Unbounce» Landing Page Optimization

Increasing Lead Capture by 27% – A Conversion Optimization Case Study

Kevin Kaiser — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:08:09 +0000

Today’s guest post is a conversion optimization case study by Kevin Kaiser from Surety Bonds. In my last post I referenced their lead capture form as a good example of how to keep your CTA above the fold on a lead gen landing page. Kevin discusses how he optimized a primary conversion goal – to have more customers complete a lead capture form to receive a quote.

Over to you Kevin.

Many people approach their web marketing strategy mainly as getting people to their site. They take for granted that once a visitor gets there, the visitor will do exactly what they want them to do.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. A complete web marketer realizes that you need to tell people what to do when they get to your site. The rest of this post will explain some of the things I performed on SuretyBonds.com to help increase conversions by 27%.

A Little Background

The site performs well drawing in visitors. But we couldn’t get them to fill out the form at a rate we thought was appropriate and decided to make and test some changes. For each of our tests, we ran an A/B split test for 2-3 weeks until we were able to gather a statistically significant amount of traffic. We had decided to work with A/B testing as it is simpler that Multivariate and went with a 50% split of traffic to each page.

Location, Location, Location: Where to put the form?

When people are searching for a product, they have an idea in mind of what they are looking for. It is up to you to make sure they can find it as fast as possible. This is the basis of our first change. When someone reached our site, it was incredibly hard for them to find the form to fill out to receive a quote. Internally, we had no problem locating the form due to our familiarity with the site, but after watching a test participant struggle to perform this task it was clear that we needed to place the form in a more prominent location on the site.

Note the form placement on the right-hand side of the homepage.

From a link to a button

Initially, we only had a link to the form in the side column on our homepage which did nothing to stand out from with the other links on the page. So the first step was to change the link to a more prominent button with a stronger call-to-action. This gave us a conversion improvement of 10% – a promising start.

Adding the form to the homepage

Something that conversion optimization practitioners suggest to do is to keep testing. So I decided to take things a step further and introduce a short form on the homepage. Using the same A/B testing, I was able to find that this version worked even better. And, being a devout tester, I decided to try another layout that included both the call-to-action button and the short form on the same page. This is the best layout I’ve found so far (and the one we’re currently using) and goes to show that testing different layouts (not even worrying about the content) can greatly affect conversion rate.

Ask Nicely

Another discovery I made in my quest for increasing conversions was what kind of information is really needed to qualify it as a good lead. Obviously you don’t want to waste all your time by having your lead form bring in poor quality leads, but do you have to ask every single question available online to qualify it as good? A big thing with surety bonds is credit score, but I decided that we really didn’t need to ask people for their credit score online. This is one example of how you can work this into your own plan.

Another thing I found is that just asking a question in a different way can increase leads. Surety bonds vary by state, so we were asking for their business address. By changing this and just asking for the state though, people seemed more apt to fill out the form. We’re able to get the rest of the info. we need when we call them back on the follow-up.

These are just a few examples of things that we changed in our form that could give you some ideas of what you could try changing on your site.

The Result

Running through this series of A/B tests helped increase the lead generation from our website by 27% compared to the original version. However, it didn’t end there. I had noticed that although we were pulling in more leads, we weren’t closing them at an increasing rate. The final step was to see how we could capitalize on these extra leads.

The Follow-Up Call

With all these leads coming in, I wanted to test and see how smoothly our whole lead process was working. So I filled out our form and waited to get a call back about it. And waited, and waited. I think the first time I tried this I didn’t get a call back until around 4pm, about 7 hours after I filled out the form. Way to long for me to wait for a follow-up and apparently it was too long for the people filling out the form online. So, teaming up with our underwriting team, I had them call back as soon as we possibly could. Noticing that our volume started increasing, I decided that we should get someone to call back almost immediately after they filled out the form online and now our offline conversion rate was almost as high as our online conversion rate. The only difference between this technique and the two above is that it takes place offline, which something people leave out of the picture when thinking about conversion rate optimization. While there was no real tool I used to track this, the before and after comparison was great enough that we continue to do this today.

Never Stop

The biggest advice I would give fellow marketers is to never stop testing. We are continually tweaking our layout and copy to get as high of a conversion rate as we can possibly achieve. If you’re a busy person and think you don’t have the time for this, think about hiring a consultant to improve your conversion rate. And remember, conversion rates don’t just jump immediately to high levels. It often takes place over a period of time with lots of little changes and maybe a few big changes as well. Often the return will be much greater than the investment, so figure out if it’s worth it in your industry/niche to outsource and start improving your conversion rate today.

– Kevin Kaiser

Join Us For The Unbounce Private Beta

Oli Gardner — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 08:23:58 +0000

The Final Countdown by Europe is ringing in my ears as I write this post. It’s officially “down to the wire” time for the Unbounce team and as anyone from a start-up can attest, there just ain’t enough hours in the day.

Get in on the landing page action before we open it up to the public.

Beta Launch Date Countdown

We’ve opened the doors to a select few companies for a very private Alpha period right now, shortly to be followed by our Beta launch in a week or so.

Sign up here for the Private Beta

What to Expect

For those that have received invites to the private Beta (there are still a few spots remaining) – you can expect to see a whole bunch of landing page awesomeness.

Highlights include:

Create a page: Our soon-to-be-legendary editor to construct your landing page.
A/B split testing with a single click. This is VERY cool. You can duplicate a page with the speed of a lightning bolt, then modify some page elements and publish a fully functioning A/B test before the IT department can say “umm, well, we can probably push this live next week”.
Stats to show how your ideas are performing. Come up with something crazy, test it, then watch the clicks and conversions and adjust the weighting of your A/B test.
And a whole bunch of bugs… it comes with the territory :)

Register For the Unbounce Beta Launch

If you’d like to participate in the private beta, and get your hands on the Unbounce landing page service before we release it to the public, then you can sign up here for the beta.

Looking forward to your feedback, insight and participation.

Cheers
– Oli Gardner

2010 New Year's Marketing Resolutions – You Know Your Landing Page is Fat When…

Oli Gardner — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:30:58 +0000

In the spirit of failed New Year’s resolutions, I’m writing this post 11 days after the fact. We all do a miserable job of living up to our personal commitments, so I figured a few new business goals might be in order to get your marketing campaigns off the proverbial couch and into the gym.

It's time to whip that 2009 marketing stomach into fighting shape!

A Totally Bogus Opt-in Checkbox That Says You Commit to the Following Resolutions

As an added incentive, I’ve decided to get you to sign a completely non-binding contract with yourself.

1. Spend more time with my CTA’s

Just like you should be spending more time hugging the kids and showering them with love and affection – your landing page Call To Action needs to be looked after. Here are a few things you can do to improve your CTA relations:

Test some different copy on your buttons: try funny, outrageous, seductive etc.
Try a different typographic treatment for your button design
Try a few different colors (depending on your palette): black & white (for contrast), red (seduction), green (for go), blue (for clickable) or orange (eye catching and positive)
Make it bigger and give it a rotation to produce a weird shape

2. Never send a PPC campaign to my homepage again

Tsk, tsk, tsk. If you’re sending people to your website’s homepage you’re diluting your marketing message to a dangerous level. Create a landing page and send all PPC traffic there first. It will help focus your messaging and keep your visitors on track.

3. Trim the fat from my landing page content

Be honest, you sometimes talk too much right? And it appears on your landing pages as bloated copy with long rambling sentences that seem to go on and on for ever without much consideration for punctuation or rhythm because you need to get every feature and benefit and quality of your product on the page but in the process all you’re really doing is making your potential customers glaze over and fall asleep so stop doing that and try cutting a big chunk of text out of your landing page and remember to do an A/B test to see if it helps your conversion rate you never know it might make a big difference alternatively it might be worse so test test test and find out what your customers like and please for the sake of all things literary insert some bloody punctuation! But not too many exclamation points!!!!!!!!

4. Spend the price of a coffee per day on conversion optimization

Baby steps are important with any new regime, whether it’s going to the gym or maximizing the return on your marketing spend. So instead of filling your belly with caffeine, see if you can commit to putting the price of one of your daily cups of Joe into a jar. Then at the end of each month, you’ll have some extra money to test a PPC campaign on some landing page variants. Even if this only lets you do 4 conversion tests per year, that’s 4 more than 2009 right?

5. Remove 1 field from my lead gen forms

Your lead gen form is fat. Deal with it.

Try removing a not-quite-so-essential field from a form and test the results (also test which particular fields you remove). If you see an increase in leads then continue to remove form fields until you reach the optimal balance of lead quantity vs. information gathering quality.

6. Stop confusing my visitors with bad message match

Here’s the thing, if I have to repeat this warning in 2011 I will be opening a serious can of whoop ass. The message on your ad (display banner, AdWords, email etc.) needs to maintain momentum right through your acquisition funnel. That means repeating and reinforcing the message on your landing page, in the product you giveaway on your form (if you do) and any subsequent pages you send them to afterwards.

7. Feed my landing pages some A.D.D. pills to keep them focused and on topic

There’s little point in spending the time and effort on designing a landing page if all you do is make it as cluttered as your homepage. This is where you must adhere closely to the concept of congruence – ensuring that every element of your landing page supports your core value proposition. No wandering off gossiping about other products or company events. One page, one topic, in harmony. Koombyah.

8. Stop any videos on my landing pages from auto-playing

This is one to be tested. In usability circles it’s considered bad medicine to have a video start playing as soon as the page loads. However, the psychographics of the convertible customer are slightly different so I’d recommend running an A/B test to see if your customers react better to this type of interruption or find it annoying.

9. Learn a new skill – Landing Page SEO

If your landing pages will be living in the internet tubes for any substantial period of time, you may want them to be SEO friendly to generate organic search traffic. So commit to learning some of the basics of good SEO from the code level right up to how to write good SEO copy. It will give your evergreen campaigns (one’s that run all year round) a bit more traffic without much effort.

10. Critique my last landing page and commit to testing some improvements

The fact that you’re making New Year’s resolutions again means that you’re not perfect – and neither was your last landing page. So dust off the cobwebs and take a fresh look at it in the new light of 2010. It’s important to be critical and not be offended if the intern points out the most basic of faults in your design.

If you need some help critiquing your landing pages – try using the Unbounce Conversion Marketing Scorecard to produce a checklist of fresh TO-DO items.

That’s it for now – see how many of those 10 promises you can keep and you’ll be a much leaner, meaner marketing machine’r come 2011.

Good luck…

– Oli Gardner

The 12 Days of Christmas – A Cheesy Landing Page Optimization Lament

Oli Gardner — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 13:51:55 +0000

What do you want for Christmas? (Photo Credit: ICanHasCheezburger.com)

For the holiday season, I’ve taken a quick stab at re-writing that 12 Days of Christmas ditty. If Christmas ain’t really your thing, then hopefully the lolcat is enough to bring a smile to your face.

Remember to sing along. Preferably after a few egg nog’s or Christmas Ale’s. (It’ll be funnier).

On the 1st day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

A typo in a CTA

On the 2nd day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

2 dove turtles – needless to say they didn’t convert because large tortoise-like animals covered in moisturizing soap doesn’t make much sense to anyone.
and a typo in a CTA

On the 3rd days of Christmas my true love gave to me…

3 french pens – no matter how I move my wrist, these pens write in French. I don’t even speak french.
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 4th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

4 appalling words – in my H1 tag. Sigh.
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 5th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

Fiiiiiiiiiive gold PPC ads on Bing – (sounds like ring. Work with me here)
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 6th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

6 clients a-paying – sweeeet!
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 7th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

7 Accountants grinning – thanks to #6
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 8th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

8 affiliates a-milking – no surprise there
7 accountants grinning
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 9th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

9 ladies dancing – I’m not going to change that for anyone, so let’s just say they’re dancing on your landing page wearing Santa hats.
8 affiliates a-milking
7 accountants grinning
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 10th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

10 conversions a-leaping
9 ladies dancing
8 affiliates a-milking
7 accountants grinning
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 11th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

11 leads converting – woohooo, here’s to Lead Gen Forms!!!
10 conversions a-leaping
9 ladies dancing
8 affiliates a-milking
7 accountants grinning
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

12 drummers drumming – to the beat of a kick-ass year that leads to the Unbounce launch!!!!!
11 leads converting
10 conversions a-leaping
9 ladies dancing
8 affiliates a-milking
7 accountants grinning
6 clients a-paying
5 goooooold ads on Bing
4 appalling words
3 french pens
2 dove turtles
and a typo in a CTA

Happy Holidays!!!

– Unbounce

544 Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Oli Gardner — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:23:55 +0000

All tips are appreciated. Here's 544 ways to make you landing pages convert more effectively.

Optimizing your landing pages or website to perform better is a no-brainer, but if you’re short on time or resources then it helps to have a bag full of tricks to kick things off.

The collection of links below brings together over 500 tips on conversion rate optimization and landing page improvement.

Naturally, there will be some repetition of the core principles, but it’s a good idea to read the perspective of several experts when forming your own opinion.

The Art of the Landing Page: 7 Tips For Increasing Conversions: Tim Ash; 7 fundamental tactics from one of the industry’s established leaders in landing page optimization and testing.; Read more

31 Conversion Optimization Tips – and Counting: Chris Goward – Wider Funnel; A great quick read from Chris Goward. If you only have a few minutes to spare this is an excellent way to get your creative and analytical juices flowing.; Read more

108 Ways to Improve Your Conversion Rate: Conversion Rate Experts; A massively long and detailed exploration of conversion optimization covers the concept and discusses how to test your web pages after applying their tips. Includes some great illustrations.; Read more

10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page: Roberta Rosenberg – Copyblogger; The Copywriter Maven, Roberta Rosenberg, tackles landing page improvements from the perspective of the writer. Learn how to craft your copy specifically for landing pages from the author of the popular Copyblogger Landing Page Makeover Clinic series.; Read more

7 actionable ideas to optimize e-Commerce website conversions for the holiday season: Wingify; Seven things you can do to improve the conversion of your e-commerce sites at the busiest shopping times of the year. This is an interesting and refreshing approach that highlights specific things to do during holiday seasons – rather than just generic advice.; Read more

Why your bounce rate is high and how to fix it – top 6 reasons why visitors immediately exit your website: Wingify; If you are new to the idea of conversion optimization, you could use this list to help spot the mistakes you might be making on your website. As they focus on bounce rate, you should do a quick check in Google Analytics to see what your own bounce rate is, and then explore these ideas to try and reduce it.; Read more

3 Tips to Optimize Your Email Landing Pages: Marc Kline – AWeber; Marc Kline examines 3 simple ways to improve the effectiveness of your landing pages when arriving via email marketing campaigns. AWeber are one of the leaders in email communication services so they should know a thing or 3 about the subject.; Read more

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability – 5 Tips: Frank Puscher – Smashing Magazine; An examination of how usability principles can be applied to conversion optimization. As with all Smashing Magazine articles, there are great examples to complement the writing.; Read more

31 quick points to instantly understand online conversion: Khalid Saleh – Invesp; A really solid introduction to the concept of conversion and a focus on Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign marketing.; Read more

10 techniques for an effective ‘call to action’: Paul Boag; 10 ways to improve the quality and convertability of your pages by focusing on the Call To Action. Tips include discussion of position, design and messaging.; Read more

13 quick tips to increase online conversion rate via building trust: Ayat Shukairy – Invesp; Trust is a fundamental element of brand and conversion success and is the focus of this article. Ways to increase trust and the resulting improvements in conversion rate are discussed.; Read more

6 Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages: Avinash Kaushik; Reduce the bounce rate of your landing pages by collecting and understanding customer insight. An excellent perspective on the importance of knowing who your customers are. Lots of examples are provided to illustrate each point.; Read more

The 6 Landing Page Conversion Rate Factors: Chris Goward – Wider Funnel; Wider Funnel breaks down the 6 key factors required to improve the lift of your conversion rate.; Read more

10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics: Larry Chase; 10 ways to improve your return on investment by optimizing your landing pages.; Read more

7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization: Jonathan Mendez; Another quick introduction to the concept of landing page optimization. #4 is a good rule to follow to help give your conversions a bit of last minute pep.; Read more

14 Instant Landing Page Upgrades: Ian – Conversation Marketing; 14 suggestions for how to improve your landing pages for PPC and email marketing campaigns.; Read more

10 Tips for Lead Generation Landing Pages: Lee Odden & Jon Miller; Lead generation is the primary goal of landing pages for B2B marketing. In this post 10 tips are provided focused around capturing more leads to reduce your cost per acquisition.; Read more

5 Successful Landing Page Optimization Tips: Alex Chia; Discussion of affiliate marketing and the use of professional design to improve the performance of your landing pages.; Read more

30+ principles to a better landing page design: Khalid Saleh; More than 30 tips focusing on the art of landing page design. The underlying message here is the importance of understanding your visitors and designing in a manner that communicates to them correctly.; Read more

Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert: Dmitry Fadeyev – Smashing Magazine; How to add a marketing element to your design skills – part 1 of a 2 part series.; Read more

7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert: Dmitry Fadeyev – Smashing Magazine; The second article from Dmitry on designing for conversion optimization. As usual there are a lot of good visual examples presented to illustrate each point.; Read more

Landing Page Optimization For Dummies – 30 Points from the Cheat Sheet: Michael Harwood; An overview taken from a book in the popular Dummies series.; Read more

10 Landing Page Optimization Tips: Jose Uzcategui; 10 best practices and a list of resource links surrounding the idea of optimizing Calls to Action (CTAs).; Read more

5 Landing Page Optimization Tips: Karen Scharf; 5 tips including one that talks about the importance of what you do on your thank-you page – an often overlooked facet of full-funnel conversion optimization (the parting gesture).; Read more

Top 10 Landing Page Optimization Tips: Dilip Shaw; 10 best practices tips that discuss the optimization of a landing page and why optimization is different to landing page design.; Read more

7 Tips To Increase Landing Page Conversions: Lauren Vaccarello – Search Engine Journal; Simple tips presented clearly with good working examples which aid understanding through extended context.; Read more

Conversion Magnet: 10 Tips to Creating a Brilliant Landing Page: Matt Jurmann; Example websites are examined in Matt’s list of 10 landing page conversion tips. He goes into a lot of depth on each point, making it a worthy read.; Read more

Optimizing Conversion Rates: Less Effort, More Customers – 3 Tips: Frank Puscher – Smashing Magazine; The theme of this post focuses on the online shopping world, and how to increase your success via better and more suitable advertising and increased trust factors. Includes an interesting comparison of different approaches to shipping costs.; Read more

12 Tips For Designing an Excellent Checkout Process to Improve Conversions: Dmitry Fadeyev – Smashing Magazine; The checkout process is a classic conversion process that should receive a lot of focus from usability and optimization experts. In this post Dmitry talks about not requiring registration, being transparent about availability and keeping the experience simple and focused.; Read more

7 Tips to Increase your Landing Page Conversion Rate: DeWitt’s Media; Read more

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design: Cameron Chapman – Smashing Magazine; I like this approach. By focusing on what NOT to do, Cameron is helping you spot your own mistakes and correct them before they have too big of an impact on your conversion rate. Attention is focused on e-commerce.; Read more

101 Landing Page Optimization Tips: Oli Gardner – Unbounce; I couldn’t offer up this list without including my own now could I? In this downloadable PDF you’ll find 101 opinionated tips on all aspects of landing page optimization: from the fundamentals, through trust, testing and how to leverage best practices in your personal workflow to ensure better performing pages.; Read more

21Things That Best Converting Websites Know That You Don’t: Taken from a Bryan Eisenberg presentation; So what do the best converting websites have in common? Read on for 21 tips…; Read more

Top 50 Google Website Optimizer Tips on What to Test: Kayden; A nice quick list on the types of things you should do when testing your landing pages with GWO.; Read more

Thanks to all the websites and authors listed for their great conversion optimization tips.

Making the web convert better – 1 tip at a time.

Did I Miss Any Tips? Share Yours Below.

If you have any articles on the subject of conversion rate optimization or landing page optimization, then please share below.

Or add your own tip like Ben did in the comments.

– Oli Gardner

8 Wicked Landing Page Articles – An October Retrospective

Oli Gardner — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:04:59 +0000

October brought us Halloween. Again… But it also brought a plethora of new insight in the realm of conversion marketing and landing pages. Wieeeoouu!!! I thought you’d be excited!!! For Unbounce the company, October saw us move into a new office space, and take our landing page product to new heights (read: more features and more bugs).

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.

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:

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

7 Easy Exercises to Boost Your Landing Page Health

Oli Gardner — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:00:21 +0000

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:

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

7 Benefits of Using Landing Pages

Oli Gardner — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:00:23 +0000

Any online marketing campaign is a candidate for the use of a landing page. On Day 6 of our 7 Days to a Better Landing Page series, I’ll explain the benefits you can expect to see by incorporating a landing page into your marketing process.

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

7 Guaranteed Ways to Make Your Customers Leave Your Landing Page

Oli Gardner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:19:12 +0000

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

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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.
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

The Conversion Marketing Scorecard

Oli Gardner — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 08:00:00 +0000

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.

Score: 0/10

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?

Score: 0/10

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.

Score: 0/10

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.

Score: 0/10

Total Score: 0/40

Interpreting Your Score

Score	Rating	What it Means
36-40	Rock Star Landing Page	Not much left to do here, you’re basically a design and marketing god. The best use of your time would be sipping on a fine wine while you watch the conversions on your iPhone.
31-35	Second Best	This is a great achievement, but like winning a Silver medal in the Olympics, it’s not quite good enough. Just don’t wait 4 years until you make the necessary improvements.
26-30	Better than most	Chances are you are converting fairly well. Go back through the checklist and spend a few minutes with each unchecked box to figure out what’s missing. Implement them, and check your score again.
21-25	Meh	You are very slightly above average. Mediocrity is only exciting for one reason: there are a lot of conversions out there that you’re missing out on. Go get ‘em champ.
16-20	One eye closed	With a score in this range, it’s as if you are trying to ignore half of your potential customers. Imagine yourself standing in the street handing out fliers – everyone on the other side of the street is missing your message.
11-15	Unmemorable	If you want people to convert, you need to be unique and memorable. If your product or service isn’t all that different, then the least you can do is follow the basic usability principles of smart landing page design. Try reading our 101 Landing Page Optimization Tips eBook for inspiration.
6-10	The second least popular kid in school	One off the bottom. Way to go. Get back to the drawing board and start applying first principles to your landing pages. A good start would be running through our HOW TO: Create a Landing Page Design Concept in 10 Minutes post.
1-5	Pathetic	Find a different profession.

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

The Unbounce Challenge

Tell us your score

If you use our scorecard to rate your landing page, we’d love if you’d share your score and a URL to you landing page in the comments below. Then you can come back and comment again once you’ve made some improvements.