Here’s the scoop cowboy: They came. They saw. They didn’t care. Sad, and perhaps a little painful – if you take these types of thing personally.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Logo's wait in line to be made bigger by Chuck Norris
Ok, for some light relief on a Friday, we’re rehashing the classic Chuck Norris Facts to see what would happen if Chuck Norris decided to become a marketing expert and critique your favorite landing page.
Advance warning, this won’t be pretty, but with a bit of luck it should make you laugh.
Here are the top 9 reasons why Mr. Norris should never be allowed near a whiteboard:
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.
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.
