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.
HiPPO's are big and powerful, and hard to argue with. Use the diplomacy of an A/B test to solve the corporate version of a family argument
The HiPPO I’m referring to is the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. Typically the voice of an uncreative senior management type that likes to ask if you can “make the logo bigger”.
Sitting around a boardroom table with a giant projection of your latest design or web page splashed across the wall. Conjecture and opinion fly – generally in the face of conventional wisdom or plain old common sense.
You argue back and forth using your most experienced and educated insights to nullify the stupidity – hopefully mixed in with some examples of previous campaigns where a certain idea didn’t work.
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:
Which test tube has the magic elixir in it? A, B or C?
Whoa there, easy Tiger! Why would you say such a thing? Well, first of all let me qualify that statement.
Both forms of testing have their individual merits and can be used for different situations. A/B is quick and simple and can tell you which page works better for your target audience. Multivariate can test a multitude of options and variants to come up with the absolute peak performer out of hundreds of potential landing page element combination’s. (However, there are certain restrictions that mean that Multivariate (MVT) isn’t even statistically viable until you have masses of traffic).
Note: if you’re unsure of the differences between A/B Testing & Multivariate Testing you should read this post on the differences for clarity.
And the truth shall set your landing pages free! (photo credit - The Truth Group)
Simply put, A|B split testing isn’t a silver bullet or a panacea for improved conversion rate on your landing pages.
What it is, is an opportunity. A mechanism by which you can begin to understand the behavior of your customers and start to build upon that knowledge over time by testing and tweaking your campaign’s effectiveness.
Testing is exciting. It allows you to see which copy, imagery and page layouts create the desired emotional response in your target demographic.
These micro brand hints can be fed back into how you speak to customers on the phone, they can allow informed design decisions to be enacted on your website, and they can put more money in your pocket.
Basically, I want the whole page to be a massive logo. Can we do that?
We’ve all been there. You’re in the boardroom presenting your latest website or landing page design. You pulled an all-nighter to get it ready in time, and you’re mighty proud of how you’ve mixed contemporary Web 2.0 design principles with usability best practices and interaction design patterns. The meeting goes great, everyone claps, but just as you’re packing up, the boss says:
“I like it. It’s good. But I’m wondering if we can just <insert cliche design commentary here>?”
Get in the habit of measuring things. You never know when they'll turn out to be bigger than you thought...
The quest for lead generation is a simple fact of marketing life. Companies require personal data to fill their sales funnels and maintain momentum, and the data that they seek varies from the simple to the extreme.
Informational requirements vary greatly depending on the campaign and the product or service being sold. But more than anything it’s influenced by the need (or greed) of the departments in your company.
Landing Page form threshold is the minimum agreed upon set of information requirements that still produce an acceptable conversion rate.
The design of a lead-gen form on a landing page always starts in the same place (simplicity), and grows according to the same law of information desire.
The following fictional dialog may sound familiar:
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.
