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).

I’m talking about Radioactive Buttons!

The folks over at Zurb.com have come up with some pulsating and vibrant buttons that really don’t suck. And I quote: “Using CSS animations in Safari, we’re able to turn an otherwise ordinary button into a glowing, radioactive mess of awesome.”

Zurb’s Radioactive Buttons

As you can tell, you need to be using Safari for the full effect, but they still look pretty decent in other non-Microsoft browsers due to the rocking colors. Hopefully the other browsers will catch up shortly and you’ll be able to add big, shiny, glowing buttons to your landing pages.

The important takeaway from this is that they are created purely with CSS (that means no images to cut up) – so once you’ve followed the instructions on how to code it up you’re good to go. (See the links at the bottom of this post for more details on how to do it).

Keeping the Customers Eye on the Prize

While I wouldn’t advocate using 26 buttons on one page like that example, I do know that being able to draw your customers eye to your most important interaction point is a great way to improve your conversion rate.

Conversion Optimization Tip #29
“Have you tested a Big Orange Button? We call him BOB. He works hard.”

Chris Goward
Wider Funnel

The Power of The Big Orange Button

I think the image at the top of this post speaks for itself. It’s big, juicy and delicious and if it doesn’t make your mouth water just by looking at it, then you’re probably color blind. In which case you might have spent your life thinking there was a fruit called Purple.

According to Wikipedia, Orange represents energy, enthusiasm, and a ‘get-it-done’ attitude. Sounds like a call to action to me.

Get it done. Click.

– Oli Gardner

A little bird told me you should have a safe and friendly nest for your Twitter visitors

Twitter landing pages have become a popular method of providing customized experiences for social media visitors.

But exactly what is a Twitter landing page, and how do they compare to the other types of landing page you might be using for your internet marketing? I’ll answer that question and provide some examples of Twitter landing pages that other people have created.

Twitter Landing Pages

A Twitter landing page is a page on your website specifically designed to receive inbound traffic from your profile on Twitter. If you use Twitter to promote your personal or business brand, then just like any other form of campaign or advertising, the effectiveness of your traffic is directly related to the experience you create for your visitors.

The Inbound Link

A standard part of your Twitter profile is the “Web:” attribute that allows you to provide a link to your website or blog. Rather than sending people directly to your homepage you can (and should) create a specialized and focused Twitter landing page for them.

The goal of your Twitter landing page should be to provide quick access to who you are and what you do – bearing in mind that the interested party is a Twitter user, sort of like a mixture of a social and business FAQ.

Why Should I Use a Twitter Landing Page?

Anyone familiar with the concept of landing pages (or this blog) will know that sending people to your homepage will result in a lower conversion rate due to the unfocused and generic messaging they receive there.

When someone clicks on the link in your Twitter profile, they want to know more about you and what you do. You could send them to your About Us page, but knowing they are visiting from Twitter gives you more opportunities for personalization. They may be used to listening to what you say in your Tweets, so there is an established tone that you can repeat on this page.

You have an opportunity to extend the basic profile that appears on Twitter and give them a quick overview of the information and content they are likely to be seeking.

More benefits of a Twitter landing page:

• Improved message match. Like any landing page, you number 1 goal is to match the expectation of the visitor at the time of click, to the experience upon arrival. A Twitter landing page gives you the opportunity to speak to people regarding a shared connection.
• Removing barriers to entry. By inserting a landing page in the user pathway you could be introducing an extra click, however when the pathway is clear and focused this is less of a barrier and more of a guidance tool.
• The personal touch: Twitter is a social medium that probably brings out a style different from the rest of your website. Use your Twitter landing page to provide an intermediary experience that combines the punchy short-form personality of your Tweets with a more professional demeanor.

What Should I Put on My Twitter Landing Page

It depends largely on what your site is about (a personal blog or a business website), but here are some elements for consideration:

• A profile photo. If you use a photo on your Twitter profile, repeating it here completes a personal connection.
• A welcome message. Welcome messages can be wasteful on your homepage, but here you are engaging with someone from a social venue, so greet them as such, mentioning the fact that they are arriving from Twitter.
• A personal elevator pitch. Even your Twitter profile is business focused, it’s nice to provide some detail of the person behind the logo. A single paragraph of interesting personal info increases trust and transparency.
• The business elevator pitch. A short summation of what would typically appear on your “About Us” page.
• Your online network. List all of your online interaction points: LinkedIn, other Twitter accounts (your CEO or customer service), Facebook etc… You don’t kow at this point which is their primary social media venue of choice, so let people choose how to interact with you.
• Greatest Hits. Provide a short list (such as a Top 10) of your best content such as blog posts, or product/service benefits and features.
• Special Twitter Only Offers: To make visitors feel special, provide coupons/vouchers for discounts on your product or service, just for Twitter users. It’s common practice to ask that they follow you in order to participate.

Example Twitter Landing Pages

Here are a few sample Twitter landing pages that I’ve come across, starting with one by Laura Fitton, who is regarded as being the originator of the idea.

• Laura Fitton – @Pistachio
• Darren Rowse – @ProBlogger
• Whole Foods – @WholeFoods
• Dell – @DellOutlet
• National Association of Professional Photographers – @NAPP_News

What About Other Social Media Visitors?

You can follow the exact same principle for visitor from other sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Digg or Delicious. Remember that these landing pages are used to provide an enhanced and expected experience for your visitors, so you should be tailoring experiences for each user type based on an understanding of what they are hoping to achieve by visiting your site.

In the end Twitter landing pages are no different from regular standalone landing pages – they are used to focus the visitors attention, present a high degree of message match and gently guide your users toward their goals with as few negative barriers as possible.

In case you’re wondering why we don’t have one, we’re in the midst of the design of the new Unbounce website for our impending launch, at which point we’ll unveil our own Twitter landing page.

— Oli Gardner

In December we’ll be releasing a private beta version of the Unboune landing page service, and we can’t wait. We’re demo’ing like crazy right now and the feedback so far has been very positive. If you want to participate in this private beta, head to the Unbounce.com homepage and sign up. Then come on back here to check out the list of cool content we wrote over the last 4 weeks:

8 Tricks & Treats From October

1. Epic Marketing Faux Pas

We took a humorous look at the world of bad marketing, courtesy of the Fail Blog. If you need some comic relief then these 13 Epic Marketing Fails should be your first stop. Each photo can be related to an aspect of conversion marketing and offers a lesson in what not to do.

2. And The Truth Shall Set You Free

The 4 Truths of Conversion Marketing examined the relationship between customers and marketers, and the effects that understanding this relationship can have on your conversion rate.

3. A Rating System for Landing Pages

The Conversion Marketing Scorecard built on the 4 Truths by breaking them down into 40 questions used to rate your landing pages. The interactive scoring system can be used to critique your landing pages and develop a To-Do list for optimization planning.

4. Rapid Landing Page Design

If you like prototyping and the energy rush you can get from whipping up a brilliant idea in just a few minutes, then this is for you. Our post on HOW TO: Create a Landing Page Design Concept in 10 Minutes describes a process for delivering an elevator pitch equivalent of an interaction architecture document for your next marketing campaign. Sounds fancy right? Hell yeah! It’s fancy and agile and nimble and perfect for napkin design.

5. 7×7 – The New Off-Road Landing Page Vehicle

I spent 7 days rambling on the number 7 which produced our 7 Days to a Better Landing Page series. It covered a lot of ground (to be perfectly honest – it was a lot more work that I had anticipated), and helped connect landing page fundamentals with other real-world marketing concepts. It also got me out of the house for a field trip which ended with fish ‘n’ chips. That’s cool enough in itself, but if you want the full skinny, here’s the breakdown:

1. Day 1: The 7 Elements of a Winning Landing Page
2. Day 2: 7 Landing Page Metaphors in the Real World
3. Day 3: 7 Types of Landing Page
4. Day 4: 7 Carrots For Lead Gen Landing Page Success
5. Day 5: 7 Guaranteed Ways to Make Your Customers Leave
6. Day 6: 7 Benefits of Using Landing Pages
7. Day 7: 7 Easy Exercises to Boost Your Landing Page Health

6. Landing Pages = Lower CPA: The Proof

In our second post in the Conversion Economics series we uncovered the impacts of spending a proportion of your marketing budget on landing pages. The post, titled Conversion Economics – Finding Your CPA Sweet Spot uncovered that spend approximately 30% of your marketing budget on landing pages vs. traffic can reduce your Cost Per Acquisition significantly.

7. Landing Page Makeovers

We also kicked off a short series of free landing page makeovers. First up was a page from foreign language school LeTutor from Phoenix. There are 2 more makeovers coming soon.

8. Hmmmmmmm

Okay, so there is no number 8. I just got really, really tired of using the number 7, 7 days in a row, with 7 points in each. And so I’m going to ad-lib a little and just make a wee statement for you:

“Landing Pages Rule.”

Convinced? I think you probably are.

– Oli Gardner

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.

Low No Barrier to Entry

I’m suggesting that in order to achieve a low barrier to entry, we need to aim for NO barrier to entry.

To truly live up to this ideal we would have to remove all lead generation or sign-up forms, which isn’t a realistic option. What I’m really trying to get at here is that if you can at least believe in the principle of working toward an ideal, you will ultimately get closer to that ideal by keeping it present in your process, focus and mindset.

So, next time you design a landing page, knock down those barriers until there are none left. Then stand up a few of the really important ones as you apologize to the Axiom for your human imperfections.

– Oli Gardner

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.

Conversion Economics Revisited

I kicked off our Conversion Economics series a few weeks ago with the Conversion Economics 101 starter kit. Today I’ll extend that by exposing exactly how much of your marketing oyster should be shucked off on those slippery little suckers we call landing pages.

(If I’ve got you thinking of the scene in Pretty Woman where Julia Roberts flips a snail off the table, then you know I’m adequately controlling your thoughts).

How much of your marketing budget should you spend on creating and optimizing landing pages?

According to information from Omniture (a world leader in web analytics), you can achieve a 25% improvement in conversion rate by using a promotion-specific, standalone landing page (vs. sending paid search visitors to your homepage).

Assumptions: Taking 25% as our base conversion improvement value, let’s also set $10,000 as our monthly marketing campaign budget.

Reducing Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Our goal is to analyze the effect of taking a portion of the monthly marketing spend and using it to pay someone (anyone really) for the purpose of conversion rate optimization (CRO).

If you assume that 100% of the budget is spent on generating traffic via paid search (Google AdWords in this example), then what happens when you reduce that amount? Obviously the traffic will drop in direct proportion to the drop in budget.

Now, what if you spend 10%, 20%, 30% of your budget on optimizing your landing page instead of paying for traffic? In this case, 10% equates to $1,000, which will buy you a couple of days of concerted effort toward improving your landing page.

What effect wil this have on your average CPA?

Finding Your Sweet Spot

The table below shows what happens when you start taking cash away from traffic to put into improving your conversion rate through optimization strategies, and how much money you should be throwing in this direction.

What does this tell us?

What these numbers say is threefold:

1. Spending a portion of your marketing budget on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) will yield a lower cost per acquisition for each customer.
2. There is a limit (or sweet spot) to how much you should separate into this endeavor.
3. In this example the sweet spot occurs when you are spending 30% of your budget on optimization. Spend any more and the CPA climbs as the loss in traffic catches up.

Finding the sweet spot for your CPA…

Your own private sweet spot will depend on how successful your CRO efforts are, perhaps you’ll only achieve a 10% increase per $1,000 spent. The only difference is that you’ll have a different chart and a different sweet spot. The important thing to learn here is that there does exist a point where you optimize your expenditure based on optimization efforts.

Find your sweet spot and you find the key to a minimized CPA.

Now ain’t that sweet!

– Oli Gardner & Rick Perreault

You have to work on your landing pages to maintain a healthy conversion rate.

Today we come to the end of the 7 Days to a Better Landing Page series, and I’m going to leave you with a series of exercises you can use to keep the momentum going after you launch a landing page.

If you are in the business of creating marketing campaigns, I’m hoping you are using landing pages focus your paid traffic. And hopefully, you’ve also employed some of the tactics and strategies we’ve discussed on the Unbounce blog to enhance it’s performance.

Using a landing page puts you ahead of the game

Simply by having a landing page as part of your marketing funnel puts you in the upper percentile of online marketers. Only 21% of paid advertising is currently taking advantage of the improved conversion offered by a standalone landing page.

If you are one of these cool kids, you are in a position where you can start iterating towards a more optimized landing page experience and higher conversion rates.

And so I present my last mention of the number 7 for what I hope will be a long time :)

The 7-Step Landing Page Exercise Workflow

If you have a team of internet marketers, I’d recommend splitting up these exercises amongst the group and reconvening to share the results of each exercise with the group.

Exercise 1 – Establish a statistical baseline for your conversion rate

Before you try to improve your landing page, you need to find out how it’s performing. Ideally you’ll know a few basic metrics:

• Visitors – how many unique people visit your landing page
• Clickthroughs – how many people act upon your primary CTA
• Conversions – how many people ultimately complete the conversion path (it may end here, but could also end on your website after a successful registration etc.)

These will be your baseline stats for comparison as you try to improve your landing page.

Exercise 2 – Competitive Analysis

Before you jump into refining your landing page, take a step back and do some competitive analysis. Search for keywords relevant to your product and click on every relevant AdWords result to see what others are doing. Copy & paste the ad before you click it, so you can look at how effective their message match is. Also try refreshing the search to get a new set of paid search results.

By watching what others are doing, you’ll learn a few new tricks and also get to laugh once in a while as your biggest rival makes a complete hash of their marketing.

Exercise 3 – Do some 5 second tests

This is a quick way to witness the reaction, effectiveness and immediacy of your marketing message when experienced by someone else. You can get the basic concept of The 5 Second Rule in an earlier post.

Just to recap: you sit someone down in front of a monitor, show them your landing page for 5 seconds (you can extend to 8 or 10 if you like), then hide the page again and ask the participant what the page was about. The science part is that an effectively designed page will be able to communicate it’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition) within 5 seconds. If no one can adequately describe what your page is offering, then you are missing out on valuable customers.

Test with 4-6 people for more reliable results.

Refine messaging and try testing again. What you’re looking at primarily is the main headline that describes your product or offer.

Exercise 4 – Let an independent party critique your landing page

If you can afford it, hand it over to an optimization company and see what they can do to improve your conversion rate. If you don’t have the budget to spare, let an internal company usability or interaction expert tear into it and see what they come back with (or if there is no one like that in your company – see if you have a friend who’ll do a quick audit as a $100 favor). Remember though that landing pages are different to regular web pages in some respects, so only take what you need from their recommendations.

If you do either of these things, the most critical part is the information transfer meeting. Insist on being walked through the recommendations so that you can understand, question and inspect their rationale. And hopefully learn something in the process for next time.

Exercise 5 – Rate your landing page with the Conversion Marketing Scorecard

Spend 30 minutes to rank your landing page using our Conversion Marketing Scorecard. It’s 40 simple yes/no questions that will give you a quick idea of how optimized your landing page is.

Once you have completed the scorecard, create a TO-Do list from the items you failed on (the unchecked items). This will give you a nice ordered task list.

Exercise 6 – Hold a group brainstorm to address remaining issues

Take any outstanding issues from exercises 2-6 and open them up to the collective intelligence of your team. Make it clear that “stupid” answers are totally welcomed. The simplest idea can often evolve into the most brilliant solution, so do your best to encourage participation from even the most quiet and shy of team members.

IDEO have used wonderful brainstorming techniques as part of their product development processes. If you don’t have an expert facilitator, do some research on methods for increasing the effectiveness of a brainstorm session.

I’ve facilitated my fair share of sessions, and can testify to the amazing impact that the right approach can have on results. I’ll be sharing my brainstorming process in a future post.

Here are a few links to get you going:

• The best brainstorm warm-up exercises I’ve ever found
• The 7 Rules of Brainstorming
• IDEO Brainstorming Techniques
• The Deep Dive

Exercise 7 – Set up an A/B test

This should be your ultimate goal. To establish a process and infrastructure where you can test the changes you want to make to your landing pages. It’s not all that simple to set up, and you may have to speak to someone in IT or software to help you out, but once you have the mechanism in place you’re ready to rock!

Putting the logistics aside, you need to decide what you want to test. There are 2 rudimentary ways you can get started with A/B testing. One would be to lump all of the changes you want to make (from the exercises above) into a single new version of your landing page, then test it against the old one to see how it performs.

Chances are after all that “improving”, you’ll get a better page. The only problem is you won’t know why it’s better because you released all of your new ideas at once. This is fine for short term fixes in a crisis, but if you are in this business for the long haul you should start trying to understand things on a more micro level.

The best way is to change one thing at a time and see how it fares. You’ll be surprised at what works. It all comes down to demographics and your target market. No matter how much you wish they’d appreciate the design intricacies of the new MacBook Pro’s solid aluminum casing and backlit keyboard, sometimes all it takes to make the sale is a testimonial from Doris in Connecticut or shifting the Call To Action button 180px north.

In short, never assume.

Think, test, readjust-your-thinking, re-test then make more money.

– Oli Gardner

Here are the 7 reasons why landing pages make your eMarketing more effective:

Note: For the purposes of this list we are talking about standalone landing pages, which are separate pages that aren’t part of the regular website architecture (i.e. they are only reached via external advertising (email, PPC etc.) – not internal site links or navigation.

1. Increased Conversions by Default

According to statistical research by Omniture, the act of using a landing page to target your campaign traffic results in an average increase in conversion rate of 25%. This underscores the fact that it’s simply a smart practice to follow. When you consider that many paid search campaigns send visitors to either the homepage or a registration form, often without any Message Match to follow up the original offer, a focused and targeted message will automatically product better results. This brings me to point 2.

2. Focused & Targeted Messaging

When you only have to worry about a single message, the focus of your page will be stronger. It requires discipline, but don’t try to say too many things at once.

Contrast a homepage – that can have multiple messages or products – with a landing page with one headline, one unique selling proposition (USP), one call to action (CTA) and a single product photo and you can see how a landing page can remove a lot of the user confusion that produces poor conversion.

Your campaign may have multiple traffic sources: email, AdWords, affiliate links and general banner placements. By using landing pages as the target of these campaigns, you could quite easily produce a separate page for each – enabling you to fine tune each custom user path via A/B testing – to find the optimum messaging and design.

3. Simpler Campaign Measurement

With only one possible action on the page (and sometimes a second safety net CTA), your analytics becomes easier. A user either completes your desired action or they don’t. If they don’t, you can massage the page until they do.

If you send someone to a homepage containing 40 other links, you can lose the ability to measure the reasons for conversion success. You also run the risk of having your conversions affected by changes you might not be aware of. Website homepages are often updated with information from a variety of sources around the company, and not all of them will be in concert with your paid advertising message.

With a standalone landing page, once you have fine tuned the success of your ad and page, you can leave it alone with the knowledge that it functions and performs as desired.

4. Co-branded Affiliate Opportunities

Message match and trust can be enhanced for affiliate traffic by using co-branding. Co-branding commonly involves the use of logos from both parties on a destination page. It allows a visitor to feel confident that the offer presented to them on the affiliate website is being honored on the target website. This isn’t as easily achieved when using your homepage or internal site page as it requires that you include code to differentiate the source, and alter the design to include the affiliate logo.

Using a standalone landing page is easier as you aren’t hampered by existing design considerations.

5. No More Design Dependencies

When you are designing a standalone landing page, you have a higher degree of freedom to design for the campaign. This is a big key to success, as you don’t have to conform to the architectural restrictions imposed by your website design.

You also have more visual freedom to experiment. Something as simple as a black background vs. a white background may help you communicate your vision more effectively but a stylistic 180 such as this is unlikely to be permissible on your corporate website.

6. Change & Test Without Politics

Websites often have multiple owners throughout the organization – a mix of different functional departments – who all need to have a say when something is changed. By separating your campaign marketing to operate through standalone landing pages, you are essentially orphaning them from the rest of the site and will enjoy greater freedom to experiment with your A/B testing.

Once you have established a base conversion rate, start testing changes to the page. Using an iterative approach you will be able to learn what your customers respond to. Then, once you have a solid theory about customer behavior you can bring it to the table for inclusion as a direction for other areas of the site – armed with the data necessary to quell the naysayers.

7. Greater Campaign Accountability

When you separate your campaigns from your main website, you can assign responsibility more easily. With simple single-goal landing page experiences, your reporting will be able to show who and what is performing the best. If you have 5 people in the team all sending traffic to your homepage, you’ll never be able to accommodate the needs of everyone when it comes to changes for testing. With standalone landing pages, you can institute a culture of accountability where individuals can own a campaign.

– Oli Gardner

We're sad to see you leave our landing page. Please click here to be redirected in an infinite loop to the same page.

It’s day 5 of the 7 Days to a Better Landing Page series. And today I’m gong to focus on some of the things NOT to do on a landing page.

I’ve already covered this topic in depth in an earlier post – Marketing FAIL – 7 Newbie Landing Page Mistakes, so I’m going to do a quick recap on that before expanding on the subject.

7 Ways to Turn Visitors Away

There are 2 primary types of offensive behavior that will make your customers hightail it from your landing page. There’s the honest type of mistake – where you’ve unwittingly incorporated some usability issues into your design. And there’s the cheap spammy behavior that people use in the hopes of making a quick buck.

I’ve seen talented marketers do both, usually through some misguided notion that the campaign is all that matters. Wrong.

Big Idea – It’s About More Than Just The Campaign

Your brand is at stake every time you appear online. If you create an unprofessional experience for your visitors, you’re not only wasting your marketing budget, you’re risking the creation of an un-social network. One that’s focused on bad-mouthing you.

If your tactics – and I’m thinking primarily about the use of interruption marketing techniques such as the “are you sure you want to leave” dialog that appears when you try to navigate away from a page – do squeak out some extra conversions, what is it really worth to you? Are these the types of customer you want? Are the customers you’re losing the “Whales” of your industry sector (the ones who are worth the most money to you)?

Optimized, professional and authentic experiences are the key to customer satisfaction, brand loyalty and hence higher lifetime value. If you do your absolute best to ensure your message is a true reflection of your brand then you may not sign up as many people as you might by using cheap trickery (not the rock band), but the clients you do sign will be getting into something they believe in, and their net worth will more than make up for the lower acquisition rate.

Recap of the 7 Landing Page Faux Pas

1. Message Mismatch: This is when the message on your ad creative doesn’t match that of the landing page. It leads to confusion and mistrust.
2. Broken Lead Generation Forms: If you are asking for someone’s personal details in exchange for a giveaway, then QA your form properly to avoid lost leads and frustrated customers.
3. Advertising Something Other than your Primary Objective: The 3 F’s: focus, focus, focus. You enticed someone to your page with a single offer – stick to your promise or risk a watered down campaign.
4. Leaving Watermarks on Stolen Stock Photos: You’d be surprised how often people do this. Normally because they’ve borrowed a photo from somewhere and their graphic designer didn’t do an adequate job of airbrushing it out. It’s a dead giveaway that you are both cheap and untrustworthy.
5. Asking if I Really Want to Leave this Page: This one’s totally up to you. There is probably some evidence of marginally higher conversion rates – for a certain demographic – when you force a dialog or popup in someone’s face as they try to leave your page. Personally, I think it’s one of the biggest brand killers you can do. I can guarantee that there are thousands of web users around the world at any given moment saying “WTF, just let me leave already!”
6. Playing Hide & Seek with the Call To Action (CTA): Be proud of your purpose, let your CTA shine brightly like a beacon of awesomeness. Hiding the primary method of interaction is a barrier to conversion. You can mess this up by burying the button at the bottom of the page, or by not using adequate design contrast and whitespace.
7. Recreating War And Peace: Think Twitter vs. Blog Post. Keep it simple stupid. Note: I’m not calling you stupid – it’s a well known phrase… dummy!

How to Tell if Your Landing Page is Treating Your Customers With Respect

A little while ago, I created the Conversion Marketing Scorecard. It’s an interactive guide to rating your landing page and can be used to qualify the design and content decisions you’ve made. One of the more important parts is section 3 which deals with trust. You might want to take a quick run through the scorecard to see how well your landing page performs.

Authenticity Is Everything

At the end of the day, how you present your personal and brand values will shine through in your landing page implementation. As long as you can sleep at night and aren’t bothered by the tactics you are employing to garner conversions, all is well. However, the gut is a wonderful device for judging quality and authenticity. If you have even the slightest tingle of unease then your customers will be feeling that too, and that can only mean one thing – the ‘Back’ button.

FACT: The ‘Back’ button is clicked more than any other button/link on the web
Don’t be part of the problem by offending your customers. Make your landing pages so effective that your CTA is the only thing they will want to do. It’s not easy – but it should be something you strive to improve the likelihood of every day.

– Oli Gardner

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.

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?

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.

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.

Interpreting Your Score

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

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:

1. What is this?
2. How can it help me?
3. Why should I trust you?
4. How do I participate?

Working backwards from these questions we are able to establish the 4 pillars, or truths, of the conversion marketing process, and then we can begin to design landing page experiences that answer these questions – which will naturally evolve into better performance.

Truth 1 – The customer knows nothing

What is this?

An unfair statement perhaps, but it’s the best assumption to make if you want to design your landing pages with simplicity and clarity in mind.

What is the customer thinking?

Upon arrival at your landing page a visitor will have immediate questions:

1. What is this page about?
2. Does it match the expectations I had when I clicked on the ad leading me here?
3. Who is the company I’m interacting with?

Hurdle #1 – First impression pain points

These questions pose the first potential stumbling block, where the quality of your message comes into play. Your visitor clicked an ad of some sort after being seduced by it’s message, and your design must reflect/repeat that same message along with a clear reference to your brand.

Common mistakes that can create barriers to conversion at this stage are:

• Message mismatch: Not repeating the core message of your ad on your landing page will confuse people and make them click the back button.
• Multiple messages: People can only handle a certain amount of information being thrown at them at one time. A classic example of this was taught to me by our CEO Rick Perreault. In a client meeting he used an advertising scenario to prove that a single focused message is more easily digested than multiple messages. I’d advise you to try this with a client some time.

  Here’s how it works:

  While in a meeting, quietly tear up 4 strips of paper and roll them into balls under the desk so no one can see.

  Then to demonstrate the importance of focusing on a single message, toss 1 paper ball over at the client. Chances are they’ll catch this easily.

  Then say “and here’s 3 messages at the same time” – throwing the other 3 balls. You can predict where this is going; the client will fumble and become disoriented as they try to catch 3 objects flying at them, and will invariably drop (miss) all 3.

Overcoming hurdle #1 – the 5 second rule

So, now that we are aware of the first hurdle (or barrier) that your visitor needs to jump over, how can we improve the landing page to ensure a greater chance of success? There is a simple usability test that can be leveraged to test how small or large the first hurdle is. (Remember we want the hurdle to be really, really small).

The 5 Second Rule was explored in an earlier post. Essentially, you show a test participant your landing page for 5 seconds (you can make this 8 or 10 if you want, as opinions on how long you have to be effective vary across the industry), then hide it and ask them the same questions we posed above (in what is the customer thinking?).

The 5 Second Rule applied in context
For a more genuine test, supply the test users with a simple page containing an advertisement (banner, Google paid search ad etc.) and have this click through to your landing page.

The diagram below shows the process involved in using this test to improve your landing page.

If your test participants are failing the test, you need to refine the messaging or design of your page, and can use these tips to get started:

• Simplify your message: Shorten the primary headline and read it aloud to see how easy it is to understand.
• Answer the question directly: Make the headline answer the question – “What is this page offering?”. A statement such as “Win a $50 Starbucks Gift Certificate” makes it clear that it’s a contest of some type and the level of reward is clearly stated.
• Arrange your message hierarchy correctly: You need to lead the reader through your messaging in a way that makes sense. To achieve this, you’ll be focused on top-to-bottom and left-to-right (for a western audience). Use a decreasing font size to help illustrate the relative weight of importance.

  To continue the previous example, you could say “Win a $50 Starbucks Gift Certificate” as the primary headline, and use a smaller “By answering our 6 question survey” beneath it for clarity.

Keep refining and testing until you have users answering your questions in a way that you’d wish your customers to answer them. The participants can be friends, family or people from your company, but it’s best if they have no understanding of the brand or particular offer your landing page is presenting.

If you have the money, you can post a message on Craigslist for participants (or use a recruitment company). A typical hour long usability session would cost you $40-$100 depending on the equivalent hourly rate of the demographic you are using. However, for a test this simple, you can probably get away with paying people $5-$10.

If you are feeling especially creative print out your ad and landing page, and get out on the street to ask strangers to click on your paper prototype. Having a basket of candy will be enough to entice people to join in if you can make it fun.

Ok, so we’re made our landing page totally awesome right? Not quite. Even though that seemed like a lot of work, we’re only a quarter of the way there. The next rule is concerned with relevance.

Truth 2 – People want something that makes their life/job easier or more interesting

How can it help me?

This may seem obvious, but it’s often overlooked. You want to state more than just what your product or service is, you need to show how it will improve an aspect of the buyer’s life. This could be improved efficiency or workflow at work, or a more entertaining personal life.

What is the customer thinking?

At this point your visitor is thinking:

1. How can this benefit me right now or in the future?

In order to answer that question, you need to answer some more detailed personal questions that deal with the specifics of your audience.

2. Do I really need this?
3. Is it worth the effort involved?
4. Is it different to what I’ve already experienced?

Hurdle #2 – Personal relevancy

Looking at the questions above, we can identify several momentum barriers:

• Not showing how your product/service is unique? If you have a unique offering, you should be stating or showing this – don’t assume that people will comparison shop on your behalf.
• No example of use: To trigger a sense of need in a customer, you should be illustrating how your product/service will integrate with their life. Don’t assume that people will automatically know how it will integrate into their existing day to day processes.
• Unnecessary barriers to entry: Having an unbalanced risk/reward proposition will scare people away. If you are asking someone to do something, be careful how much you ask for. Brand ambassadors (those who have come to love your product/service) will be willing to go the extra mile for you – new potential customers will not.

Overcoming Hurdle #2 – focus on benefits not features

To quickly and effectively educate your visitors about what your product or service can do for them, you should focus primarily on benefits rather than features. Head & Shoulders wouldn’t be the world leader in dandruff shampoo if they’d come out trying to explain the scientific properties of their shampoo’s ingredients. By suggesting that the product can improve the health of your scalp or fix your itchy head, they got right to the relevant and personal questions that a customer would have about the product and it’s benefits.

As mentioned in the Hurdle for this Truth, an effective tactic can be to show your product/service in use. Think of the new wave of netbook laptop computers. The primary benefit is it’s tiny size. If all you do is say “We have really small laptops”, you are discussing a feature and are requiring the customer to piece together how it could be used. By showing a photo of someone using it on the food tray of a cramped airline, you are showing a benefit and usage in one go. Couple that with a headline that says “work on your presentation even when you’re sitting in economy” and you identify a real world problem, and provide a solution.

Here’s AT&T illustrating this concept through video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

PAUSE: Always have a backup plan – use a safety net

At this half way stage of the process you have hopefully grabbed the customer’s interest. However, not every interested customer is ready to buy at this point in time. With standalone landing pages, it’s critical that you offer up a “soft exit point” that allows them to leave, but remember you when they are ready to purchase. Remember, they got to you by clicking on an Ad and they might not be able to re-create the circumstancs by which they saw that Ad.

Using a Safety Net Call to Action

Provide your visitor with a low commitment method escape pod by utilizing one of the following techniques that keep them within your sphere of influence:

• Follow us on Twitter: Once they are following you on Twitter they will be exposed to other marketing and brand messages that could entice them to buy in the future.
• Remind Me: Provide a way for them to be reminded at a predetermined time in the future (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, specific date etc.) and be sure to place a trust statement beside it that explicitly states that you will not contact them at any other time.
• The Takeaway: Provide a link to a download-able brochure (without having to complete a form).

Truth 3 – People are skeptical

Why should I trust you?

Online transactions are second nature to most people nowadays, but the same types of fear regarding security and trust remain. There are many subtle or unconscious triggers that can influence our customers belief in our authenticity and trustworthiness.

What is the customer thinking?

Your customer has decided that your offering is interesting, and now they’ve moved on to the validation phase. Questions they are asking now include:

1. Why should I trust you?
2. Is this a legitimate company?
3. Is anyone else using this?

Hurdle #3 – The trust barrier

There are many factors that have the power to trigger a negative trust response from a visitor. Anything that causes a person to stop and question the validity of your message is a barrier to entry.

Common trust barriers:

• No phone number
• Unprofessional design
• Design of landing page is inconsistent with banner
• Long forms
• Fake looking testimonials
• Exaggerated claims
• Predictable or overused stock photography

Overcoming Hurdle #3 – Put yourself in the customer’s shoes

When it comes to trust issues, you really have to learn to think like your customers. Look over your landing page and take note of any items that could match the trust barriers listed above. Ask yourself honest questions about whether you would trust this page/company yourself? Would you happily give your credit card to a company that presents themselves as you are doing?

When trying to design your landing pages without trust barriers, understand that subtle cues can be used to help allay the fears of your potential customers. Professional design and usability best practices can go a long way to remove the instinctive negative gut reaction that can occur.

7 things you can do to counteract commitment phobia:

1. Multiple contact methods: Include a phone number, Twitter account, physical and email addresses.
2. Remove the form: You may be using the page for lead generation, but if your conversion rate is low, it might be worth testing a brand exposure exercise. Give away your eBook or white paper completely free, but be sure that it has all of your branded elements and contact details in the PDF.
3. Never use pop-ups or pop-unders: If you don’t use these or don’t know what they are – that’s a good thing. Keep it that way.
4. Use endorsements by trusted people: If you have clients or users that are well known brands, leverage this on your landing page to answer the “who else is using this?” question.
5. Professional design: It may be worth a small investment in a more professional design. A|B testing after the fact will help you identify how much this helped.
6. Privacy: Provide links to a privacy statement and or terms and conditions to quell fears of email abuse. A good technique is to write “We’ll never sell your email address” beside and email form field.
7. Co-branding: Affiliates drive traffic to your business, often to a landing page. To enhance the Ad Message Momentum using a co-branded landing page can improve your conversion rate.

Remember to test your new page vs. the old one to determine how effective your changes were. Ideally, you’d test after each change to see which are the biggest influencers.

Another thing to consider is that trust extends in both directions. Not only do you want to convey a sense of trustworthiness, but you should present yourself in a way that is open and transparent, which shows that you are placing trust in your visitors. Somewhat akin to putting your head in a lions mouth (maybe).

Truth 4 – A customer that can see how to participate is more likely to try

How do I participate?

If a customer is ready to purchase, they should be given the white-glove treatment and gently and clearly guided toward the point of conversion.

In other words:

Let them put the coin in the slot, and make the slot very obvious.
Oli Gardner, circa about now

What is the customer thinking?

Ok, you’ve made it all the way to the point of conversion, the customer us primed and ready, they have their proverbial credit card out and are poised, anxiously anticipating “the thrill of the shop”, that beautiful moment where you get to engage in a decision to purchase. Shopping is fun right?

So what are they thinking?

• I like this, how do I get it?
• What do I do now?
• Which of these big shiny buttons am I supposed to click?

You can tell by reading these, that your landing page has some focus and directional issues.

Hurdle #4 – An unclear objective

This is the worst time to piss off your customers with a poorly guided experience. They want to give you money (or their email address etc.) but they are momentarily stumped because they’re not sure what to do next. If you’ve done a good enough job to get them here, you must convert – so make the final action the most obvious and clear part of your whole page.

Some of the things you could be doing wrong if people are not converting at this stage:

• Too many links: Don’t give your visitor 15 exits away from your conversion highway. Follow the Roman concept of a single straight road – destination conversionville.
• Hiding the button: When you have a lead gen form it’s usually fairly obvious where the button is. But if your landing page is designed to take the visitor somewhere else you may just have a link or button sitting by itself. Don’t make it hard to find. This includes keeping it above the fold. You may be thinking that the user has been on your landing page for hours by now (based on how long it’s taken you to read this post), but in reality they’ve been sucking in subliminal information since arriving about 5 seconds ago, and if you haven’t made the destination action clear, it’s just one more reason for them to bug out.
• The confidence-killing button CTA: Sometimes landing pages will offer something to a customer, suggesting it in the headline, photo and copy, and then the button at the end of the page doesn’t repeat the offer – this gives cause for pause.

Overcoming Hurdle #4 – Guide users toward a single goal

The key to closing the deal is to make it so obvious that an idiot with poor mouse skills could still get the job done.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind the ensure your customers can find their way at this most critical of times:

1. Conversion Momentum: If you are offering a free $50 coupon for Starbucks, make the button say “Get your Starbucks coupon now” rather than “Submit” or “Go”. This subtle but important difference can make someone stop and wonder if you are truly going to provide what you say you will.
2. Photo Directional Cues: Photographs of people that are looking at your call to action make visitors instinctively look in the same direction.
3. Graphic Directional Cues: Use arrows to indicate the direction someone should move through your page, or point them directly at the call to action.
4. Make the button massive: Although this goes against most of my regular website design principals, on a landing page you want to make it look a little like a Fisher Price kids toy.
5. Increase the contrast of the CTA: Two things here; give your call to action room to breathe, and make it stand out using contrast. Don’t be subtle by placing a dark green button on a light green background (partially because that sounds fugly), landing page CTA’s should never be subtle.
6. Use a last minute trust indicator: Place a trust indicator close to your call to action. This could be a statement regarding your privacy policy, or a link to a page of terms and conditions.
7. The safety net: Remember this? (I mentioned it between Truths 2 & 3) If you’re looking for a place to put a safety net CTA, try sticking it below the main button. If change their mind at the last minute, you are right there, like a handy concierge, with an alternative option for their fun day out.
8. Be audience appropriate: If clicking on your button is super exciting, because the customer is about to receive a free iPod (like immediately) then by all means use a youthful tone with multiple exclamation points “Get your free iPod right now dude!!!!!”. But if you’re signing up to receive a coffin brochure it would be wholly inappropriate and not at all related to the needs of the customer or the end result. Plus it can smack of in-authenticity. Remain calm and let your product or service communicate for you – ditch the hype bro!!!!!!

Phew, ok, that was a long long post. I hope you were able to learn something useful from it. Just remember that you can attack your landing page optimization in stages that are applicable to the phases of human interaction.

In our next post regarding the 4 Truths, we will be sharing our Conversion Marketing Scorecard that extends this process to the measurement realm, and will allow you to rate your landing pages (hot or not).

Cheers

– Oli Gardner