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.

Sounds much like women’s tennis.

A great example of the crowded marketplace that is a homepage vs. a focused landing page can be seen in this comparison post about Campaign Monitor. Where the landing page has 1 interaction point vs. 412 on the homepage.

Inbound marketing sources typically include email, PPC, banners (display ads) and social media. Each of these sources should be treated with the respect the ads deserve – which means a nicely tailored landing page for each.

Stop wasting money and time sending traffic to your homepage.

Exception

There’s an exception to most rules (don’t eat yellow snow is fairly safe however). If you’re selling a single product or service that’s very focused, then sending traffic to your homepage is totally OK – just make sure you do actually spend some time testing your home page to make it convert better. Remember to edit ruthlessly and refine your messaging to really explain with clarity what it is you do/offer.

You should still use a landing page when you are running promotions (particularly private ones for affiliates and such) so that you can keep your homepage clear of all the clutter.

That’s all for now.

– Oli Gardner

(Click infographic for full size view)

Social media should be good for business, but there are two lingering problems. Firstly, the stubborn gaggle of non-adopters that doth protest too much – “it should be for personal use, not business”. Secondly, most people that are using social media for inbound marketing are doing a poor job of converting the traffic once it arrives.

If you’re using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to drive traffic to your business – but the results are less than inspiring – you’re probably making fundamental mistakes during the conversion phase of the social media conversion funnel (see the infographic attached to this post).

The 7 Secrets

While they’re not as sexy as Victoria’s, or even close to being in the same league as “Aladdin’s Cave” – these 7 secrets (shhh) will help you leverage social media in smarter ways to improve your conversions.

SECRET #1 – Use a landing page please

Let’s start with a simple vocal warmup exercise. Repeat this phrase out loud until your coworkers tell you to be shut up:

• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”
• “Don’t drive traffic to your homepage. Use a landing page.”

Your homepage is a terrible destination choice for social campaign traffic because your message gets diluted upon arrival. Landing pages on the other hand are purposely designed to be one dimensional so your 140 character tweet (for example) can be expanded upon without distraction from other messages.

From a practical perspective, if you tried to update your homepage to reflect every promotion and lead generation campaign you do, it would quickly turn into an ugly mess and would be impossible to measure or test. Not to mention the grief you’d get trying to convince a boardroom full of stakeholders for approval.

Compare these two (slightly convoluted) scenarios

Scenario A

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste (bear with me), and drops you off at the supermarket. If you manage to find the toothpaste aisle, you’ll be so overwhelmed by the choice that the odds of you getting the right kind are akin to pinning the tail on the donkey. And that’s if the magazine rack and the booze section don’t distract you first.

Scenario B

A friend tells you about a great new flavor of toothpaste and takes you to a room dedicated to only that type of toothpaste. There are posters on the wall explaining the benefits and there is a big shiny cash register with a large “buy the toothpaste you are looking for here” sign above it.

Which scenario do you want your customers to experience? (The correct answer is B).

SECRET #2 – Social message match

The primary message on your landing page should be the same (or reflective of) what you said in your social media channel. Like positive reinforcement for dogs, seeing a familiar message adds to the feeling that you made a “good” click. Conversely, not having a matched message can make your visitors feel lost – at which point they head for the comfort of the back button.

Stick to the tone of your seed message. Chances are that if someone clicked on your link then they connected with your style. If you are using a quirky short form on Twitter, repeat this on the landing page. If you’re driving corporate business traffic from LinkedIn then maintain a more formal style. Consistency is the key here.

For extra reinforcement, use an icon or design element that reflects the upstream social source. There are a million free social media icons that you can use for this purpose. It can work a little like a socially co-branded experience between the source and your brand; where you can clearly tell where you came from and where you are going.

[TIP] Use a landing page for each traffic source

Using a different landing page for each social media traffic source lets you personalize the experience and improves the social message match. It also makes it much easier to track the performance of your pages and determine which traffic source converts the best.

[Example] – Contextual social message match

The WP Greet Box Wordpress plugin is used to provide a contextually relevant icon and message to visitors form social media sites. It detects where you came form and suggests that you follow/like etc.

SECRET #3 – Social proof via social media widgets

Most people are a bit like sheep. They have no idea where they are going and no idea if it’s a good idea. Our herd mentality makes us want constant validation that our choices are sound. We do this by seeking reviews of products and services and we observe the reactions of others as they experience the goods before us.

Imagine walking down a street; on one side is a person staring straight up, on the other side is a large group of 30 people all looking up at the sky. We are programmed to react more strongly to the inferred wisdom of the crowd and will gravitate towards checking out what the group is doing first.

This is a form of social proof, which can be used in the digital realm as an aide to conversion manipulation or optimization. There are a few techniques you can use to replicate it on your landing page:

• Show your popularity: use a social media widget to show how many Twitter followers, article retweet’s and Facebook likes/fans you have.

  

• Show your success: testimonials show people that you have made someone else happy. Make sure they are authentic and provide a photo if possible. Ideally show the support of an influencer in the common space you share with your customers. You can also use social media widgets to show a timeline of “reactions” from various channels (such as an @yourname feed from Twitter).

Cats are like sheep too

Whiskas cat food used this concept to great effect in their 80s/90s ad campaigns declaring: 8 out of 10 cats prefer it. People believed it then, they’ll believe it now, especially if you show the proof.

SECRET #4 – Make it easy to share with social media widgets

Having your content shared might not be your primary conversion goal, but it can be an important source of bonus traffic – or it can be the difference between mild and epic success. The multiplicative effects of viral exposure are often the tipping point in a social media campaign.

Motivation comes in numerous forms from self expression (the online equivalent of placing your favourite books or CDs in view for your houseguests) to status (the “I saw it first” effect). Some people are gagging to find quality content to share as it reflects well on their perceived connectedness. If you have a great product, service or offer, enhance this motivational desire by making it really simple to share. Test different sharing mechanisms to see which your audience responds to the most.

No barrier to entry

One of the simplest sharing methods for Facebook users is the new Like button widget. Many Facebook’ers are in a permanently logged-in state – which lets them interact in a single click without leaving your page.

Familiarity breeds interaction

Be consistent with your traffic source, e.g. if they arrived via Twitter – have a Retweet button as it offers the lowest barrier to your “sharing” conversion goal.

[Example] – follow and share to enter a contest

This example uses Twitter widgets to ask people to follow and share in order to gain entry to a contest. (Source http://campl.us/)

SECRET #5 – The world’s shortest lead gen form

Conversion is a balancing act between enticement and resistance (barriers to entry).

If you are collecting leads (personal data such as name, email, phone number, company, website etc.) then your lead gen form is a barrier to entry and the size of the barrier is directly correlated to the size of the form (number of fields).

When collecting personal data, you need to offer something back to the customer in exchange, such as a whitepaper, webinar registration, eBook and so on. The more relevant and interesting your giveaway is, the larger you can make the hurdle.

This balance can be tough to achieve, when people in your company are asking you to add extra fields to the form to get the data they so badly need.

A solution to this is to remove every field from your form except the email address.

In the past this would mean you would have empty meaningless data and the subsequent email campaigns targeting these new leads would be impersonal (no first name). With the use of post-conversion social discovery tools like Flowtown you can get the best of both worlds, by lowering the barrier to entry all the way down, while still receiving the data you need.

Secret #7 below sheds more light on this. But for now the important lesson is that you can greatly increase your conversion rate on lead gen campaigns by leveraging the power of a short form – without sacrificing the quality of your data.

SECRET #6 – Use a safety net CTA

Sadly, not everyone that comes to your landing page is ready to convert. They may be window shopping, browsing or just curious about what you have to say. By offering a secondary call to action (CTA) you can sometimes persuade the visitor to maintain a connection with you.

The simplest ways to do this are to provide a method to:

• Follow you on Twitter
• Like your Facebook page or group
• Join a LinkedIn group
• Bookmark you on Delicious

Even if 1 in 100 decide to do this, it adds up to future conversion potential because they have entered your sphere of brand influence.

Note: You don’t want this to take away from your primary CTA, so place it in the footer or near the bottom of the page.

SECRET #7 – Post-conversion social discovery

Post-conversion strategy is a completely overlooked part of the sales funnel. You got your conversion and you got your lead so everything’s good right? Wrong.

There are 2 main ways to optimize your post-conversion opportunities:

• Good: Place additional CTA’s on your confirmation or thankyou page (after they complete your lead gen form). This can help to reduce clutter on your landing page. And you can also suggest a page on your website as their next step – knowing that they have a qualified level of interest.
• Better: Turn the email into a complete social profile using a service like Flowtown. This gives your leads an identity and sets you up for more targeted follow-up marketing. Your first contact with the prospect is critical, and the more you know about them the better. By connecting based on real profile data you look like someone who’s made the effort to do some research before making contact. This is a massive conversion advantage.

As I mentioned in secret #5, social discovery lets you shorten your lead gen forms to improve your conversion rate. And while it’s true that a social profile may not answer every question you have about your new prospects, what it does is provide you with a level of personal data that can start a more effective conversation.

In Summary

For your next social media campaign or promotion, try a few of the 7 secrets to improve the conversion phase of your social media funnel. As a starting point, make sure you begin with #1, #2, #5 and #7 on your next lead gen landing page.

A word of caution: using all 7 secrets at once may cause undesirable side-effects such as content bloating and sweaty widgets. If you don’t need a form, don’t use one (obvious), and if you want to utilize social sharing widgets, pick one (relevant to your audience) not twenty.

Share this post

If you think these secrets should be shared just remember to add a #shhhh hashtag on Twitter.

– Oli Gardner

To kick things off here are 5 great examples of lead gen and click-through landing pages:

Full Sail University – with an A/B test of two designs

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.

View the full analysis

iBrite – an iPad app

An e-commerce landing page for the iBrite iPad app. Includes an energetic video demonstrating the app being used.

View the full analysis

Campaign Monitor

A beautiful landing page from email provider Campaign Monitor, that should serve as inspiration for your click-through page designs.

View the full analysis

Webtrends

A super simple and clean lead capture landing page from Webtrends.

View the full analysis

Glow.com

The thumbnail shown is only a small portion of what is a long landing page from cosmetics company Glow. Read the full post to learn how they constructed one big page out of several smaller screen-sized landing page areas.

View the full analysis

We’ll be adding new landing page examples every week, and if you have one you’d like to submit for inclusion be sure to drop me a line at oli@unbounce.com.

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.

We were discussing ideas for a new campaign and how to integrate it into the corporate website. They wanted to use a separate standalone “landing page”. I’d never heard the term before and started to gag when I heard the list of requirements.

What I hated about the “landing page”

The landing page was going to break rules I usually worked hard to uphold. From a user centered design (UCD) perspective, I was worried about three main things:

1. No navigation: It struck me as being a tunnel-vision design tactic to try and trap the user on the page, not allowing them to determine their own experience.
2. No link on the logo: This is a similar point and breaks a fundamental rule of facilitating simple transport to the homepage. Why make them type in the URL, or delete half of what’s in the address bar?
3. Inaccessible: The design was almost completely image based, chopped into several large graphics and dumped on the page – rather than being a well constructed HTML page with accessible content (to readers and syndication) and good SEO value.

My thinking: This will just lead to annoyed visitors and lots of attention being paid to the back button.

Gather Round as I Admit to Being Wrong

I don’t say “I’m wrong” all that often. Not because I’m a rancidly stubborn egomaniac. Rather because I just happen to be naturally good at stuff (#notmyfault). But in this instance I was completely wrong. Not with regard to my concerns, but with their relative importance. You need to use a different mindset when approaching design for conversion. Landing pages, as it turns out, are actually a pretty good idea.

Landing pages aren’t so bad

Positioned right in the middle of the sales funnel, landing pages play a critical binding role in the conversion experience of your visitors. They should be educational – to expand upon the ad message that brought them your way. They should offer value – if you’re giving something away, make it good. Trickery has no part to play in a real marketing campaign and you should aim to make your customer’s day a little better by providing a product or service with real and tangible benefits.

What I like about landing pages

Over time I’ve come to understand the role landing pages (and marketing people) play in making a business successful, and I can honestly say that I like them both more than I used to. I won’t say “love”, because I’m reserving that for things like bonus cheques, girls, and wine from Argentina. What I will do is share a few key lesson I’ve learned.

Looking back at 2004 and my earlier issues, I came up with this new list:

1. One thing at a time: While writing this post I got up from my laptop at least 30 times. Why? Because I have ADD and I’m easily bored. Guess what? So do/are your potential customers. It’s hard to dedicate your attention to something when there are so many distractions around you. Landing pages – when done right – have a single focused objective and they don’t let you wander off (because they remove the navigation and you can’t click on the logo).
2. Designed for a specific purpose: Websites are designed to deal with multiple goals, maybe multiple personas, and they need to accommodate technical visitors such as search engines. Landing pages can be about nothing more than a single idea. A campaign should have a single measurable goal, and your landing page should be a selfish reflection of that.



3. Creative freedom: Not being tethered to your company’s website guidelines gives you significantly wider creative latitude. Try a full-page background image with a button layered over the top. Switch to a black background to create a more intense mood than your corporate site. Push the boundaries in the name of conversion (but not at the expense of brand values). Test new or crazy ideas without having to design by committee. If you end up arguing direction in the boardroom, do an A/B test with each idea and prove which is best. Remove conjecture.
4. Communication oriented: Yes it might be image heavy, but sometimes it’s better to have a compelling typographic treatment that communicates effectively, than having a page of dull 12pt Verdana text. Note: If you are doing paid search via Google AdWords or similar, then you need to pay closer attention to the actual HTML text content in order to maintain a good quality score. It’s not the be all and end all, but is something you should take into account. You may gain better placement and a lower cost per click (CPC) if you have bot-readable text that matches your ad.
5. SEO is not always a factor*: Typically, a campaign specific landing page is designed to be withheld from the search engines to stop it interfering with your conversion stats (when running a PPC campaign for example). This allows you to focus on the purity of your message, as opposed to trying to insert keyword-rich phrases in your copy. *The exception is the type of single page website that uses a sales letter style template (with a ton of content), and is created to attract organic traffic.

At the end of the day, if you are connecting customers with valuable products and services, then conversion centered design is solving a user centered problem. And everybody wins.

What do you think about landing pages?

Share your opinions on landing pages as a concept, and why you love or hate them.

– Oli Gardner

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.

In this month’s update

• Pre-made dropdown lists for your lead gen forms
• Enhanced form button support
• Video landing page template
• Page section guides
• Stat reset
• Coming soon – what’s next?

New Form Features

Lead gen is top of mind for a lot of Unbounce customers so we’re making it a priority (see coming soon below). The latest additions are a series of pre-made dropdown lists and improved button support.

Ready made dropdown lists for your lead gen forms

We added a set of pre-made lists to save you time when building your lead gen forms. Choose from Countries, US States, Canadian Provinces, States & Provinces together, days, months and more. If you want us to add any other lists to the system just drop us a line on our Get Satisfaction forum.

Enhanced form button support

Your form buttons are now fully customizable, including support for graphical image buttons. Buttons can have 3 states, up/hover/active to enhance interactivity and you can position the button anywhere inside the form area to give you more layout freedom.

Video Landing Page Template

For anyone who isn’t graphically inclined or doesn’t have access to a design resource, our landing page templates can help you get your campaigns started. We’ve been adding new templates as we roll along and will be reworking all of them into a bigger collection in the coming weeks.

The latest is a video landing page template that also includes a feature list and social media icon which can be utilized for enhanced path relevance when doing social media marketing (via Twitter in this example).

If there are any specific template types you would like to see in Unbounce, please let us know on our Get Satisfaction forum.

Usability Enhancements

While adding as many new features as possible, we’re also committed to making Unbounce the most usable landing page platform available. We are constantly testing the tool and evaluating feedback from you to see how we can make it easier to use. Here are a couple of changes we made that should make your life simpler.

Page section guides

Page sections are the foundation of the landing page editor. They let you segment your content into flexible and stretchable blocks. Typically you use them for adding header, body and footer type sections. With the new guides, it’s easier to see where the boundaries are and to drag them to resize.

If you click inside a page section you will see the small black handle to resize the height. You can also grab any of the horizontal lines to stretch a section or use the vertical lines to change the page width.

Reset stats

We added this to your page details view so that you can take control of when your campaign should start. We realized that you need to publish your pages if you want to send them around to stakeholders or colleagues for review and also just for the peace of mind of looking at them in a live browser scenario.

Once you are confident that your page is ready for receiving traffic, simply hit the reset stats button to wind the counters to zero.

Be careful not to reset your stats once your campaign and A/B testing is underway.

Coming Soon

Over the next few weeks we’re going bananas over lead generation features and new landing page templates.

Major lead gen updates

If you’re capturing user data you’ll love what we’re planning in our next release. Here’s a bird’s eye view of what we’re working on.

• View your leads within Unbounce: If you don’t have an existing place to house your leads you’ll be able to view them directly in Unbounce as soon as they are captured.
• Integration with 3rd party CRM’s and Email Service Providers: If you want to push your leads directly into your existing MailChimp account or CRM system then we’ll be building support for this. We could use your help in determining priority here – so please jump onto the support forum and tell us which providers you want us to integrate with.
• Send leads to an email address: If you just want your leads sent to your inbox we’ll be able to do that for you too.
• Send users a whitepaper, eBook (or any file) on form submit: We’ll let you upload files for your users to download automatically (or get from a confirmation page).
• More form field features: Checkboxes are coming, but we also want to know the other forms field types you need. Text areas? Radio buttons? We’ll get to them all in due course, but if you have a burning need let us know.

New suite of landing page templates

We’re working on a major overhaul of our templates that will make your job easier and more enjoyable. The next update will include improved visual designs and extra template layouts. We’re also working on some fully designed “samples” to illustrate what you can build with the Unbounce landing page editor.

Ok, that’s it for now. If you have a product feature wishlist, please let us know what you need and we’ll see about incorporating it into our roadmap.

Until next month.

Cheers,

– Oli Gardner

Could it be that you’re not holding their hand long enough?

Conversion is hard

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)

Keeping them in the mood

Take advantage of that magic moment directly after the customer says “Yes, I like you” and you’ll keep your new leads in your sphere of influence while they’re “in the mood”. To do this you need to try and keep their attention on the first thing they see after submitting your lead gen form – the confirmation page.

The confirmation page

The lead generation confirmation page could be considered the digital equivalent of a post-conversion supermarket candy shelf. We’ve all fallen victim to the shelves of sweet goodness lined up by the checkout as you wait in line – aimlessly throwing crap we don’t need into the basket. But asking someone to pause and listen to your message after they’ve paid is a lot more tricky. Staying with the supermarket analogy for a sec, imagine if the guy bagging your food said, “Hey, here’s a $5 voucher for next time” – chances are you’d pay attention.

5 Post-Conversion Marketing Ideas For Your Confirmation Page

At this stage it’s all about EXCEEDING expectations. You have a blank page to work with and a few precious seconds to direct your new lead. Here are 5 ideas that you can use:

1. Ask them to follow you via social media (Twitter, Facebook) to learn about other opportunities

This can be used as a secondary “safety net” call to action on your landing page, as long as it’s small and subtle. On your confirmation page, you can throw a great big icon out there to entice them into your social media world. It’s a fairly low risk action for a customer and can place their ears in front of your digital mouth for a long while to come. It also exposes them to the positive reactions you gather from others which adds some word of mouth reputation strength.

2. Invite them to a webinar

This is another low commitment value add to offer. Make sure the subject matter is closely related to the goals of the leads you’re capturing. If you can get someone to attend a webinar you are effectively establishing a higher level of contact – they will get a chance to see or hear you and ask you questions. If you can establish yourself as a thought leader on your given subject, this can elevate the trust factor massively.

3. Give them a discount coupon (or code)

I once bought a Sony Playstation PS3 that had an open box. It was already marked down by $100 making it a great deal. Without my asking for anything, the salesman offered up a free game and a further discount – with no catch. What was the result of this action? I told all of my friends about my great customer experience. If you give people a discount when they’re not asking for it and don’t have to give you anything in return (they already completed your lead gen form) – they’ll get that great service buzz and momentum.

4. Send them to an important “What To Do Next” page

Many people enjoy a guided experience. Tell them what to do and they’ll often do it. Use only a single link for this and send them to a “Greatest Hits” or “Top 10″ list page that shows off the very best content and information you have to offer.

5. Ask them to subscribe to a drip campaign

Drip campaigns are a powerful permission marketing tool that keeps you in the leads stream of consciousness for a defined period of time. The confirmation page is a good time to ask if someone would like to participate if you can automatically transfer their details to the new list without asking for more data. An example campaign would be the ProBlogger 31 Days to a Better Blog. The expectation and benefit is set right away – you will receive an email every day for a month and by the end of it you’re blog will be better! This type of campaign take a lot of work to put together, but once it’s ready you can automatically “drip” the emails to your prospects as soon as they sign up.

4 Benefits of “In The Mood” Engagement

By paying careful attention to your confirmation pages you add the opportunity for some powerful brand extension touchpoints:

1. The opportunity for more subtle follow-up marketing: sharing knowledge via social media, staying within the sphere of marketing influence
2. The opportunity to exceed expectations: differentiate by being the best at every step
3. The chance to offer info/advice etc. that would have crowded your landing page: if you wanted to convey a message that wasn’t appropriate for your landing page (as you were rightfully keeping it focused on a single message), you now have the opportunity to do so
4. The chance to offer a guided experience: most people like direction. Offer a suggestion and even if some only 1 of your leads takes the bait, it’s still better than none…

Putting It Into Practice

In a future post I’ll show you how this approach can be applied by building a lead gen landing page and confirmation page in Unbounce. I might even embarrass myself with a screencast, so check back for that.

– Oli Gardner

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.

How Does/Will Social Media Affect Landing Page Conversion rates?

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:

Brainstorm Questions

If you have any opinions/answers, please comment below.

In what ways can you incorporate social media into a landing page?

There are a whole bunch of social media widgets that can be inserted into a landing page:

• Twitter streams
• Facebook updates
• Flickr photostreams
• Blog RSS
• YouTube Video?
• Etc.

What other examples are there?
What are the uses of each type?

Is there an exception to be made re: the single goal of a landing page?

Typically a landing page should be highly focused on a single goal. However, I believe there is value in using a secondary “Safety Net” call to action (CTA) that captures the people who are not quite ready to convert. An example of this would be “Follow me on Twitter”. This allows you to maintain a post-bounce connection with the visitor, and lets them commit to something less intimidating than the Buy Now button.

What do you think about this concept?
What other examples are there when applied to different social media interactions?

What benefits are there to be gained from social media integration?

What strikes me initially is that social media integration can improve your landing pages in the following ways:

1. Increased trust: social proof factors (e.g. a large following) can make you more credible
2. A modern mindset: depending on your demographic and campaign topic it could enhance the appeal of your landing page
3. The primary goal: If your primary goal is to grow your social network then inclusion of social interaction points is clearly relevant

What other benefits are there?

Please share your thoughts and experiences below.

Cheers

– Oli Gardner

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

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:

1. Test some different copy on your buttons: try funny, outrageous, seductive etc.
2. Try a different typographic treatment for your button design
3. 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)
4. 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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics

Larry Chase

10 ways to improve your return on investment by optimizing your landing pages.

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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.

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14 Instant Landing Page Upgrades

Ian – Conversation Marketing

14 suggestions for how to improve your landing pages for PPC and email marketing campaigns.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Landing Page Optimization For Dummies – 30 Points from the Cheat Sheet

Michael Harwood

An overview taken from a book in the popular Dummies series.

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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).

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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7 Tips to Increase your Landing Page Conversion Rate

DeWitt’s Media

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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

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

– Oli Gardner