The Unbounce Blog
2010 is the year of landing pages and conversion optimization. Join in as we discuss the evolution of conversion economics, conversion centered design and the art and science of landing pages.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a relatively new discipline that focuses on the manipulation, bending, tweaking and testing of landing pages to find the optimal mix of design, messaging and offer to increase conversion rates.
In 2010 CRO will become a mainstream activity and will infiltrate the workflow of marketers everywhere (enabled by a new wave of marketing products like Unbounce, and a growing number of optimization specialists).
(Our favourite posts about Conversion Rate Optimization)
I want to try something different for this post by making it more of an informal online brainstorm. I’ll pose a topic and a few primary questions, then open it up to comments.
The more people that interact with their opinions, the better the post will become and I’ll re-incorporate them into the post as we go.
Social media is no longer the next big thing, it’s just simply an interaction medium that proliferates all aspects of online life. As such, it will naturally begin to infiltrate the discipline of internet marketing. How this happens is yet to be determined. There seem to be a few toes being dipped in the water, but it’s a little early to get a clear picture of where it’s headed and what’s been successful thus far.
And so, I have some questions:
Today we have another new guest post on the Unbounce blog! The topic surrounds a huge market potential that lies in engaging the large online Hispanic community – by offering landing pages correctly translated into marketing Spanish. The author is Angelica Maria, President of Marketing Translation at Traducción4you.com.
I have been working with optimizing landing pages for a while and have discovered through my work that many people have forgotten to think about the Hispanic demographic. As a Spanish-American myself, when I view a landing page or even a website, the first think I look for is the Spanish option. I know I am not the only one that does this.
Today’s guest post is a conversion optimization case study by Kevin Kaiser from Surety Bonds. In my last post I referenced their lead capture form as a good example of how to keep your CTA above the fold on a lead gen landing page. Kevin discusses how he optimized a primary conversion goal – to have more customers complete a lead capture form to receive a quote.
Over to you Kevin.
Many people approach their web marketing strategy mainly as getting people to their site. They take for granted that once a visitor gets there, the visitor will do exactly what they want them to do.
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. A complete web marketer realizes that you need to tell people what to do when they get to your site. Â The rest of this post will explain some of the things I performed on SuretyBonds.com to help increase conversions by 27%.
All tips are appreciated. Here's 544 ways to make you landing pages convert more effectively.
Optimizing your landing pages or website to perform better is a no-brainer, but if you’re short on time or resources then it helps to have a bag full of tricks to kick things off.
The collection of links below brings together over 500 tips on conversion rate optimization and landing page improvement.
Naturally, there will be some repetition of the core principles, but it’s a good idea to read the perspective of several experts when forming your own opinion.
Click me, squeeze me! Go on, I dare you.
Inspired by a conversion tip from our friends at Wider Funnel, where they suggest that BOB – the Big Orange Button – is an overtly clickable button color, I thought I’d talk a bit about what the web is doing to help improve marketing’s most important element – the Call To Action (CTA).
Buttons on the web have always been a bit lame, forcing designers to find creative ways to improve the customers’ level of click desire.
Well listen up, cos it’s all about to change. Sorta. Kinda. Perhaps in a little while.
Or right away if you use the Safari web browser (sadly I don’t – I’m still a Firefox lover).
Don't make your customers cry by promising and not delivering.
Message match is the ability for your destination or “landing” page to match the content and messaging of the upstream ad you arrive from. Good message match is the foundation of conversion optimization and helps to ensure a smooth experience for your customers.
Aaaaaaaand here’s an example of how to get it horribly wrong…
While checking my email the other day I spotted a sponsored ad at the top of my Gmail inbox.
Uncovering the ever-elusive magic bullet.
I have been optimizing websites from a business/sales perspective for about 8 years, and about a month ago, I finally made that “Magic Bullet” change most people look for when optimizing their sites. Its rare to change a word and double your conversion rate.
I’ve done it on landing pages, emails, and micro-sites, as well as for site “micro conversions” (improving one piece of a larger process, such as a form) but to increase end conversions on a complex eCommerce site with a single word change, without spending a dime or increasing targeted (paid) traffic, this was rare and worth sharing.
In the second of our landing page makeovers, I’m going to look at a landing page designed to sell a book called “Matrix Reimprinting: Using EFT”.
In our first makeover (aimed at providing some advice to small businesses), I used the Conversion Marketing Scorecard to analyze a landing page for a Phoenix language school.
Here is the landing page for the Matrix Reimprinting Book.
Let your customers through.
An Axiom, outside the realm of logic or mathematics, is (to quote Wikipedia) an established principle of some field. Today, I would like to propose the creation of a new ideal, a new axiom, in the field of Conversion Marketing. An ideal is something to strive for. A goal – perhaps lofty – that one aspires to achieve in their work or life.
When it comes to conversion, it pays dividends to reduce the barriers to entry for your potential customers. A free flowing traverse of your online sales funnel; from ad, to landing page, to conversion action is the ultimate goal. And it stands to reason that you will have a greater conversion rate with a low barrier to entry.
That’s the traditional thinking on the subject – mainly from a usability or interaction design perspective.
I’m suggesting that in order to achieve a low barrier to entry, we need to aim for NO barrier to entry.
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.
Today I’m going to present the first in a series of free landing page critiques. Our first example comes from language school LeTutor. My hope is that the simple process described below will be of benefit to others in a similar situation.
I’d like to thank LeTutor for agreeing to the public scrutiny of their landing page, which can be seen below.
The live version of the page can be found here: www.PhoenixSpanish.com.
At first glance this is a decent landing page, well structured with a balanced design and directional cues pointing towards the necessary page flow and Call to Action.
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.
If you can understand the 4 fundamental aspects of visitor behavior you can design for better conversions.
In an earlier post, I likened customer interaction with your landing page to a dance between 2 parties. The primary point of that article was to understand the questions and barriers facing your potential customers, and to unlock a strategy for dealing with these issues.
Key to this process was understanding what your customer is thinking during their visit. We learned that there are 4 primary questions to be considered:
Take a peek inside Unbounce's Greatest Hits for September. (Image source: Vogue Magazine)
September was an exciting month for the Unbounce team. We moved into a new office and cranked into high gear for the big push towards our end of year launch (shhhh).
We bored our friends and family to tears with talk of landing pages and conversion marketing, and we wrote a slew of blog posts to help our readers kick their own landing pages in the butt.
If you’ve only just discovered Unbounce, this is a great place to start as we roll through the highlights from the month.
In today's lesson we'll prove how landing pages can increase your return on marketing spend. (Image: Zazzle T-shirts)
Landing pages are a focused and customized sales pitch, specifically designed to get your visitor to take an action.
As an extension of your upstream advertising (paid search and banners), they have the ability to increase your conversions rates from between 2X-10X compared to the effectiveness of a campaign that doesn’t use them.
In this article, we’ll share some insight into the simple economics of landing page use and answer the question: “Why Should I use a landing page?”
There are several simple answers to this question, the most obvious of which is that it can increase your conversion rate. But how, and by how much?
Download our free white papers and reports for some bedtime conversion optimization reading.
Download our free opinionated guide to landing page conversion.
Using Twitter to enhance, promote and measure your landing page campaigns.
