nudge with the arrow keys – use Shift + arrow keys to nudge by 10px at a time). And you can now also delete the element if you want to get rid of it.
Yes I do! From my lists...
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Dont get me wrong, I love Twitter lists. When you have a big following, they let you segment and prioritize without kicking everyone out of the ark.
What I don’t get is why they turn off the RT feature when you are viewing content from within a list! This is the most relevant and interesting content Twitter has to offer me (because I filtered it as such). Yet I’m left with oldschool cut ‘n’ paste vs. the Retweet button.
They probably have a reason for it, but I want to hear how justifiable they think it is.
If it makes you crazy or you know why they do it, please let me know.
Looking for some design inspiration for your next landing page? We’ve just started a new landing page examples section in the Unbounce blog where we’re going to feature the best examples of landing pages that we find on our marketing travels. In each post we’ll break down the anatomy of the landing page and look at what’s good and where they could be improved.
To kick things off here are 5 great examples of lead gen and click-through landing pages:
An example of excellent message match between banner and landing page is shown by Full Sail. They also offer up 2 different design versions to test their messaging in an A/B test.
Here’s a great example of an A/B test on an education lead gen landing page. It’s a common strategy in education to use banner ads and PPC to drive traffic to a landing page where data is captured in exchange for course information.
The main elements being tested here are the color palette, hero shot imagery and primary messaging.
Type of Landing Page: Lead Gen
Source: http://www.fullsail.edu/
Built Using Unbounce: No
You can see from the two landing page examples below that there is a very strong message match – both visually and in terms of the primary headline.
(Click on the landing page images for a closeup)
Download our free white papers and reports for some bedtime conversion optimization reading.
Read our opinionated guide to landing page conversion.
Using Twitter to enhance, promote and measure your landing page campaigns.
A collection of articles about landing page fundamentals.
