Conversion Heroes is a series of short 5-question interviews with experts in the field of conversion. Subjects for discussion include landing pages, copywriting, conversion optimization, social media conversion, email marketing, organic SEO for landing pages and A/B & multivariate testing.
Roberta is a regular contributor to Copyblogger.com where she writes the popular Landing Page Makeover series. She also teaches copywriting for American Writers and Artists Institute and writes children’s book reviews for Adoptive Families magazine. She has also served as Technical Editor for Blogging All-in-One for Dummies (April 2010), Google Blogger for Dummies (2009) and Writing Copy for Dummies (2004).
Firstly, a big thank you to Roberta for participating in the interview. The topic for discussion is copywriting for landing pages.
Oli: What process do you use when writing a headline for a landing page?
Roberta: It depends, but generally I don’t write the headline first. I always feel like that’s too much pressure. Instead, I just dig into the body copy for the promotion. By involving myself deeply in the meat of the product or service, ideas for headlines generally bubble to the surface. I keep a yellow pad handy or a Notepad window open on my screen for jotting headlines down as they come to me, but continue to work on the other writing. When I feel like I’ve pretty much got the basic copy down, I return to the headline list. I may write more or I may start reviewing and editing what I’ve already listed. My approach is very non-linear, but I prefer to let the ideas flow as they flow.
Now that we’ve had a year of blog posts at Unbounce, I thought it would be worth digging back through the pile to uncover the most popular ones. Our Top 10 is based on a combination of factors, including the reactions of our readers – comments, retweets and inbound links.
Enjoy looking back on the best of Unbounce…
![The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program [Infographic]](/photos/12-step-landing-page-rehab-80-th.jpg)
![The 7 Secrets of Social Media Conversion [INFOGRAPHIC]](/photos/7-secrets-thumb.png)
![The MR. MEN Guide to Landing Pages, Conversion & Absurd Metaphor [Infographic]](/photos/mr-happy.gif)
![Landing Pages for PPC [Infographic]](/photos/ppc-landing-pages-th.png)
The conversion scorecard is a tool you can use to gauge the effectiveness (or readiness) of your landing pages, in a simple 20-question yes/no format.
Answer each of the 20 questions as honestly as you can and tally the number of “Yes” responses to arrive at your score. The goal is to get a quick ballpark sense of how good you landing page is and how many rules your page is breaking. You probably wouldn’t want to do this exercise on a page that’s doing really well as rules and best practices are only a starting point and you should never interfere with a successful campaign.
Then take all your “No” responses and create a “To Do List” of things to improve on your page.
Nice T-shirt. Terrible way to spend your inbound marketing budget.
There’s a simple point to be made here. When you’re sending multiple streams of inbound traffic to your homepage (or registration page, cart page) the original upstream ad message gets lost in a flood of generic multi-channel multi-product communication that dilutes the experience to the point where the visitor just does the browser shrug and leaves.
For the record, the browser shrug is the physical embodiment of real-life disappointment, akin to a simultaneous clicking of the back button whilst saying “meh” out loud.
It sounds a bit like a modern-day women’s tennis match.
Looking for some design inspiration for your next landing page? We’ve just started a new landing page examples section in the Unbounce blog where we’re going to feature the best examples of landing pages that we find on our marketing travels. In each post we’ll break down the anatomy of the landing page and look at what’s good and where they could be improved.
To kick things off here are 5 great examples of lead gen and click-through landing pages:
An example of excellent message match between banner and landing page is shown by Full Sail. They also offer up 2 different design versions to test their messaging in an A/B test.
In November 2004 I had my first real encounter with marketing people. It was a horrible experience.
I come from the user experience (UX) crowd, indulging in usability, interaction design, information architecture and other such altruistic endeavours rooted in a desire to make the web work better for “the customer”. The marketing guys had an entirely different agenda with no real concern for anything but the bottom line.
This is the first of our new monthly product updates. My hope is to shed some light on where we’re taking the product by highlighting recent developments and leaking a few of our upcoming features.
In the spirit of transparency, we’d be stoked if you jumped in to discuss where we’re going and how it affects you and your marketing business needs.
You’ve optimized your landing page to convert like an electric car salesman in a world without oil, and your PPC campaign is pumping out a CPA lower than a spring break limbo pole. Yet despite having a well targeted and relevant giveaway (a whitepaper for example) on your lead gen landing page, you feel like you could be generating more paying customers from your prospects.
Could it be that you’re not holding their hand long enough?
Turning a visitor into a lead is one thing, and turning them into a paying customer is a whole other bucket of frogs. It requires constant attention and marketing effort to capitalize on your available opportunities.
“statistics show that it takes six to seven contacts before you can turn a prospect into a customer.”
– Constant Contact (pdf)
I want to try something different for this post by making it more of an informal online brainstorm. I’ll pose a topic and a few primary questions, then open it up to comments.
The more people that interact with their opinions, the better the post will become and I’ll re-incorporate them into the post as we go.
Social media is no longer the next big thing, it’s just simply an interaction medium that proliferates all aspects of online life. As such, it will naturally begin to infiltrate the discipline of internet marketing. How this happens is yet to be determined. There seem to be a few toes being dipped in the water, but it’s a little early to get a clear picture of where it’s headed and what’s been successful thus far.
And so, I have some questions:
Download our free white papers and reports for some bedtime conversion optimization reading.
Read our opinionated guide to landing page conversion.
Using Twitter to enhance, promote and measure your landing page campaigns.
A collection of articles about landing page fundamentals.
