Here’s the scoop cowboy: They came. They saw. They didn’t care. Sad, and perhaps a little painful – if you take these types of thing personally.
Maybe they weren’t ready? Unprepared even.
I’m not here to instill false hope about your business model or promise you a golden chalice of optimized redemption. Really I’m not. That would be silly. If you want to improve your conversions you need to figure out why the horse bolted, and whose fault it was.
There are a few reasons why your wannabe customers skedaddled without paying the toll. If you can analyze them, you might get a second chance at conversion:
What do ping pong balls have to do with conversion rates? It’s all about focus and “message reception”.
Recently, Rick and I have been giving landing page workshops to small businesses and start-ups, and we always kick things off with a game that involves ping pong balls… and an unwitting volunteer. Our purpose is to illustrate the importance of focused messaging on your landing pages.
If you’re the type that has ping pong balls lying around, pick ‘em up and join in. Quick tip: don’t use golf balls as a replacement, they hurt. (If we meet in person, ask me to explain the golf ball incident).
For my latest post, I wrote about Lessons in Conversion Centered Design: 7 Arm-Twisting Persuasion Techniques for Your Landing Pages on the web analytics and internet marketing blog over at VKIStudios.com.
The post uncovers 7 persuasive tactics for increasing conversion on your landing pages:
Head on over to VKI Studios for a read.
Some random smart looking teacher types from WikiCommons
Landing pages are awesome, we all know that. They expand upon your ad message just enough to distill the concept into a bite-sized chunk of marketing goodness. They convert waaay better than the traffic you send to your homepage, and once you understand the basics, they’re pretty simple to put together.
Having said that, there are still a truck load of really really bad landing pages driving around on the old information superhighway.
That’s all about to change…
In the spirit of failed New Year’s resolutions, I’m writing this post 11 days after the fact. We all do a miserable job of living up to our personal commitments, so I figured a few new business goals might be in order to get your marketing campaigns off the proverbial couch and into the gym.
It's time to whip that 2009 marketing stomach into fighting shape!
As an added incentive, I’ve decided to get you to sign a completely non-binding contract with yourself.
What do you want for Christmas? (Photo Credit: ICanHasCheezburger.com)
For the holiday season, I’ve taken a quick stab at re-writing that 12 Days of Christmas ditty. If Christmas ain’t really your thing, then hopefully the lolcat is enough to bring a smile to your face.
Remember to sing along. Preferably after a few egg nog’s or Christmas Ale’s. (It’ll be funnier).
Make your visitors pay attention to your landing page!!!
I’m going to take a different approach to this post and use photography to illustrate some principles of design.
Understanding these fundamental concepts will help you grab your visitors attention and direct them to your intended conversion goal.
The most important element of any landing page is the conversion goal. Similarly, the most important aspect of your landing page design is to focus the visitor’s attention on that conversion area.
You'd be happy too if you were a yellow cartoon ball with a smile to rival Julia Roberts. (Images from Ladybird Books)
Landing pages, conversion rate optimization, bounce rate, blah, blah, blah, blah, yada yada yada.
As important as all of those terms and concepts are, sometimes you need to step back a bit and look at things in a more playful manner.
I find metaphor can greatly aid the process of communication – although as you’ll infer from the title of this post – my examples can at times be a bit of a stretch. Hopefully, this bunch are clear enough to mean something.
And so, with no further posturing or technical jargon, I present to you – The MR. MEN Guide to Landing Pages, Conversion and Absurd Metaphor.
The A to Z of Landing Pages
So you want to get into landing pages hey? Great idea. They can help create more focused marketing campaigns, improve measurability and increase the return on your marketing spend.
If you’re new to the idea of using a landing page for your marketing campaigns, I’ve whipped up a quick A to Z to explain some of the terminology, jargon and theory surrounding their use.
By splitting your budget between traffic and optimization you can find your cost per acquisition sweet spot.
Here’s a little injection of cool with your morning coffee.
Not only is spending a portion of your marketing budget on landing pages beneficial to your bottom line, there’s a way to predict how much you should be spending to optimize your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA).
And today I’ll share that with you.
Unbounce CEO Rick Perreault is actually the architect of this particular theorem, I’m just taking credit for it by writing the blog post.
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.
