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Here is part two of my landing page optimisation post. If you missed it, part one is here. I am happy to receive your comments and suggestions and thanks for your feedback so far.

To recap: A landing page is the webpage you direct traffic to from a specific email, ad or piece of marketing. Its goal is to convert that traffic into sales or sign ups.

Be Personal

When designing your landing pages the golden rule is to be personal. People like to buy from people, not computers, or websites. It’s inbuilt in all of us to relate better to other people. The more you personalise your message and offer, the more you increase the connection with your visitor. Why? Because it increases their comfort and trust when buying from you. A great example is to add your phone number to your site, as Brandon Eley points out.  Once a visitor realises there is a person on the other end of the phone to help, IF needed, conversions increase. The knowledge that someone is there to help is enough to reasure the user.

Likewise, if there is any way you can make your message more personal and targeted for your page visitor the better. At the most basic, you need to know where in the world they are coming from and what site or advert they are visiting from. Are they an existing customer? Do you know their name?  Can you tweak your message to include these details?

Link the landing page to the advert

Here is an example of an ad for Eircom Broadband on Google. Note the wording and information contained. Yet when you click through to the landing page, pictured underneath, where is the mention of the “Value Business Bundles”?

Repeat the Promise

You need to repeat the wording of the original ad and give a clear call to action. Repeat the wording and the graphics. It should be obvious to the visitor that they have come to the right page, with the offer they were expecting. The key point here is, you made a promise in the initial advert so you must fulfill that promise on the landing page.

Scantastic

Make sure your pages are scanable. Here is the text from the first third of an Amazon product page for Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow.

This amount of information should be overwhelming but Amazon didn’t become the leading online retailer by confusing and overwhelming shoppers. Here is the designed Amazon landing page for Purple Cow. What a difference.

You can see now how design and formatting of the content makes information much clearer and easier to find. This example highlights one of the misunderstandings of landing page optimisation. Your pages do not have to be short to be effective. It doesn’t even have to be that simple.  Your landing page needs to be long enough, detailed enough and clear enough to make the sale. It can be 1 page or 5 pages. No one size fits all, so you will have to test what works for you.

An interesting side note regarding the addition of review on Amazon. You have probably heard how reviews increase sales. But recent data from Amazon has shown that products with both positive and negative reviews sell better then ones with positive reviews alone.

The reason attributed to this is twofold. First, we are a suspicious bunch and we don’t trust something that everyone gushes about. The second reason is that negative reviews are not necessarily bad. A bad review from a large corporate CEO might tell a small business CEO that this is the book to buy.

Wording

Simple word changes can have a huge impact. 37 Signals wrote about some of the wording variations they tried on their Highrise CRM  sign up page. Here are three types used with the percentage increase in conversions for each one.

Their original wording had the worst conversion rate “30-day Free Trial on All Accounts.”  Variation no. 2 – “Sign-up takes less then 60 seconds. Pick a plan to get started!” gave a 30% better conversion rate. When you are attracting the level of traffic that 37Signal products do, 30% means a significant jump in revenue.

How to increase conversion with four amazing words.

Jason Fried said that they tested various phrases on the Highrise homepage for the call-to-action button. They had originally used various permutations of “Free Trial” and “Sign-up for Free Trial”. Then they tested the phrase “See Plans and Pricing” this resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups. That’s right. 200%.

Fried believes it’s because people are afraid if they click a link that says “Free Trial” then they’ll somehow automatically sign up for something and be trapped. However, “See Plans and Pricing” encouraged them to explore, without the fear of commitment.

Euocottage Case Study

This landing page from Eurocottage highlights a common failing for websites where they ask for too much information upfront. Ask for the least amount of information and at each step and clearly explain why you need this information in the first place. Explain to the user what the benefits are by imparting this information.

We redesigned this new landing page for Holiday Cottage search site Eurocottage.com. We simplified the process and gave users the information they needed to trust the sign up process. The new page is clearer and easier to use. It’s friendly and welcoming and is much more inviting to users. We are testing the new landing page at the moment. It will be interesting to see the performance rates for the new page. We will keep you posted.

Tools for testing

There are a few must have tools if you decide to try and measure and optimise your landing pages. Website Optimiser is a specific tool from Google for doing A/B and multivariate testing. If you use only one tool for testing this is it. Use Google analytics of course for basic numbers and tracking goal funnels.
5 Second test is an interesting site for checking what parts of your page people actually notice.

Be a pirate!

Be a pirate for your user. Sites like Amazon spend millions of Euro in usability and conversion tracking every year. Look at what the successful sites in your market are doing and copy them. No need to reinvent the wheel but try and make your own improvements. Landing page optimisation is not rocket science it is just a series of small simple tests. Devote an hour a week to it and track your progress.

Why bother?

You can spend 6 months building a level of traffic converting at 1% and to double that turnover, you can spend another 6 months.
Or you can simply test and tweak the landing page to convert up to 2% or 3% in a fraction of the time.

Recommended Reading

Seth Godin The Big Red Fez
Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
Landing Page Optimization – Tim Ash
eConsultancy
Marketing Experiments
Google Website Optimizer
Which Test Won

Image above from Scurvy Pirates

I had great fun talking about Landing Page Optimisation at Bizcamp Newry. It was a great event and well done to the crew for organising it. Below, is part one of my presentation. Part two can be found here.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is the webpage you direct traffic to from a specific email, ad or piece of marketing. Its goal is to convert that traffic into sales or sign ups.

On the right is a landing page:

If I asked you right now to hand over your credit card would you do it?
Feeling nervous? Why? What do you mean you need more information?

Some information you are looking may include:

• Who are you?
• What am I buying from you?
• Is the service/product good?
• Do I want it?
• Do I want it now?
• Can I trust you?
• Who else thinks this is a good deal?

The tricky bit is to get the balance right; giving just enough information to get the conversion. Include too little or too much information, or add unclear messaging and you start loosing sales.

Typical components of a landing page are:
The typical components of a Landing Page are:

• The Primary offer
• The primary offer
• The total solution being offered
• Headline
• Sales copy
• Image(s)
• Pricing
• Call-to-action
• And anything to indicate a limit (number, time) to the offer.

Here is an example of a landing page for the site Rudder.com. It comes from a case study by WiderFunnel.

In this case study Rudder redesigned their landing page to try and increase conversion.
The resulting page managed an amazing 45% increase in conversion.
So how did they manage it?

Here is the new landing page. Can you spot a few differences?

An article over on I am a landing page designer offers a good explanation why this new page converts so well.

• The redesigned page swapped the main header copy and image positions – copy on the right, image on the left.
• The value statements are in bullets along with check marks. An image of a lock is placed next to the security statement.
• Lots of white space is used above the button to draw in the eye.
• Button size is increased and the call-to-action text is much more descriptive.
• A testimonial is placed directly underneath the button, as it gives that extra push.
• 2009 Webby Awards nominee icon is included along with an iPhone App notice and iPhone image.
• As Featured in the Press, icons of CNBC, TechCrunch and Cnet, logos added to the bottom of the page.
• The Truste icon was removed.
• McAffee and Verisign logos are also added.

In summary, adding these visual references and clarifying the layout of the page gives the user confidence in signing-up for this service. Benefits are clearly outlined and, most importantly, we know that Rudder is free and secure; a vital element, not to be ignored when dealing with issues of personal finance. Rudder has since redesigned again.

Redesigning order pages for maximum conversion


Here is an example of an order page for a free Audiobooks Catalogue featured over on Which Test Won. The old version is on the right, new redesign is below.

As you can see, in the redesign, an image of what you are signing up for is added. The most interesting thing about this new page is what’s been taken away. Sometimes simplifying things is the best course of action. In this case, the new Landing Page is much better off for this decision, as users know exactly what this form is for. You must be absolutely sure that every item, piece of text or image you add to the order page, adds to a visitor’s knowledge about why they’re signing-up.

In the first page version, the left and right column had no relevance to the purpose of the page. At the very least, they distracted a visitor or at worst, led a visitor to click away from the order page without taking any action. The result? The new order page resulted in 42% more visitors registering for a free catalogue, a dramatic increase.

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

The answer then, lies in not making a form ask for fewer details but just enough to secure the sign-up. Shorter pages are not the goal either. They need to be long enough to make a sale. See how SEOMoz added $1million to their revenue with a longer sign-up page. What converts best, on any landing page, is clarity above all else.

Part two can be found here.

Give us a shout on info@toddle.com if you would like to discuss improvements to your landing pages.

We are very excited to announce our new Toddle plug-in for Outlook today, as part of our strategy to integrate Toddle as close as possible to your business needs. We are thrilled to incorporate Toddle into one of the most popular business tools on the planet!

Before launching it to the world, we are entering a testing phase and this is where we need your help. We are looking for fifty Toddle users to give the new plug-in a whirl; try it out, break it and offer your feedback on how to make it more useful to you.

To get a first sneak peek at the new system sign up here with your email address. Looking forward to your feedback and thanks for helping us make Toddle even more awesome!

We all know the importance of a good welcome. A great example we came accross this week, is our local bistro. Lots of families walk their dogs along the strand each day but it is pretty difficult to have dinner with doggie in toe.

The bistro owner has created a beautiful outdoor area where dogs can accompany their owners. Bowls are provided for water and food and doggie do do is taken care of with the placement of special bins located far away from the tables. Other diners along the strand actively discourage dogs (and their owners). What other café’s view as a problem, this bistro has turned into a selling point. Smart, effective and makes perfect business sense.

Are you making it easy for your customers to come back to you?

Image leelefever

A few months back we ran a survey to track how Toddle.com is performing for our customers. From the results of the survey, we created a Wordle cloud of terms most used to describe Toddle’s benefits.

As you can see, the words easy, use, newsletters and professional jump from the graphic. This got me thinking – easy is hard to do. We built Toddle to ease the pain of newsletter design and sending for small business. And to make sure your message looks great, we test it in over 30 email clients. We take the pain you get the gain. We are really thrilled that Toddle is benefiting our clients every day and thank you all sincerely for your feedback and referrals.

What’s next then?
We are working on new template designs to add to the template gallery and new payment pathways to make payments easier. Find our two newest template designs here. Exciting times indeed!

The Trinity Enterprise Network invited Marketing Consultant Paul Hayes from Beachhut PR to give a talk on building an international brand. And they very nicely agreed to let me come along.

Paul was previously Marketing and Communications Director at Havok and currently works with JoltOnline among others.

Paul had some brilliant advice and war stories from his time in Havok, Pirtomedia, Demonware and Plastinum on how they, as a start up, had go out and sell to the leading companies in games and film. Image it seams is vital but not that difficult… or expensive.

I got a lot of great points to take away from the day and here they are in no particular order.

PR

• Start your PR locally. Use it as your training ground to hone and practice your message before you move international.
• With everything showing up on Google do not underestimate local press. A Wired journalist rang up Paul after a story in the Tipperary Star popped up in his alerts.
• Develop relationships with three key Journalists and publications.
• • THE trade publication of the industry.
  • A national publication
  • One international publication.



• Wired is THE publication for a technology company and it took Havok a year from initial contact to getting covered in the magazine.
• The easiest way to get international PR is to get on a plane and go have a drink with a Journalist and start a relationship.
• Journalists do not write for their readers first. they write for other Journalists and their editor. Remember this when pitching a story.
• It’s easier to get coverage if you ‘promise’ to take out advertising in the future. Most trade magazines are run at a loss to maintain an audience for other business activities, events for example. So do not stress too much if you are unable to take out advertising for a long while.
• Third paragraph PR is better for credibility. The public are very media savvy. They recognise a PR piece about a company for what it is.However if your opinion is mentioned in an overall industry piece it lends more credibility to you being an industry expert.
• You are the best person to tell your story. Do not use a PR firm to be the middle man. It annoys Journalists.

Business

• The first sale was for $1 to get past the ‘First Customer’ credibility problem.It was a marketing deal in return for using the customer in PR, Marketing and Case studies.
• There is value in everything you produce. Watch out for opportunities. Havok had an artwork tool to help users of their main product. 3dStudio Max wanted this for their application and it generated a nice bit of money for Havok over 3 years.
• Paul believes Tradeshow stands are a waste of money. Think smarter or of a ‘Meta Stand’.Instead of a stand Havok would organise wacky transport (with a bar) carrying VIPs from a tradeshow to the afters party and again at the end of the night back to their hotels. A fraction of the cost, and more memorable.

  

• One horror story in the early days of Havok involved 250k on a stand, intending to make a splash. They ended up wedged between Microsoft and Sony who each spent about $10 million to launch their next gen consoles. It almost broke them.
• At a tradeshow in Calais they rented a $20k Yacht and moored it outside the event instead of spending the $200k cost of a stand inside. They also got to save costs by sleeping 8 people and eating on it as well.
• For a tradeshow all you need is you and a laptop walking around. Just as effective.
• In most cases you are not selling your features. What you are selling is reduced risk.Customers assume that your product works. They want to know you will be around in 3 years and will not make them look bad to their piers and boss.
• And last was a question from the audience asking if the Trinity name helped them abroad when making contacts and selling. He said at the time no but after the very successful companies that have emerged over the years including Havok and Jolt Online it can open doors now.

On the day we hit over 10,000 user mark, a big milestone for us, we bring you the results off our recent survey. You have spoken and we have listened. Thank you all for taking the time to take our survey. The information is invaluable to us as we plan on how we can become (and stay) the best darn email marketing service for you.
The survey we used is called Survey.io from the brilliant Sean Ellis and KissMetrics. I really recommend you try it yourself with your own customers. So for the curious and nosey (me usually) among you I have some results below.

Great, relevant content is still the best source of traffic online. Looking at the results above, the Blog and Search Engines results can be combined together, as most search traffic lands on the Blog. I will dig a little deeper into Google analytics and see which source converts better  and get back to you. Thank you all  for reading and commenting. Expect more great tips, advice and research from the team this year and more often.

Of all the questions on the survey this is the most important result to us. According to the research behind this survey a result of 45% and up indicates something special. So thank you for making Toddle something special. It is only from your constant  feedback and input that we are on this path.

Caelen King gave a great talk last year on online business and subscription models. He explained that a churn rate of 20-30% of your customers is to be expected each year. (In his words, “people die” and their focus and circumstances change). A must see talk if you have a few minutes. I remark on this because the number of users above who nolonger use Toddle back up his point. I am just happy to see that we are on the low end of the churn rate.

Survey.io has a great feature where they create a word cloud of the most repeated words across all answers. It gives a great visual snapshot of how your product or business is viewed.
“NONE” in this case is due to the number of people who skipped this question as opposed to them getting no benefits from Toddle :)
“Easy”, “Design” and “Good” are great responses to the key benefits of Toddle. From the beginning we sought to make email marketing easy, simple and fun with great looking professional newsletters that signals you out from the competition. We are more than delighted that you our user agrees with our vision.

Half of you have recommended Toddle. WOW! Sincerely once again, thank you so much. We are honoured and humbeled that so may of you love Toddle so much to refer it to friends and colleagues. We will do our utmost this year to continue to make Toddle a must have business resource that you will be glad to recommend!

Once again your feeedback to this question was music to our ears. We built Toddle to ease the pain point of email marketing for SME’s, Consultansy professionals, small organisations, individual business owners and anyone who wanted to DIY their own marketing material. We are delighted that Toddle has gained such an amazing foothold in this our target market thanks to all of you. The best, most creative response we got to this question  was: “A Breathing one.”

Well this was pretty clear, you want more and it is coming.
Right now we are preparing to move Toddle to new, bigger, faster servers for the next phase of development. Expect a speed boost in about two weeks when the move is complete.
We have more newsletter designs coming out, better integration with your other services, more marketing advice and a few killer features to make your life much much easier.
However,  we are being very careful about what features we are adding to Toddle. As our goal is to make Toddle the simplest, fastest email newsletter application on the planet! The results above show that you guys agree with us. Each additional feature we add to Toddle makes it a little more complicated, so please be patient with us as we test and refine each one to make it the best experience possible for you.

I know I have said it previously, but 2010 is going to be a great year and I am so happy you are taking Toddle on the ride with you.

Kind regards,

Alan and the Toddle team.

Happy new year. I hope you are well rested from the break and that Christmas was good to you. Welcome to 2010. A new year, a new opportunity to try new things and I can feel it in my water, it is going to be a good one.

To jump start your marketing I have put together a wonderfully simple online marketing plan for you for the year. It is put together as a checklist and it has the basics filled in with space for you to add your own twist and cross them off each month. It also includes few tips on what holidays and events you can use each month. It is based on one I have been using last year and I can tell you it helped me focused and on track.

Go ahead and download, print it off and hang it over your desk. This year you are going to be ahead with your marketing!

If you think you could do with some more information on how to get started or improve your email marketing campaigns sign up to our free email marketing course. More useful tips and tricks are found on our monthly newsletter so feel free to sign up below.

Keep us posted and let us know how the plan helped your business and let us know how we can improve it. We will showcase replies right here on the blog.

I was catching up on some reading this morning and the question of buying email lsits came up again. Here is what I think about it. If we are talking about ‘opt-in’ marketing I don’t believe buying lists is of benefit to your business. Firstly, where did the list originate from, are those on the list in your target market and did they give permission for their emails to be disseminated to third parties. Can you be completely sure that they have given permission at all?

In my experience bought lists can cause headaches, namely receivers hitting the spam button and not appreciating the unsolicited mail. If losts of people hit the spam button often enough your messages will not get through. It is far better and far more sustainable to grow your contact lists through opt-ins like sign up forms on your website, from connections made in your business and by simply asking in the first place.

To my mind bought lists are not worth the financial outlay and are in fact a danger to your business. Why take the chance of destroying your goodwill by sending emails to people you don’t know and have no connection with. After all email marketing is about relationships built over time, advice and support given to your user that is valued and appreciated by people who want to read about what you have to say.

It is tempting to try to fast track to thousands of connections but in reality it may turn out to be a very backward step. Makle connections honestly and help your user. Give them information they need and look forward to receiving. So instead of blacklisting you they send your insigntful content to their frienda and family thereby growing your connections organically as a trusted expert and friend!

1. Ask
Sounds simple and it is. You will be surprised how your customers, partners and friends will happily agree. Make it a part of your normal business interaction. A sales call, a first meeting, a network event, before you say goodbye tell then you have information you believe would be useful to them in your newsletter and can you add their email. Now you have promised to deliver good, useful content so make sure you deliver or your customers won’t be long unsubscribing.

2. Blog / Site
I heard recently that up to 80% of a website’s visitors do not return. People simply forget or think they have found the information they need and move on. Email is a great way to hook them in and remind them to come back when you have new news and updates. Your customers have done the hard work and found you among the millions of sites on the web. So grab them and don’t let then go too easily. VERY prominently on your blog or site put up an email subscribe box with a GREAT reason to sign up.

3. Offer a free course
Seth Godin has a great story of a wine merchant, who used free information provided to him, to create a wine appreciation course by email. By putting a single ad in his local paper users subscribed to his course. Newsletter by newsletter he explained the virtues and characteristics of the wines in his shop and along with it, gained the trust and confidence of would be purchasers. The information he gave out was free provided by the wine makers. The upshot: He became known in his locality as an authority on wine; he converted readers to purchasers and ultimately grew his business. Like our wine merchant think of the expertise you have in your field and see how you can repackage it to your subscribers. Keep it simple and relevant to the needs of your clients.

4. eBooks
Very similar to the free course above. For readers who prefer books to courses package up your information into a downloadable eBook. As part of the download process ask them to subscribe to additional information and advice from your newsletter.

5. Competition
I noticed in a local restaurant a big fish bowl by the cash register offering a years free membership to a local gym as a prize. All you had to do was drop in your business card and agree to get a healthy living newsletter monthly.
What a great idea. The restaurant gets a free prize for their customers and the gym gets a list of people who have indicated they want to get more active and healthy. You can offer a competition via your website, local newspaper or try and find out who else is sending newsletters to your target market and team up with them.

6. Free stuff
Incentivise people to sign up. Offer something free. An eBook, as above, a free 30 minute consulting session or a special offer only for subscribers. I noticed a tourist office recently offering USB drives for the first 100 people who signed up. An expensive promotion but it worked with me! Whatever it is make sure you have calculated that you will get the returns. Something else to consider, is your incentive is believable? At this years Marketing Sherpa conference in Boston, a great case study highlighted how a GUARENTEED incentive of $250 received only 12 responses. That is, a guaranteed payment of $250 dollars if a subscriber responded. However, when the same company offered the same subscriber list $7 per sign up they got over 500 responses. People simply did not believe the $250 offer.

7. Ask for referrals
Similar to point 1. Just ask. Most of us are more then happy to refer other people to services, sites or information that they will find useful. If your customers and subscribers are happy with you, then they will only be too happy to refer your newsletter to someone else. Make sure you have a nice big “Forward to a friend” link in your newsletter.

8. Give a talk / network
Events and seminars are great places to meet new people. When you are exchanging business cards ask if you can send your newsletter to them and mark their cards for adding their details later. If you are standing up in front of these people then you are already perceived as an expert in the field and someone worth listening to. So at the end of the talk, tell the audience you can send them more information on a particular point or topic, they just need to drop up their business card.

9. Make your subscribe box pop
You are going to need to test this. Play around with the location, colour and wording of your email subscribe box on your site. You will be surprised but some very minor changes can increase sign ups by up to 400%.

10. Email Signatures
You are sending out hundreds / thousands of emails every year. How many of your emails promote your email newsletter in your email signature. Look at doing the same on discussion forums and social networks.

For every point above there are a few things to keep in mind to make the process more effective:

A.  Tell people how often they should expect the newsletter (people are afraid they might get overloaded with mails daily)
B.  Where possible show them an example / link to the type of mail they will get
C.  Send them a welcome mail as soon as they sign up. A month down the line they might not remember you and unsubscribe or mark you as spam.

Got any more tips? What works for you? Let us know.

Image thanks to atomicShed