The Conversion Scorecard

Also included in the post is a scorecard to measure the state of your landing pages.

Pop over to SEOmoz to read the complete article and see the scorecard.

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.

– Oli Gardner

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.

Sounds much like women’s tennis.

A great example of the crowded marketplace that is a homepage vs. a focused landing page can be seen in this comparison post about Campaign Monitor. Where the landing page has 1 interaction point vs. 412 on the homepage.

Inbound marketing sources typically include email, PPC, banners (display ads) and social media. Each of these sources should be treated with the respect the ads deserve – which means a nicely tailored landing page for each.

Stop wasting money and time sending traffic to your homepage.

Exception

There’s an exception to most rules (don’t eat yellow snow is fairly safe however). If you’re selling a single product or service that’s very focused, then sending traffic to your homepage is totally OK – just make sure you do actually spend some time testing your home page to make it convert better. Remember to edit ruthlessly and refine your messaging to really explain with clarity what it is you do/offer.

You should still use a landing page when you are running promotions (particularly private ones for affiliates and such) so that you can keep your homepage clear of all the clutter.

That’s all for now.

– Oli Gardner

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.

A short video about Unbounce

Check out the Unbounce video we submitted to Launch Party.

(Click infographic for full size view)

Social media should be good for business, but there are two lingering problems. Firstly, the stubborn gaggle of non-adopters that doth protest too much – “it should be for personal use, not business”. Secondly, most people that are using social media for inbound marketing are doing a poor job of converting the traffic once it arrives.

If you’re using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to drive traffic to your business – but the results are less than inspiring – you’re probably making fundamental mistakes during the conversion phase of the social media conversion funnel (see the infographic attached to this post).

The 7 Secrets

While they’re not as sexy as Victoria’s, or even close to being in the same league as “Aladdin’s Cave” – these 7 secrets (shhh) will help you leverage social media in smarter ways to improve your conversions.

SECRET #1 – Use a landing page please

Let’s start with a simple vocal warmup exercise. Repeat this phrase out loud until your coworkers tell you to be shut up:

• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”

Your homepage is a terrible destination choice for social campaign traffic because your message gets diluted upon arrival. Landing pages on the other hand are purposely designed to be one dimensional so your 140 character tweet (for example) can be expanded upon without distraction from other messages.

From a practical perspective, if you tried to update your homepage to reflect every promotion and lead generation campaign you do, it would quickly turn into an ugly mess and would be impossible to measure or test. Not to mention the grief you’d get trying to convince a boardroom full of stakeholders for approval.

Compare these two (slightly convoluted) scenarios

Scenario A

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste (bear with me), and drops you off at the supermarket. If you manage to find the toothpaste aisle, you’ll be so overwhelmed by the choice that the odds of you getting the right kind are akin to pinning the tail on the donkey. And that’s if the magazine rack and the booze section don’t distract you first.

Scenario B

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste and takes you to a room dedicated to only that type of toothpaste. There are posters on the wall explaining the benefits and there is a big shiny cash register with a large “buy the toothpaste you are looking for here” sign above it.

Which scenario do you want your customers to experience? (The correct answer is B).

SECRET #2 – Social message match

The primary message on your landing page should be the same (or reflective of) what you said in your social media channel. Like positive reinforcement for dogs, seeing a familiar message adds to the feeling that you made a “good” click. Conversely, not having a matched message can make your visitors feel lost – at which point they head for the comfort of the back button.

Stick to the tone of your seed message. Chances are that if someone clicked on your link then they connected with your style. If you are using a quirky short form on Twitter, repeat this on the landing page. If you’re driving corporate business traffic from LinkedIn then maintain a more formal style. Consistency is the key here.

For extra reinforcement, use an icon or design element that reflects the upstream social source. There are a million free social media icons that you can use for this purpose. It can work a little like a socially co-branded experience between the source and your brand; where you can clearly tell where you came from and where you are going.

[TIP] Use a landing page for each traffic source

Using a different landing page for each social media traffic source lets you personalize the experience and improves the social message match. It also makes it much easier to track the performance of your pages and determine which traffic source converts the best.

[Example] – Contextual social message match

The WP Greet Box Wordpress plugin is used to provide a contextually relevant icon and message to visitors form social media sites. It detects where you came form and suggests that you follow/like etc.

SECRET #3 – Social proof via social media widgets

Most people are a bit like sheep. They have no idea where they are going and no idea if it’s a good idea. Our herd mentality makes us want constant validation that our choices are sound. We do this by seeking reviews of products and services and we observe the reactions of others as they experience the goods before us.

Imagine walking down a street; on one side is a person staring straight up, on the other side is a large group of 30 people all looking up at the sky. We are programmed to react more strongly to the inferred wisdom of the crowd and will gravitate towards checking out what the group is doing first.

This is a form of social proof, which can be used in the digital realm as an aide to conversion manipulation or optimization. There are a few techniques you can use to replicate it on your landing page:

• Show your popularity: use a social media widget to show how many Twitter followers, article retweet’s and Facebook likes/fans you have.

  

• Show your success: testimonials show people that you have made someone else happy. Make sure they are authentic and provide a photo if possible. Ideally show the support of an influencer in the common space you share with your customers. You can also use social media widgets to show a timeline of “reactions” from various channels (such as an @yourname feed from Twitter).

Cats are like sheep too

Whiskas cat food used this concept to great effect in their 80s/90s ad campaigns declaring: 8 out of 10 cats prefer it. People believed it then, they’ll believe it now, especially if you show the proof.

SECRET #4 – Make it easy to share with social media widgets

Having your content shared might not be your primary conversion goal, but it can be an important source of bonus traffic – or it can be the difference between mild and epic success. The multiplicative effects of viral exposure are often the tipping point in a social media campaign.

Motivation comes in numerous forms from self expression (the online equivalent of placing your favourite books or CDs in view for your houseguests) to status (the “I saw it first” effect). Some people are gagging to find quality content to share as it reflects well on their perceived connectedness. If you have a great product, service or offer, enhance this motivational desire by making it really simple to share. Test different sharing mechanisms to see which your audience responds to the most.

No barrier to entry

One of the simplest sharing methods for Facebook users is the new Like button widget. Many Facebook’ers are in a permanently logged-in state – which lets them interact in a single click without leaving your page.

Familiarity breeds interaction

Be consistent with your traffic source, e.g. if they arrived via Twitter – have a Retweet button as it offers the lowest barrier to your “sharing” conversion goal.

[Example] – follow and share to enter a contest

This example uses Twitter widgets to ask people to follow and share in order to gain entry to a contest. (Source http://campl.us/)

SECRET #5 – The world’s shortest lead gen form

Conversion is a balancing act between enticement and resistance (barriers to entry).

If you are collecting leads (personal data such as name, email, phone number, company, website etc.) then your lead gen form is a barrier to entry and the size of the barrier is directly correlated to the size of the form (number of fields).

When collecting personal data, you need to offer something back to the customer in exchange, such as a whitepaper, webinar registration, eBook and so on. The more relevant and interesting your giveaway is, the larger you can make the hurdle.

This balance can be tough to achieve, when people in your company are asking you to add extra fields to the form to get the data they so badly need.

A solution to this is to remove every field from your form except the email address.

In the past this would mean you would have empty meaningless data and the subsequent email campaigns targeting these new leads would be impersonal (no first name). With the use of post-conversion social discovery tools like Flowtown you can get the best of both worlds, by lowering the barrier to entry all the way down, while still receiving the data you need.

Secret #7 below sheds more light on this. But for now the important lesson is that you can greatly increase your conversion rate on lead gen campaigns by leveraging the power of a short form – without sacrificing the quality of your data.

SECRET #6 – Use a safety net CTA

Sadly, not everyone that comes to your landing page is ready to convert. They may be window shopping, browsing or just curious about what you have to say. By offering a secondary call to action (CTA) you can sometimes persuade the visitor to maintain a connection with you.

The simplest ways to do this are to provide a method to:

• Follow you on Twitter
• Like your Facebook page or group
• Join a LinkedIn group
• Bookmark you on Delicious

Even if 1 in 100 decide to do this, it adds up to future conversion potential because they have entered your sphere of brand influence.

Note: You don’t want this to take away from your primary CTA, so place it in the footer or near the bottom of the page.

SECRET #7 – Post-conversion social discovery

Post-conversion strategy is a completely overlooked part of the sales funnel. You got your conversion and you got your lead so everything’s good right? Wrong.

There are 2 main ways to optimize your post-conversion opportunities:

• Good: Place additional CTA’s on your confirmation or thankyou page (after they complete your lead gen form). This can help to reduce clutter on your landing page. And you can also suggest a page on your website as their next step – knowing that they have a qualified level of interest.
• Better: Turn the email into a complete social profile using a service like Flowtown. This gives your leads an identity and sets you up for more targeted follow-up marketing. Your first contact with the prospect is critical, and the more you know about them the better. By connecting based on real profile data you look like someone who’s made the effort to do some research before making contact. This is a massive conversion advantage.

As I mentioned in secret #5, social discovery lets you shorten your lead gen forms to improve your conversion rate. And while it’s true that a social profile may not answer every question you have about your new prospects, what it does is provide you with a level of personal data that can start a more effective conversation.

In Summary

For your next social media campaign or promotion, try a few of the 7 secrets to improve the conversion phase of your social media funnel. As a starting point, make sure you begin with #1, #2, #5 and #7 on your next lead gen landing page.

A word of caution: using all 7 secrets at once may cause undesirable side-effects such as content bloating and sweaty widgets. If you don’t need a form, don’t use one (obvious), and if you want to utilize social sharing widgets, pick one (relevant to your audience) not twenty.

Share this post

If you think these secrets should be shared just remember to add a #shhhh hashtag on Twitter.

– Oli Gardner

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.

What gives Twitter?

They probably have a reason for it, but I want to hear how justifiable they think it is.

Does this bug you too?

If it makes you crazy or you know why they do it, please let me know.

– Oli Gardner

To kick things off here are 5 great examples of lead gen and click-through landing pages:

Full Sail University – with an A/B test of two designs

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.

View the full analysis

iBrite – an iPad app

An e-commerce landing page for the iBrite iPad app. Includes an energetic video demonstrating the app being used.

View the full analysis

Campaign Monitor

A beautiful landing page from email provider Campaign Monitor, that should serve as inspiration for your click-through page designs.

View the full analysis

Webtrends

A super simple and clean lead capture landing page from Webtrends.

View the full analysis

Glow.com

The thumbnail shown is only a small portion of what is a long landing page from cosmetics company Glow. Read the full post to learn how they constructed one big page out of several smaller screen-sized landing page areas.

View the full analysis

We’ll be adding new landing page examples every week, and if you have one you’d like to submit for inclusion be sure to drop me a line at oli@unbounce.com.

I come from the user experience (UX) crowd, indulging in usability, interaction design, information architecture and other such altruistic endeavours rooted in a desire to make the web work better for “the customer”. The marketing guys had an entirely different agenda with no real concern for anything but the bottom line.

We were discussing ideas for a new campaign and how to integrate it into the corporate website. They wanted to use a separate standalone “landing page”. I’d never heard the term before and started to gag when I heard the list of requirements.

What I hated about the “landing page”

The landing page was going to break rules I usually worked hard to uphold. From a user centered design (UCD) perspective, I was worried about three main things:

1. No navigation: It struck me as being a tunnel-vision design tactic to try and trap the user on the page, not allowing them to determine their own experience.
2. No link on the logo: This is a similar point and breaks a fundamental rule of facilitating simple transport to the homepage. Why make them type in the URL, or delete half of what’s in the address bar?
3. Inaccessible: The design was almost completely image based, chopped into several large graphics and dumped on the page – rather than being a well constructed HTML page with accessible content (to readers and syndication) and good SEO value.

My thinking: This will just lead to annoyed visitors and lots of attention being paid to the back button.

Gather Round as I Admit to Being Wrong

I don’t say “I’m wrong” all that often. Not because I’m a rancidly stubborn egomaniac. Rather because I just happen to be naturally good at stuff (#notmyfault). But in this instance I was completely wrong. Not with regard to my concerns, but with their relative importance. You need to use a different mindset when approaching design for conversion. Landing pages, as it turns out, are actually a pretty good idea.

Landing pages aren’t so bad

Positioned right in the middle of the sales funnel, landing pages play a critical binding role in the conversion experience of your visitors. They should be educational – to expand upon the ad message that brought them your way. They should offer value – if you’re giving something away, make it good. Trickery has no part to play in a real marketing campaign and you should aim to make your customer’s day a little better by providing a product or service with real and tangible benefits.

What I like about landing pages

Over time I’ve come to understand the role landing pages (and marketing people) play in making a business successful, and I can honestly say that I like them both more than I used to. I won’t say “love”, because I’m reserving that for things like bonus cheques, girls, and wine from Argentina. What I will do is share a few key lesson I’ve learned.

Looking back at 2004 and my earlier issues, I came up with this new list:

1. One thing at a time: While writing this post I got up from my laptop at least 30 times. Why? Because I have ADD and I’m easily bored. Guess what? So do/are your potential customers. It’s hard to dedicate your attention to something when there are so many distractions around you. Landing pages – when done right – have a single focused objective and they don’t let you wander off (because they remove the navigation and you can’t click on the logo).
2. Designed for a specific purpose: Websites are designed to deal with multiple goals, maybe multiple personas, and they need to accommodate technical visitors such as search engines. Landing pages can be about nothing more than a single idea. A campaign should have a single measurable goal, and your landing page should be a selfish reflection of that.



3. Creative freedom: Not being tethered to your company’s website guidelines gives you significantly wider creative latitude. Try a full-page background image with a button layered over the top. Switch to a black background to create a more intense mood than your corporate site. Push the boundaries in the name of conversion (but not at the expense of brand values). Test new or crazy ideas without having to design by committee. If you end up arguing direction in the boardroom, do an A/B test with each idea and prove which is best. Remove conjecture.
4. Communication oriented: Yes it might be image heavy, but sometimes it’s better to have a compelling typographic treatment that communicates effectively, than having a page of dull 12pt Verdana text. Note: If you are doing paid search via Google AdWords or similar, then you need to pay closer attention to the actual HTML text content in order to maintain a good quality score. It’s not the be all and end all, but is something you should take into account. You may gain better placement and a lower cost per click (CPC) if you have bot-readable text that matches your ad.
5. SEO is not always a factor*: Typically, a campaign specific landing page is designed to be withheld from the search engines to stop it interfering with your conversion stats (when running a PPC campaign for example). This allows you to focus on the purity of your message, as opposed to trying to insert keyword-rich phrases in your copy. *The exception is the type of single page website that uses a sales letter style template (with a ton of content), and is created to attract organic traffic.

At the end of the day, if you are connecting customers with valuable products and services, then conversion centered design is solving a user centered problem. And everybody wins.

What do you think about landing pages?

Share your opinions on landing pages as a concept, and why you love or hate them.

– Oli Gardner

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.

Why Did They Leave?

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:

1. They were blog post transients: blogs have an inherently high bounce rate. People visit (often via social media), read your content and leave.
2. You sent paid traffic to your homepage: tsk tsk rookie. Read my last post about ping pong balls to see why this was a bad move.
3. A communication breakdown: your messaging wasn’t clear enough to be effective.
4. You suck: Not much I can do to help you here.

Bringing them back

I started writing this post while thinking about our friends at ReTargeter, halfway down the left coast in California. Their idea is to serve up banner ads to people who’ve visited your site (as they travel around other sites). The thinking is that by repeatedly exposing visitors to your message, it has a higher chance of sinking in. This is in agreement with the thinking of many email marketers, who suggest that it can take up to 7 instances of communication before the “average” prospect becomes a customer.

It’s a cool concept, and one we’re about to try out for ourselves here at Unbounce. Which brings me back to my inspiration for the post. If you’re going to bring visitors back for another kick at the can, you need to ensure the new experience is better than the first one. This requires focus, clarity and the ability to communicate quickly to people with attention issues.

Another way to bring people back to your site is via email marketing.

This assumes that you have the prospect on an email list – generated via a lead gen campaign. You captured their interest at some level (perhaps by offering a free whitepaper), sent them a follow-up email and they didn’t convert. As I mentioned above, with email marketing you typically need to communicate several times before you hook the customer with the right message. This is equal parts luck, timing and relevance. Even the most targeted of customers has better things to do most of the time and may not be stirred into action until the timing is right.

Luck can’t be helped. Timing can’t be predicted. And relevance comes down to how you generated the lead in the first place!

I know it’s all starting to sound like mission impossible, but given how hard you worked to gain even this small amount of interest from a prospect, the critical lesson here is to maximize your opportunity when it does arise.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you should be able to read into all the foreshadowing and predict what I’m about to suggest as a solution: yup, a landing page. Landing pages are fundamentally designed to capitalize on this opportunity.

Making the Most of Your Second Chance by Using a Landing Page

Here’s a 5-step process you can use to improve your conversion opportunities if you’re re-targeting your customers (via a service like ReTargeter, or via an email campaign) :

1. Walk a mile in your user’s shoes. Step back and try to think like a customer. What is the main message they see when they hit your homepage? If you show it to a few strangers, can they summarize what you do after a few seconds of exposure? What about arriving at your site on a blog post? Is there a message on the page that communicates what you do?
2. Do a pain-point analysis chart. This is an experience path exercise where you plot a curve of emotional reaction. Pick a typical flow and “walk the path”, adding a positive or negative score to your chart at each step. An example would be searching in Google, finding a search result, clicking the search result, arriving at your homepage, not being able to find the product you were looking for etc. For each step, add a dot on the chart either moving upwards (+ve) or downwards (-ve) from the last step. You’ll be able to see where the experience breaks down (a big negative turn) and address this point in your experience.
3. Nail your elevator pitch. Take a friend or co-worker to an “actual” elevator. Travel up and down until you’re confident describing your core value proposition in a succinct manner.
4. Design a landing page that bleeds clarity. Using your elevator pitch as inspiration, design a new landing page for your next marketing campaign. Read about how to create a landing page design concept in 10 minutes.
5. Send your re-targeted marketing traffic to the landing page. Track the conversion rate of your new landing page and don’t forget to start testing new messaging and design ideas.

Not everyone deserves a second chance – and similarly, your visitors don’t deserve to have to show up twice to be convinced. So if they do happen to come back, you’d better make sure you treat them right.

– Oli Gardner

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.

Grab Some Balls and Throw Them at Your Colleagues

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).

Step 1

First, throw a single ping pong ball at the volunteer. Typically they’ll catch this ball – representing a customer dealing with, and receiving, a single focused message.

Step 2

Next, throw 4 balls at the same time. Most people will catch one or two, some miss them all entirely. You get the point – juggling is hard.

To be extra clear. The point is that by sending your marketing traffic to an unfocused landing experience you risk them missing your message.

Your Homepage is No Place to Send Advertising Traffic

It’s not rocket science, marketing science, or even particularly complicated. It’s simply a matter of attention and focus. Despite the proliferation of Yoga here on the west coast, we’re still part of the Ritalin-infused attention deficit generation – which means the brains of our potential customers can absorb only a finite amount of information in the few seconds they are willing to spend on our websites.

If you want to increase your conversion rate, make sure your customers only have one thing to do at a time.

A Comparison – CampaignMonitor.com

Campaign Monitor have a beautifully designed site. And they also do a cracking job of producing focused landing page experiences. Let’s take a look at their homepage vs. a landing page.

Both pages look great, have well targeted messaging, and fit the brand. But let’s compare them based on the number of interaction points they present to a new visitor:

The Solution to A.D.D.?

Simply stated. You should use a landing page for every promotion you run. This effort is wasted though, if you don’t ensure that the messaging sticks to one concept at a time. So, for your next campaign, try following these 3 guidelines:

1. Guideline 1: Always begin with the product or service you are marketing and create a concept based on this.
2. Guideline 2: Create a landing page that distills your offer into it’s simplest form. Use 1 primary call to action.
3. Guideline 3: Only now should you work on your ad messaging (banners, PPC, email). The message match between ad and landing page is critical. You may have to go back and forth to tweak ad and landing page copy until they work well in unison.

How to Break the Habit

Short of electric shock therapy, and other forms of negative reinforcement, the best way to break the cycle of throwing marketing money down the toilet is simply to try something different. Try building a landing page and start driving your traffic through a more focused marketing funnel.

Once you start seeing higher conversions and a more flexible environment for changing & testing your message, you’ll never go back.

– Oli Gardner