First, I present a test. Please answer truthfully.
Where do you place primary focus in your online work on a daily basis?
Please select in order of importance of workload:
- A. Search Engine Rankings & Monitoring (___ %)
- B. Web Traffic Building/Link Acquisition (___%)
- C. Website Usability Study and Updates (___%)
- D. User Behavior Tracking and Strategy (___%)
- E. Brand Reach/Social Media Expansion (___%)
- F. Conversion Testing and Profit Tracking (___%)
I certainly hope flavors of all six, but I’m guessing that F, the last one, grabs the smallest attention in your day-to-day? It’s very common, and I see it all the time.
The truth is: You don’t have to spend all that time and work trying to get more traffic or rankings with detailed user click-stream tracking, link building in order to add potentially significant *bottom-line dollars* to your existing business.
All right then: How can you create “big revenue into your business” today?
With existing traffic (assuming “big enough” data rate!) and the overall movement to your website, you should be able to double–and triple–conversions by making just some small changes (some more drastic, perhaps), but overall, pretty easy to implement.
You could try to build more traffic, but it’s generally harder to raise traffic that you need to meet your conversion goals, versus just tweaking your existing page(s) to simply get more customers to buy more of your stuff.
There are many ways to do this. But today, I’ll show you examples from a design team that I have been working with lately, with some amazing results. We’ve seen outstanding success, and extracts from case studies are presented below.
But, let me rehash–from a previous post on my blog–here are some things you can test yourself:
- Headlines: A strong, compelling, problem-solving headline, relevant to topic
- Price of offer: Test different prices
- Bonuses or other incentives
- P.S.: Add a P.S. at the end of your sales letter or squeeze/content page. Many will scroll down your page and read this
- Guarantees: For example, “90 day guarantee or your money back”
- Audio: Test with autoplay 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
- Subheaders, taglines: Compelling “problem solvers”
- Images: i.e., “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. Add more “flair” to your page.
- Test your signup forms, short vs. long (short forms work better normally, but test this). B2B vs. B2C behavior may differ.
Check out some live examples, granted complimentary by Creative Digital Media.
Below are extracts from its top 10 secrets list, but five overall landing pages design strategies are presented here:
EXAMPLE #1: Keep your opt-in above the fold.
Number 2: Do whatever you can to look professional.
Number 3: Don’t waste space and keep your message simple.
Number 4: Use “eye candy” around the opt-in form.
Number 5: How much “flare” can you use?
To get the complete list of landing page design secrets–with many more examples–please download it here.
In my next post, I will discuss advanced testing via software-enabled tools. This will include how to take the very important human creative inputs and test them via A/B landing page testing and multi-variate, sectional testing recipes. This can all be done in an SEO search-friendly way.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Conversions, 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.10 Responses to “Success in Landing Page Conversion–Before & After”
Leave a Reply
ULTIMATE Guide to Search Engine Optimization
August 19th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
I know many small business website owners that just won’t bother with testing, I didn’t at first either, then I learned the real money difference between 10 & 15 percent conversion!
August 20th, 2008 at 10:25 am
This stuff really works!
I tested a few different layouts on a couple of my websites & saw an improvement in the opt-in rate.
Those folks over at Creative Digital Media really know their stuff. (Thanks to Frank Kerns for introducing me to them.)
Aloha!
http://www.SkiBumBiz.com
http://www.SkiBumVacation.com
August 20th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
How much you will charge me to be in charge of fixing my website and ppc add
August 21st, 2008 at 12:12 am
looks like my comment was not posted correctly. here it goes:
The good thing is that not many realize that increasing CR from 1% to 2% results in doubling your business. They are getting the math wrong and only see an increase of 1%, not 100%.
Interesting to see the CR increases associated with the above shown changes.
August 21st, 2008 at 12:21 am
Hi,
interesting post. That’s a very useful list things to test on websites. Measuring and testing is so important and is overlooked by most website owners.
Steve
September 1st, 2008 at 8:05 am
Hie Mr.Rognerud
i always love your blogs entry…
i definitely need to test my Conversion Testing and Profit Tracking. It is the weak part in my marketing campaign
Thanks a lot…
Michel Richer
http://hombyz.com/homebusiness.htm
September 1st, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Thanks, Michel, I appreciate it.
For more creative landing page samples, you can take a look at this: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/lph07/toc.html — it’s Marketing Sherpa’s landing page creatives, and is part of their handbook. Cheers, Jon
P.S.
Get the landing page handbook here –> http://www.sherpastore.com/LandingPageHB.MarketingSherpa.com.html
September 2nd, 2008 at 9:19 pm
[...] W. Furst presents Success in Landing Page Conversion? Before & After posted at [...]
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
Hi Jon,
Love your post. Before and After is always a great method for teaching.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:05 am
[...] Success in Landing Page Conversion–Before & After [...]