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

If interested click here for a quote.

Check out our work that is featured in the July issue of .net magazine on the shelves now. I believe the magazine is called Practical Web Design in the US and Australia. What ever the name look for the cover to the left.

Alan designed a fictional email offer for the real web application Finetuna.com. This is how he described it:
“Finetuna.com is a real web application run by the team at Spoiltchild. It’s for sharing feedback on concepts between a designer and client. However, it doesn’t have subscriptions or even an email newsletter, so I thought it would be fun to see what one might look like.

I approached this email as if it was one edition of a newsletter that’s been going out regularly. With that in mind, the subject line is ‘Finetuna.com – WIN a lifetime subscription’. The hope would be that the Finetuna brand name would have built up recognition and trust over previous emails, making a subscriber pay more attention when they see it.

The design is consistent with the look and style of the website, except for the main competition piece, which has large formatted type, an off-brand contrasting colour and big call to action button so there’s no doubt this is the most important part of the email. Entry is as simple and quick as possible because a subscriber’s attention span won’t be that long with this mail.
I also deliver on the established trust by providing links and an article that would be of value to a designer reading it.

Finally, while I love email newsletters, I realise they’re just one part of a wide marketing mix, so I’ve included links to the other channels where a subscriber may prefer to interact instead.

Overall, the design and art direction captures the brand and personality of the service. It requests instant action from the subscriber, but doesn’t sacrifice the long-term relationship in favour of a quick win.”

Alan also gives a break down in the article of the the individual sections of the email design but i will not give those away so that you go out and buy loads of copies!
Check it out now on your magazine stands.

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!

                         Birmingham Roller                                               Bremen Tumbler

Log in and get started now.

SPECIAL LAUNCH OFFER

For the next 30 minutes we are making this template free to all. Simply log into Toddle here, select the christmas design from the options at the top, add your text and send.
But hurry clock is ticking.

Afterwards the newsletter design will revert to the still great value of just $9.

Christmas Wrapping                                                                 Christmas Gift

Of course you can add some Christmas cheer to any of the existing newsletter templates by adding some seasonal images from the always great iStockPhoto.com for as little as $1 an image.
Here are a few of our favorite images. Just search for ‘Christmas’ or ‘Santa’.

Log in and get started now.

The prints are on a very-heavy weight paper with a really lovely matte finish.
Details: A substantial, very white print medium with a matte finish, imprinted with UV-resistant archival inks (100+ years of fade resistance when displayed indoors and protected from direct sunlight).
You can adjust price, sizes and paper weight on Zazzle and even add a frame if you are feeling flush. The one i have linked is €27.50 and is the one i have in the office here.

Poster detail

Feck The Recession (Safe for Work) by Toddle

Buy Feck The Recession (NSFW)

The print above is the clean version. The original i have hanging up is a little more in your face. :) You can order it here if you like.

Feck The Recession NSFW by Toddle

Classical in style this email marketing template is perfect for the more serious corporate business image.

Like all Toddle templates the design will work great in every email client and will degrade gracefully for those email clients that do not support the more advanced design features. Put simply you will look great when your client gets this.

And of course it is great value at only $9. Sign up and start marketing your business.