We’ve decided to hold another contest in September to reward 3 lucky people with some marketing prizes totaling $11,000. If you’d like to get hooked up with a year of free landing pages and a kickass design, keep reading…
What if you could read the minds of your visitors? Why they didn’t convert, what confused them in your campaign message?
Landing page optimization is an exercise undertaken based on a desire to make your pages convert better. The changes you make are typically based on either a new idea, or the result of an expert critique. Rarely is it in direct response to customer input.
Seems like a great opportunity is being missed here…
The simplest way to find out why your page isn’t converting is to just come right out and ask.
There are a couple of cool products out there that let you do this, either via a survey or live chat.
Conversion Heroes is a series of short 5-question interviews with experts in the field of conversion. Subjects for discussion include landing pages, copywriting, conversion optimization, social media conversion, email marketing, organic SEO for landing pages and A/B & multivariate testing.
Roberta is a regular contributor to Copyblogger.com where she writes the popular Landing Page Makeover series. She also teaches copywriting for American Writers and Artists Institute and writes children’s book reviews for Adoptive Families magazine. She has also served as Technical Editor for Blogging All-in-One for Dummies (April 2010), Google Blogger for Dummies (2009) and Writing Copy for Dummies (2004).
Firstly, a big thank you to Roberta for participating in the interview. The topic for discussion is copywriting for landing pages.
Oli: What process do you use when writing a headline for a landing page?
Roberta: It depends, but generally I don’t write the headline first. I always feel like that’s too much pressure. Instead, I just dig into the body copy for the promotion. By involving myself deeply in the meat of the product or service, ideas for headlines generally bubble to the surface. I keep a yellow pad handy or a Notepad window open on my screen for jotting headlines down as they come to me, but continue to work on the other writing. When I feel like I’ve pretty much got the basic copy down, I return to the headline list. I may write more or I may start reviewing and editing what I’ve already listed. My approach is very non-linear, but I prefer to let the ideas flow as they flow.
Now that we’ve had a year of blog posts at Unbounce, I thought it would be worth digging back through the pile to uncover the most popular ones. Our Top 10 is based on a combination of factors, including the reactions of our readers – comments, retweets and inbound links.
Enjoy looking back on the best of Unbounce…
![The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program [Infographic]](/photos/12-step-landing-page-rehab-80-th.jpg)
![The 7 Secrets of Social Media Conversion [INFOGRAPHIC]](/photos/7-secrets-thumb.png)
![The MR. MEN Guide to Landing Pages, Conversion & Absurd Metaphor [Infographic]](/photos/mr-happy.gif)
![Landing Pages for PPC [Infographic]](/photos/ppc-landing-pages-th.png)
We’ve just tested out an exciting new integration with the guys over at Visual Website Optimizer, which adds the capability for you to run multivariate tests (MVT) on your Unbounce landing pages! It also has built-in visual heatmaps and clickmaps to show you where your visitors are interacting with your page.
A year ago, when the six of us sat in a Vancouver restaurant to agree that we were going to start our new company, I started work on a makeshift website, primarily to expose our value proposition and to house the beginnings of the blog you are now reading. Prior to releasing our first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) we wanted to generate some business leads.
Lead gen is all about the prize you give to the provider of personal data, and we needed something (as a friend and investor often said to us) to sell the fire and not the fire extinguisher. Meaning that we needed to address the pain which would naturally lead to an enhanced desire for the pain relief.
With that in mind I corralled the team at Jason’s place for a 2 hour brainstorm session, where I hoped to get enough stickies on the wall to create an ebook worth exchanging an email for. By the end of the session, we had several hundred post-it notes – some great and some ridiculous and I headed home to start writing.
Despite fears that this could take a week, I worked all night and in the morning presented the team with a 27-page PDF of the official Unbounce eBook – “101 Landing Page Optimization Tips – An Opinionated Guide to Conversion”.
This was our lead gen prize for the past year and it served us well, building a customer list, spreading the brand and our knowledge on the subject of conversion.
Looking back on that day where we did what needed to be done to achieve a goal, is a fond memory, but today, on the anniversary of the creation of Unbounce, I’ve decided to remove the shackles of the lead gen form and turn the PDF into a 5000ft blog article for everyone to read without impediment.
Reporting on the success (or failure) of your marketing campaigns is a massive pain. I’d rather stick a pitchfork in my ankle than wait for a monthly report from an IT department, or sit through a 30-slide presentation of Google Analytics charts by a business analyst. And it’s only getting worse now that the concept of multiple inbound marketing channels has reached the mainstream (which is a great thing btw).
Marketers are using more sources for driving traffic than ever and it’s causing funnel gridlock. Sending up to 7 different traffic sources into the same page (hopefully you’re using landing pages and not your homepage) makes it impossible to know what’s working and what isn’t.
So how do you figure out which traffic sources are performing and where best to focus your marketing efforts?
Consider the configuration presented below. Notice how each inbound source uses it’s own landing page. It’s super simple and will make your headache go away. Read on to learn about the benefits of segmenting to separate landing pages.
The conversion scorecard is a tool you can use to gauge the effectiveness (or readiness) of your landing pages, in a simple 20-question yes/no format.
Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is to get a quick ballpark sense of how good you landing page is and how many rules your page is breaking. You probably wouldn’t want to do this exercise on a page that’s doing really well as rules and best practices are only a starting point and you should never interfere with a successful campaign.
Then take all your “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page.
We’re announcing some changes to our pricing plans that will make marketing to your landing pages even more cost effective. At the same time we’re rolling out a new feature that many of you have been asking for – multiple custom domains.
Unbounce is on a search to uncover the top 100 posts about the subjects of conversion:
We’ll be compiling them into a greatest hits compendium with some analysis and organization based on content.
So, if you have written a great post, or know about a post you think is worthy, add it to the list in the comments.
Go…
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.
