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The Conversion Marketing Scorecard

report-card

How awesome or lame is your landing page? There's no hiding from the Conversion Marketing Scorecard.

Let’s start with a simple statement: Most Landing Pages Suck More Than You Think!

Following the principles of denial, the first step in recovery is admitting that you have a problem. If you followed my last post about the 4 Truths of Conversion Marketing, you’ll know that there is a fair amount of psychology involved in delivering the best landing page experiences.

To make things easier, I’ve created an interactive scorecard that walks you through the “4 Truths” and allows you to apply them to your existing landing pages in a simple checklist format.

Scoring your landing page

It’s drop dead simple, just walk through the scorecard while observing your landing page. Answer each question honestly and find out how well your page scores.

Note: if a question is not applicable to your landing page, it’s OK to check the box if you think you would have done this were it relevant.


Assessing Truth #1

Are you describing what the page is about?

Remember that Truth 1 asserts that the customer knows nothing when they first arrive at your landing page. Let’s see how well your elevator pitch is going at the point of introduction.

Score: 0/10

Assessing Truth #2

Are you giving visitors a reason to care?

Truth 2 points out that your landing page needs to improve your customer’s work or personal life in some way. How well are you explaining the benefits of your product or service?

In case they care but not right now.
Score: 0/10

Assessing Truth #3

Are you trustworthy?

Truth 3 is about legitimacy. It’s time to test how well you are presenting transparency, integrity and trust to your visitors.

Score: 0/10

Assessing Truth #4

Is it easy to get started?

Truth 4 is about the white-glove treatment, and leading your customers to the all important call to action. Let’ grade how well your CTA is presented.

Score: 0/10
Total Score: 0/40

Interpreting Your Score

Score Rating What it Means
36-40 Rock Star Landing Page Not much left to do here, you’re basically a design and marketing god. The best use of your time would be sipping on a fine wine while you watch the conversions on your iPhone.
31-35 Second Best This is a great achievement, but like winning a Silver medal in the Olympics, it’s not quite good enough. Just don’t wait 4 years until you make the necessary improvements.
26-30 Better than most Chances are you are converting fairly well. Go back through the checklist and spend a few minutes with each unchecked box to figure out what’s missing. Implement them, and check your score again.
21-25 Meh You are very slightly above average. Mediocrity is only exciting for one reason: there are a lot of conversions out there that you’re missing out on. Go get ‘em champ.
16-20 One eye closed With a score in this range, it’s as if you are trying to ignore half of your potential customers. Imagine yourself standing in the street handing out fliers – everyone on the other side of the street is missing your message.
11-15 Unmemorable If you want people to convert, you need to be unique and memorable. If your product or service isn’t all that different, then the least you can do is follow the basic usability principles of smart landing page design. Try reading our 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips eBook for inspiration.
6-10 The second least popular kid in school One off the bottom. Way to go. Get back to the drawing board and start applying first principles to your landing pages. A good start would be running through our HOW TO: Create a Landing Page Design Concept in 10 Minutes post.
1-5 Pathetic Find a different profession.

What Now?

What you choose to do with your score is up to you. But if your goal is to convert more customers and be more awesome at landing page stuff, then you owe it to yourself to refine your landing page (through testing, observation, analysis and optimization) until it’s busting above that 36 threshold.

How to get started

The simplest way to get started is to keep a list of all your unchecked checkboxes. Consider this your TO-DO List, and work your way through each point until your page is performing better.

Good luck.

Oli Gardner

The Unbounce Challenge

Tell us your score

If you use our scorecard to rate your landing page, we’d love if you’d share your score and a URL to you landing page in the comments below. Then you can come back and comment again once you’ve made some improvements.



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Related posts:

  1. The 5-Minute Conversion Health-Check Scorecard
  2. The 4 Truths of Conversion Marketing
  3. NO Barrier To Entry – A Conversion Marketing Axiom
  4. The Marketing Dance – Getting In Step With Your Customers
  5. 2010 New Year's Marketing Resolutions – You Know Your Landing Page is Fat When…

Comments

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  1. Great resource! Surprised at the lack of buzz.

  2. Sam Noble says:

    This really is an excellent tool and could really help websites improve conversion rates.

    One I will be using in the future when I am looking at landing page designs and layouts – thanks!

  3. Oli Gardner says:

    Thanks Sam. I’m glad you found it useful. I’m going to be doing an updated version in the future to make it a little more flexible so any thoughts or feedback you have while you are using it would be greatly appreciated.

  4. Chris Goward says:

    Great list, Oli. This will certainly help marketers realize where their landing pages are failing.

  5. Nicole_Sheldrake says:

    Yikes! I got 14/40. But I've signed up for Unbounce and am currently devouring the 7 Elements of a Landing Page blog post. Thanks for all the great information. Looking forward to the results!

  6. oligardner says:

    Hi Nicole,
    Thanks for sharing your score! I'm sure you'll be able to make some big improvements by following the tips in the blog posts. Remember to create a To-Do list from the 26 elements that you didn't check off on the scorecard.

    If you feel like sharing your page for more discussion you can jump on over to our Facebook page http://facebook.com/unbounce and we can join in.

    Good luck!

  7. [...] voor niets “hoe goed is jouw landingspagina?”. Afgelopen weekend bezocht ik de “The Conversion Marketing Scorecard“. Op deze pagina worden je 4 vragen gesteld over je [...]

  8. Kraig Guffey says:

    What a great tool!

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