Landing Page Optimization - How to Identify Testing Opportunities

If landing page optimization and conversion funnel testing are not on the list of items that you're currently focusing on, then you're not getting the most out of the visitors that are coming to your site. This is true for all types of websites, whether you want your visitors to make a purchase or donate so you can increase revenue, download a white paper so they can learn more about a specific topic, watch a video, spend more time engaging with the content on your site, etc. etc.
During the Landing Page Optimization session at SES New York 2013, Justin Cutroni (@justincutroni), Analytics Advocate at Google, discussed:

• Why testing is important for your business. 
• How to identify opportunities for testing through data. 
• The different elements on a page you want to consider testing. 
• What types of tests are available. 
• Some tools you can use. 
• The basic elements of setting up a test.

Learn Your Audience, Improve Your Results

Cutroni started off by talking about how to approach testing from a high level and putting it into perspective.
Start by thinking about your typical conversion funnel (i.e., the common steps that it takes for someone to complete an action on your website). The purpose of conversion funnel testing is to optimize that process ‐ you're trying to figure out how to get more people through the funnel more effectively by making it easier for them to take each next step through to the end.

To help you understand what's going on in the conversion funnel, you have access to more data than ever before, e.g., you have click path data, micro conversion data, macro conversions, etc. And you can optimize around all these different data points.
What's great about testing, Cutroni said, is that you can automatically increase the return on a lot of things you're doing today. If you can improve the efficiency of your website through landing page testing, conversion funnel testing, etc. then you should do it.
If you can increase the amount of purchases, donations, signups, subscriptions, downloads, etc. (all of the different processes) on your site then you're going to get a much higher return on investment at the upper part of the marketing funnel, whether you're running display or search ads, focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) or content marketing.
This is why every business should be testing, but not enough do. The concept of figuring out and identifying what works best for your company, rather than just going along with the common recommendations or best practices, has been embedded in marketing for a very long time and is nothing new. You can see this in direct mail, product catalogs, store coupons, etc. just like you can with email marketing, content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and so on.

How to Identify Testing Opportunities

Start by looking at your data.

You have tons of data, but there are some common places that people start to get an idea of how their pages are performing for their visitors. One of those is with bounce rate.
Cutroni recommended that you identify your top landing pages on your site and look for the ones that have a really high bounce rate.
So what’s a high bounce rate? According to Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, "as a benchmark from my own personal experience over the years it is hard to get a bounce rate under 20%. Anything over 35% is a cause for concern and anything above 50% is worrying."
Bounce rate is subjective and depending on the pages you’re evaluating, what appears to be bad might not be. But in general, start with the pages that have a bounce rate over 50 percent, because if they’re bouncing they’re not taking the actions you want them to, e.g., they’re not adding products to the cart, they’re not viewing multiple pages in an article, and so on as Justin mentioned.
Once you have your bounce rates by top landing pages, Justin recommends taking a step back and asking yourself "why" you think the bounce rates are so high for a specific page or group of pages.
In order to help answer that question he created this handy Google Analytics Custom Report, called Landing Page Testing Ideas, which, in addition to bounce rate, includes the following engagement and acquisition metrics: average visit duration and % new visits. It also includes these outcome metrics: conversion rate, transaction, revenue and per-visit value (i.e., what’s the value of everyone coming through this landing page). Adding in these value metrics is really important and gives you a little bit more ammunition.

Why It's Important to Consider All This Data as You Build Your Testing Plan

Often times key stakeholders at your company may not know the value of website testing. So it’s your job to educate them. One of the easiest ways to do that is showing them how testing can affect the bottom line.
If you ever have any trouble trying to convince your boss, IT staff, or other teams that you want to start testing try and show them current conversion numbers, or better yet current revenue numbers, Cutroni said. This ends up being very helpful in the conversation because you frame the issue in a way that they already understand and likely already thinking and talking about.
Bounce rate is great, but when you can say, "look how much money we spent on this awesome new landing page but here’s how little revenue we received from it" then it starts to really resonate with people and get them on board with wanting to try and improve.
While you’re creating these reports with acquisition, engagement and outcomes metrics, don’t forget about the power of segmentation. For example, if you add another dimension that includes where people are coming from, with source / medium in Google Analytics, it gives you even more insight into bounce rate, and conversions and revenue, he said. A person coming in from email is likely to have a really different path and action than someone from organic, and so on.

Key Takeaways From Two Case Studies

Cutroni then went into two case studies he included in his presentation, one for Kapitall, a new type of investment company that added a level of gamification into their training platform, and the other for Amari, a luxury hotel brand primarily in Asian countries.
Think about the audience coming to your landing pages and how that matches with what you’re trying to offer them (i.e., what’s your value proposition). Create an experience that is compelling for them to take the action you want them to take.
In the case of Kapitall that was coming up with landing pages that moved away from kind of the boring and straightforward white-background pages to something that had a game feel to them – an "Angry Birds"-themed page was the winner there.
For Amari that was creating supporting information and a clearer call-to-action up-front by finding out that online users were ready to book a room on their first visit to the website, i.e., they were lower in the marketing funnel.
Cutroni pointed out that it’s not always just about identifying high bounces, etc. It’s about understanding the bigger macro behaviors of those people, your potential customers, to see how long does it take them to complete something, what’s their intent, and so on.
By having the data to support that, you can start to develop and come up with a strategy for creating engaging content on a page that you’re sending people to.

What Kind of Test Should You Run?

Landing page optimization and conversion funnel testing has become much easier over time, and there are many tools and options out there to get started (e.g., Optimizely, Google Content Experiments, Unbounce). That said, you still have to plan for testing, and there are some things you need to understand about the pages that are involved.
Once you’ve gone through and identified a few pages you want to start testing, the next thing you want to do is figure out what type of test you want to run. Almost all of the testing platforms out there today support two types of tests:

• A/B Testing: You have one landing page which is version A, or the control, and then you came up with multiple variations of that page to test against that control. This is probably the best way to get into testing, since the implementation is simple, and you have a little more free-reign over the creative.
• Multivariate Testing (MVT): Cutroni likes to compare MVT to using a scalpel – it's an opportunity to really fine-tune the pages and the content on your site once you start testing. MVT is different than A/B testing, since rather than just doing a bulk change and testing different variations of full pages with A/B testing, you can carve up the page in different sections and you can test in real-time different combinations of these different sections with MVT. This can include headlines, text or content on the page, forms, buttons, etc. So you come up with two or three different variations for each of these elements or sections and then your testing platform will put them in a magic blender, shake it up and show the different combinations in real-time to your website visitors.

How to Set up a Test

When you running a test, there's usually not a lot of information that you need to give each tool. Here are three things you need to consider according to Cutroni:

1. What are you testing for – what's your conversion event? Conversion events can include selling products, generating a lead, scheduling an appointment, etc. It really depends on your business model. But you want to test against something pretty specific. For example, don't just say, "here's a page that has a high bounce rate and I want to drive more conversions." Rather, start small with reducing the bounce rate first, and once you make progress there, you might discover there are other issues with the site that you need to fix before you can actually start to increase conversions.
2. If you need to convince stakeholders internally to run tests on your site, one tactic you can use to reduce anxiety is limiting the amount of people that are thrown into the tests. Something great that most testing tools allow you to do is create a threshold of how many people you want to include in the test. You might have employees that feel like testing is going to end their world ‐ $X in revenue comes through the site every single day, and "why try and fix what's not broken." If that's the case, one thing you can do in addition to giving them your estimates as to what difference you can make, is showing them you can start small – you don't have to throw 100 percent of your traffic into the same test. Show them you can start with 50% or maybe even 25 percent of your overall web traffic. Most testing tools allow you to have some control in that area.
3. You'll need to code all of the pages included in the tests. Almost all the tools out there require you to put some type of JavaScript on the page. And this is really where the magic happens ‐ where your website talks to your testing tool, and your testing tools says I want this person to see this variation. So it magically sends the different combinations in the multivariate test, or the right page in an A/B test. And it actually will display that test in real-time to the user. The cool thing is it does all the heavy lifting: it knows there are two variations, it knows how many conversions happened based on those variations, it does all the complicated math in the background to make sure the tests are significantly significant, etc. So make sure you get the code on the page so your website can respond accordingly.

So then once you start running the test, and your data builds, you'll end up with really pretty graphs that typically include the following:

• How many people are flowing through your tests.
• How your different variations are doing from day-to-day or week-to-week.
• Do the different variations actually have a chance at beating your original.

What's a Good Length of a Test?

Sometimes people aren't really sure how long they should let us a test run to get to statistical significance, and they're just eager to just let a test run for 8 months. Not only does that make you impatient, but if devices are changing and the environments are changing then the test isn't really valid if it's stretched out over such a long period of time.
You really need to go just a couple or a few weeks for a test – nothing longer than two months according to Cutroni.

How Can You Test Pages on Other People's Websites (e.g., Third Party Sites?

This can come into play when you're using different vendors and third-party domains for your conversion events. This issue is that unless you can get your JavaScript code on their page, you can't really test on it.
That said, if they're going to let you put code on the site, then you can set up your tool to test different variations and versions. But that's really the only way.

Can You Apply These Testing Principle to Ads?

Yes, surprisingly 90 percent of advertisers are hitting pause, starting new ads, stopping them – a lot of activity is going on, and if you were to just check your ads to see if there was 95 percent statistical significance in their tests, often times you'll find there's enough to determine if there's a winner or loser.
Do Long Forms on a Page Suck in Terms of Driving Performance?
Cutroni agrees, yes, 99 percent of the time long forms suck. That said, as marketers some of the data that we base our assumptions off of is good, but it's not always great. And the only way you can really understand what's going on with long forms on your site is to track every step along the way.
It's unbelievable what you start to learn once you dive into the data; you'd be surprised what people will do if they're really interested in your site or what you're offering. So you always need to test something for your own particular situation before making any conclusions.


By Amman Badlani
Source:

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Design Elements of a Landing Page

The following elements are always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

5 Dimensions of Landing Page Element Success

• Relevance
• Quality
• Location
• Proximity
• Prominence

Relevance

Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.

First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.

Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.

Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.

Quality

The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.

Location

Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.

Proximity

Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.

Prominence

Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizardfrom fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.

 by BRYAN EISENBERG

Source : http://www.bryaneisenberg.com-

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Overlooked Page Elements That Drive Online Sales

The product page may be the most important page on your website. It’s the point at which the user decides whether they’re buying or walking. And while the shopping cart gauntlet looms beyond, the product page is where the magic of an ecommerce sale begins. The thing with product pages, however, is they’re part basics and part nuance. More importantly, it’s often these nuances that are overlooked, and can kill the conversion rate of your product page.

In this post we look at eleven often overlooked page elements that can be the secret heroes of your conversion success story. Forget these eleven, and you can forget about a website that really drives revenue.

Element #1 – Clear, Differentiated Pricing Information

Have you ever checked out a product online and been unsure what the difference between the Silver and Gold plans were? Did Pro seem a little too much like Basic? Without pricing tables or pages that create a clear difference in value between product options you’re not going to sell much of either.

So how does one go about differentiating their product SKUs and service tiers? The most effective methods can be boiled down to a simple philosophy – focus on the benefits, instead of features, and highlight the differences. The best pricing tables allow you to quickly ascertain the value you’ll personally get out of each option, and discern the differences between each, rather than get bogged down squinting at row upon row of checkmarks.

A great example of clear pricing information can be seen at Launchlist – each tier of the service has its own personality, and it’s easy to see the differences between the feature set of each package.

Element #2 – Customer Confidence

Despite the fact that so many transactions are carried out online, the lack of personal interaction in this medium means that even the smallest thing that’s out of place on your ecommerce pages can rapidly erode customers’ trust in your product and business.

There are many ways to build this trust though, and almost all are fairly easy to implement. For instance, if you use an SSL certificate to secure your transactions (and you really, really should be if you’re processing credit card info), show it! Many consumers know to check for secure web pages when proceeding with a purchase, so they’ll be looking for that all-important padlock icon.

Clearly articulate your refund policy upfront, so your customers can buy knowing that they have recourse if things don’t go according to plan. List an actual phone number and address. Or even offer live chat on your site, to help address pre-sales questions one-on-one.

Finally, set expectations as to when and how customers will hear back from you. It’s a simple thing to communicate, but goes a long way towards preventing people from feeling like they’ve been left hanging, not knowing whether their questions have been received.

Element #3 – Unconventional Social Proof

It’s no secret that social proof helps drive conversions and sales, but it often takes the form of TechCrunch logos and endorsements from celebs or, *gasp*, web-celebs.

Take the road less-travelled with your social proof: use real people in your testimonials and images, skip the logo pond and share one key case study or client anecdote.

Incorporating social proof into your product pages is a way to complement and reinforce the positive influences on your visitors for a given product. It can take many forms, ranging from customer testimonials, to star ratings, to simply exposing the number of units of that particular product left in your inventory.

Netflix is famous for their movie ratings algorithm, which crowdsources members’ ratings as a whole, and uses it to predict a personalized rating for each subscriber. There’s something undeniably compelling about knowing that a particular movie is likely to be one you really enjoy, based not only on previous movies you’ve personally watched, but also because other members with tastes similar to your own loved it too.

Element #4 – Tell Me And Show Me

Too many product pages provide too little insight into what the customer is actually buying. This is particularly true of software product pages – if you’re selling a piece of software, show it in action via a demo. The most exemplary cases of this are often seen “eating their own dog food,” i.e. use the function of the product to sell itself.

Take a look at the wonderful product tour for Joyride – a plugin meant for building product tours. Immediately, they’ve communicated the core benefit of their product by using the product’s function itself to demonstrate just how well it helps to guide users through a tour.

Element #5 – Get Ready For Your Close-Up

Sure, most product pages have a nice big image of the item in question. But what if you want to see the back of it? The underside? What if the detailed stitching pattern is what’s important to me as a customer? Ask yourself, “How can I get close up and personal with the product to really experience it before I buy?”

Offering a good selection of images for tangible products allows your visitors to get as close to touching and getting familiar with a product as digitally possible. Best-in-class online retailers like Park & Bond, and Fab.com take this philosophy a step further, allowing visitors to zoom in super-close on each of a variety of artfully-shot high-res images for each product.

Element #6 – Choices, Choices, Choices!

Similar to the point about showing multiple product images, an element that’s often neglected is showcasing variations of a product. For example, is there a version of the product with a special attachment? Do some models come with a telescoping arm, or are there different materials and finishes available to choose from?

Remember that the image(s) you put on your product page are all the customer has to go on when making their decision, so if they can’t view the exact item they’re looking to get, they may have some trepidation in going through with the transaction.

Zappos understands this point well, so they make sure not only to show lots of images of the products (from almost every conceivable angle), but they also show every available color combination for each pair of shoes. They even allow you to sign up for a notification email if you don’t see a particular color combination that you’re looking for – that way, even if they don’t get the sale now, they can at least contact you if they do eventually stock those fabulous neon pink Chucks that you have your heart set on.

Element #7 – Invest In The Writing

One staple of the typical product page is the features and details section. Often, most stores will simply list off points in a clutch of bullet points and call it a day. Yawn.

Rote listings put the burden on the visitor to determine what the actual benefits are of the product in question. You end up making them do the heavy intellectual lifting as the responsibility falls to them to compare and contrast the feature sets of your product with your competitors’.

Honing in on the true benefits of your product is more helpful, as it addresses the most important question in the visitors’ mind: why should I buy this? This is accomplished with good copywriting on the product page. A well-written blurb of copy can help make a product stand out, as well as even entertain your visitors.

Don’t believe that the copy is worth investing in? Groupon, with its brain-meltingly huge IPO last year, distinguishes its offers by hiring teams of aspiring comedians to write the copy. Thinkgeek also takes care to infuse each and every product listing with spirited copy that entertains its discerning target audience.

Element #8 – Page Loading Speed

Funny enough, one element that frequently gets overlooked in the design of product pages isn’t even on the page – at least, not visibly. The speed with which a page loads can be a critical determining factor as to whether your visitor lays down their credit card, or decides to bail completely. This means it pays to keep load speed in mind when designing your product pages, especially if you’re planning to have a lot of large images, rich interactivity or other media.

According to a recent study, users make up their minds about a website in less than 3 seconds, which means that the longer you make them wait for the page to load, the less of a chance they’ll likely give you to capture their attention. Don’t keep them waiting too long!

The big daddy of online retailers, Amazon, has product pages that load incredibly fast – an absolute must, when a delay of even a couple of seconds means thousands of lost potential customers.

Element #9 – A Clear Next Step

This should be the biggest no-brainer in the history of the Internet, but too many product pages clutter up their pages with excessive calls to action. View customer photos, view pricing, view our knowledgebase, get customer support, talk to a representative, read reviews. Without good design, these calls to action all blend into a confusing mess, and make your user feel like they’ve just been blindfolded and spun around. Now, which way to that pinata?

While it may be tempting to utilize your product page with many actionable next steps as possible, remember that focus and clarity is the key to truly guiding your user to your main conversion goal. Typical methods for designing a good call to action include using high-contrast buttons, treatments or callouts that are unique to the overall design of the page, as well as giving the actionable elements plenty of breathing room to make them stand out.

Element #10 – The Soft Sell

Is your product all or nothing? If you’re selling software or a service without a soft sell opportunity you’re missing out on conversions. Can you give away a free trial? A free month of service? Can visitors set up a free account, download the software for free and activate later, or play with a demo version (also sometimes known as a sandbox)?

Often times, users might not be willing to make the commitment in buying your product right away. Therefore, you need to get them hooked with a smaller sell that takes little commitment on their part. By creating steps that extend the relationship and get the user to commit to a smaller action (even if it’s not the ultimate commitment), you’re building the bridge to the ultimate sale.

Element #11 – Wayfinding

Quick, how many steps lie between your product page, and your transaction confirmation page? If you don’t know, then it’s probably too many. A convoluted and laborious funnel is a sure-fire way to kill conversion.

If the customer is on the checkout page, then get them to their final purchase as quickly and efficiently as possible. Don’t make their purchasing effort seem like an arduous journey that can leave them second guessing their purchasing decision along the way.

The Dollar Shave Club has an easy purchase funnel that, once you hit the “select” button to purchase their product, immediately signs you into your account and jumps you to their one page checkout screen. No annoying registration confirmations, no five-step checkouts, just a simple log in and checkout process.

On another note, resist the temptation to distract your users with anything that’ll take them away from your purchasing funnel. Don’t shuttle them off to an obscure part of your site just because they happened to click on one of your recommended similar items. Don’t interrupt them with a link to your latest blog post. You’ve worked hard to get your visitors to this stage, so let them finish the transaction before you take them anywhere else.

Conclusion

Product pages can be a delicate dance, where one misstep can cost you the trust of your dance partners, a.k.a. your visitors. Take the time to nail all of these elements though and it’s highly likely you’ll be reaping significantly higher conversion rates as well as enjoying a better bottom line.

What have we missed? Are there any other product page elements you feel don’t get enough attention on most ecommerce sites? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author: Jason Amunwa is the Director of Products at digital-telepathy, a user-experience design studio that created SlideDeck, the WordPress slider plugin that lets you create awesome content sliders in minutes with no code, as well as Hello Bar and Impress.

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Elements of a Winning Landing Page

If landing pages didn’t exist and you were designing one for the very first time, what ingredients would you need to make your new creation a success?

On day 1 of our 7 Days to a Better Landing Page series, we’re going to take look at theanatomy of a landing page, and we’ll define the building blocks of a successful online marketing campaign.

The purpose of this first post is to define the types of content that you should consider for your landing pages. As we progress through the week we’ll build on this foundation piece by piece.

So grab some paper and a pen and sketch out a page for your next campaign as we step through the 7 elements. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you can create a basic page outline using this technique.

Our gallery of landing page templates show the elements applied to some different landing page layouts.

A Simple Example

This diagram represents a sample layout with the 7 elements placed in fairly standard locations. Your specific landing page may vary greatly, but it’s helpful to look at this for reference as we walk through each element.

A sample landing page layout showing placement of the 7 elements.

1. The Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

The starting point of a marketing campaign often revolves around defining a point of differentiation. What is it about your product or service that sets it apart from the competition? Often, this has already been defined at a higher brand level and you just need to re-iterate it in a succinct way on your landing page. If not, this is your first task. Try to break down your offering to its most basic level, to describe the specific benefit your customers will get by choosing your product/service.

A classic example comes from Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less – or it’s free.”

A well crafted USP sets clear expectations for your customers and allows them to understand why they should care.

On your landing page, the USP should be delivered using a combination of the following page elements:

• The primary headline: the Domino’s example above is a perfect illustration of a page headline.
• Sub header: Sometimes you will need a secondary headline (typically smaller in size) that provides some clarification about the primary headline. Most commonly, this is used to allow the primary headline to be very short and punchy.

2. The Benefits

Following on directly from the USP is a more detailed description of your offer’s benefits and features. By crafting an effective headline you gained the attention of your customer, and now you have to provide a little more detail to the offer to answer any questions they may have. Try to focus on answering the question “What will this do for me?”, as this will help you to write copy that speaks directly to your customers questions.

It’s important to strike a balance here and not get into so much detail that your landing page feels like it’s full of text. Write a brief one paragraph summary and 3-5 bullet points for clarity. Come back to this section many times and edit the copy to remove any bloated or unnecessary verbiage.

3. The Hero Shot

The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially true in the short attention span world of the landing page. The hero shot is the visual representation of your offer and can help people to gain a better understanding of what it is or what it looks like. It will most commonly be one of these types of visual element:

• A photograph of your product/service – preferably shown in it’s context of use (see point 4 below)
• A diagram illustrating how it fits into the realm of an existing problem (like a series of steps)
• A chart comparing it to the competition
• A large graphic simply stating the numerical aspect of the offer – 200% Bonus, FREE, $100 off etc.

4. Context of Use

You should aim to showcase your product or service being used in real life. The idea here is to get your customers to empathize and place themselves in a scenario where they are using it. There are many ways in which to achieve this, including:

• A photo: Consider an example of a collapsible step ladder. A standard white-background photo of the item would work for the hero shot, but to add extra effect you could provide supplementary photos of someone unfolding it, using it to reach somewhere high, and placing it neatly into a small cupboard afterward.
• Video: While the camera never lies, video is an even more compelling way to showcase your product. Think of the common Shamwow and Slapchop commercials currently running. While cheesy, they impart a sense of need by illustrating direct benefits to everyday life.
• Testimonials: Show that you already have customers, but keep them real.
• Client lists: By listing known brand names that are using your service provides an implied sense of context and adds to the feeling of trust.

5. Request for data

It’s common – especially in the B2B marketplace – for the main purpose of your landing page to be lead generation. Usually this will involve asking the visitor for their Name and Email in exchange for some sort of freebie (we’ll be covering this in Thursday’s post). If you are requesting data from your customers, keep the form as short as possible and include a privacy statement near the button or email address field.

TIP: There is some thought and opinion on the placement of lead generation forms that suggests placing them on the right-hand side of the page yields higher conversions. This is likely due to the way westerners read from left to right. As such, placing the form on the left is akin to asking for something before explaining the benefits involved.

Read more about creating the perfect length lead gen form.

6. The Backup Plan

Not all visitors will become paying customers after the first kiss. To give you the opportunity for a little extra foreplay, leave a non-committal escape route from the page. This is what’s known as a Safety Net, and its purpose is to capture the attention of someone who is interested but not ready to buy. Examples include:

• Follow us on Twitter: Once someone is following you on Twitter they can be exposed to your other marketing and brand messages, which may entice them to buy in the future.
• Remind Me: Provide a way for them to be reminded (via email) at a predetermined time in the future (1 day, 1 week, 1 month, specific date etc.) and be sure to place a trust statement beside it that explicitly states that you will not contact them at any other time.
• A Free Takeaway: Provide a link to a free download-able brochure (without having to complete a form).
• Bookmark This Page: A classic technique that isn’t likely to yield great results as people don’t really check their bookmarks a a matter of process. It does however enable someone to find you again if they want to deal with you later on – especially important for standalone landing pages that are reached via an Ad they may never see again.

7. The Call To Action (CTA)

The final part of your landing page is the all important Call To Action or CTA. This is the statement or copy that instructs your visitor to take a specific action. Often it will be the button on a form, or a large graphical button that takes your new customer through to a final destination somewhere on your main website. It’s critical that the CTA is very obvious and is written in a way that describes what clicking on it will actually do.

Poorly written CTA’s are the standard CLICK HERE or SUBMIT. A good example would be “Get your $50 spa coupon” which clearly articulates what you will be receiving in exchange for your precious click.

For a more detailed look at CTA’s download our 101 Landing Page Tips eBook which contains 10 ways to make them more effective.

By Oli Gardner 

Source : http://unbounce.com/

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