Did you know that your current landing page may be standing between you and hundreds, perhaps thousands of additional dollars sent to your business?
Well, you are not alone, so I decided to write up some little known secrets to increase your profits online.
Why bother with a landing page?
Imagine the perfect sandwich. It contains a top, middle, bottom. The acquisition of clients is the top part, the conversion (and the juicy part) the middle, and retention/back-end the bottom part. If you can make all three in a perfect way, you can eat your way to a great landing page business model.
Who should design the perfect landing page?
Aren’t you the King or Queen of Internet Marketing? Don’t you know your strategic and tactical angles the best of all? Wrong. Not when it comes to landing page design. It’s the visitor to your page that will help design it for you. But - only if that visitor is tracked and tested in such a way that you can quantify the relevancy and conversion factors of that visitor.
What I mean by that is - you need to test variations of your landing page and classify the “winning pages” (pages that converted) and constantly check your conversion rates. If a 100 folks click or find your webpage and 1 person engages, you have a 1% conversion rate. Your goal is to move this number up and tracking not only the CR (conversion rate), but the dollars associated with each offer and page.
Where do I start to write a landing page?
When you start working on the page, make sure that you start with the relevancy factor. Don’t try deceit, make it compelling and look to solve a problem for the visitor as your core message. Look also at your competition and move to a wireframe layout (where you can move things around), without getting too deep into details at first. Think about what possible headlines, offers and variations of those capture you the most intially. Then, add a scarcity factor to make the offer short-lived. You probably have seen count-down clocks and other imagery to show “limited supply” or “limited offer”.
Furthermore, make sure that the message to engage the visitor is “above the fold” on the page, so they don’t have to scroll to see your most important sections. You have 5 seconds or less - “a blink of an eye” really - to convey your message and have them take action. A personal touch is always good, it helps to establish trust, which is a key component on the Internet, where visitors don’t know you. Try also not to just “pitch”, but make a softer sell, and think “informational”. If you are in e-commerce (transactional) - it will be different, but test everything as indicated below:
16 Top Things To Test - For More Money From Landing Pages:
- Headlines - A strong, compelling, problem solving headline - relevant to topic
- Price of offer - test different prices
- Bonuses or other incentives
- PS (p.s.) - at the end of your sales letter - many will scroll down your page and read this
- Guarantees - ex: “90 day guarantee or your money back”
- Audio - test with auto-play or not
- Body Copy - short and long copy, maximize use of white space, and make it short - web readers “scan” the page
- Header image and/or banner - Test by turning it on and off, different sizes and colors too
- Site color/fonts - Red and Blue fonts work well, test it all
- Sub headers, taglines - compelling “problem solvers”
- Images - “hero shots” - personal pictures of people, then things
- Videos - very powerful in the new YouTube age. Upload a video to YouTube and make sure to brand it on your page
- Buttons - different colors, different text in buttons (not just “submit”, but “Yes, download the free whitepaper”, etc)
- Your Logo - Show it, Don’t show it. (You’d be amazed what turning it off may do. Don’t do this if you are Coca-Cola)
- Credibility, Legitimacy - Verisign logo, BBB, Hackersafe, Visa/MC, etc
- Test your sign up forms, short versus long (short forms work better, but test this)
Testing all of this and in many ways can be daunting. You can use the web optimizer from Google to start, or write your own (I’m working on a simple, but effective javascript system). There are also vendors like optimost, vertster, kaizentrack and others. They can be very expensive, but worthwhile for the right business.
You should set your ego aside, and recognize that most new users who come to your website, has a “bad” or “I’m busy” attitude. If you can generate relevant pages that try to answer their problems quickly (”the 5 second rule to action”) - you are on your way. The 5-second rule (or less) must engage the user to do something on your site.
Look to overcome this user psychology and test your pages against them:
“I’d like to buy, but:
Can I trust you? If so, prove it!
Are others buying from you? If so, show me!
Are you going to be around if I buy from you?
Is this all too good to be true?”
Alway make sure to apply good SEO - with TITLE tags, Descriptions, Headers and more - watch your money and profits grow!
This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 4:00 pm and is filed under Landing Pages. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.8 Responses to “Who Else Wants More Money From Their Landing Pages?”
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ULTIMATE Guide to Search Engine Optimization
September 15th, 2007 at 6:27 pm
That’s fantastic information. Much of this we currently do with our clients landing pages already. However, there were a couple of new things that we’ll certainly be trying out.
September 16th, 2007 at 8:13 am
[...] are converting at over 10%. If you are one of them, then congratulations, if not, check out this article at the SEO world blog. Don’t you know your strategic and tactical angles the best of all? Wrong. [...]
September 17th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Great article. Jupiter Research actually named a medium sized company in San Francisco called http://www.memetrics.com as the leader in testing and conversion optimization. What’s great is they do offline optimization as well.
September 18th, 2007 at 9:33 am
It depends, a little, on what you’re selling, too. If I was buying a piece of software, say, spelling errors in some document wouldn’t bother me quite as much. But, bugs on the page would be a huge turnoff because of the implication. Conversely, if I was buying a tennis racket, I might be less sensitive to page errors.
Generally though, I can’t stand page errors such as broken links - click here to download white paper, but there’s nothing there. Dated copy is also a huge turnoff - copyright 2004 is DOA, even if I otherwise think they’re OK.
The worst of all? Email someone for sales information - here I am ready to buy and I just have this tiny question - and …. nothing. No response, nothing. Ignored? You can guarantee I will never go back. Fill out a long, stupid form and click to submit. Then … nothing happens. No one responds because it got dumped because there was no drive space. Then there’s the form that’s either broken or after you make one error, it tells you to go back and fix the error but when you go back it flushed all the fields! Insanity and another guarantee I am gone forever.
BTW - the whole white paper thing became a wholesale scam about a year ago. These days, about 90% are nothing but a sales pitch. They don’t provide any information and some aren’t even white papers, period.
September 18th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
What are your top 5 best landing pages? I’d love to see examples of the sites you think are doing it the best –
Thanks!
October 12th, 2007 at 7:37 am
What a great article. We get excellent search engine coverage. We are always on the first or second page but get approximately 50 visitors per day. It’s hard to test results with so few visitors. However, I would love to see those sites you consider doing a great job on landing page.
Catherine
November 14th, 2008 at 12:19 am
The Psychology of Sales Conversion
In conclusion to my small series of articles on how to effectively sell online, I wanted to finish with a small piece of wisdom I found in a blog post on Entrepreneur.com, written by Jon Rognerud.
He had this to say in his article entitled “Who E…
January 21st, 2009 at 8:27 am
[...] simply too much information there, and visitors may leave your site. Read my blog entry on money-making landing page tips and test the pages for content. Realize that narrow-casting is better than broad-casting in almost [...]