What is a Landing Page? 

A Landing Page is a web page you create for a specific Marketing Campaign. It has one particular aim – converting people into sales leads which you can then target with your other communications. 

So, you’ll want your landing page to stand apart from your website where visitors may get distracted by other messaging. 

Clean in its design and easy to use, a landing page is an ideal place to include a form for capturing a visitor’s data. People can instantly see what you’re offering, why they should be interested, and what you want from them. 

On your landing page, you can persuade people into leaving their data by offering them stuff they can’t get anywhere else. Examples are: 

• The chance to download and access the content you’ve created – like white papers, eBooks, and webinars  

• Exclusive discounts on your products or services  

• Free trials or demos 

Where Does Traffic Come From? 

• Click on the call to action in a campaign email, or online or mobile ad  

• Click on a pay-per-click ad  

• Link through from a piece of social media content  

• Go to a campaign web address you’ve read, seen or heard in an offline ad  

• Go to a campaign web address using a QR code 

Each of the online and offline assets and ads highlighted above is designed to generate interest and drive people to the landing page where their data is collected. Landing pages can also be made visible to search engines. 

That way, whenever a person does a search using relevant keywords or phrases, your landing page will appear somewhere in the results pages – potentially generating more traffic. 

Create your Landing Page 

Essential Elements for a Successful Landing Page 

You’ve probably heard the dreaded term ‘Design by Committee’: the design methodology (or lack of methodology) that drives the typical corporate website. 

Marketing wants a video demo and a “How it Works” page. Legal wants a complete page dedicated to the disclaimer. The CEO wants a link to his latest speech at the widget convention. Support wants to put that annoying pop-up support icon, and HR wants a prominent “Apply for a Job” link. The one thing that didn’t make it on the homepage was the “Try Now” button for your new product or service. 

If you have been involved in that scenario, so have lots of us. One day somebody invented the landing page, probably one of the greatest online marketing tools ever invented. 

The landing page was specifically created to help you drive conversions. And conversions are the online marketer’s number one job. 

You want visitors to convert into subscribers. You want subscribers to convert into webinar participants. You want webinar participants to convert into leads. And you want leads to convert into customers 

But there are so many ways to build a landing page, and it’s hard to tell in advance, without the benefit of several weeks of testing with an A/B testing tool, which design and a copy will convert better. Lucky for you, thousands of marketers before you have conducted thousands of real campaigns and have learned through experimentation, trial and error what works and what doesn’t. 

There are some foundational best practices you should consider when you design your landing page:  

We list five of the most important right here.

      1. Keep It Simple 

One of the biggest conversion killers is confusion. You don’t want your landing pages to look like your “designed by committee” corporate website. Your landing pages need to be focused on conversion. Get rid of sidebars, navigation menus, unnecessary graphics, buttons, and text. Also, don’t go crazy on design. This is business, not art. We’re trying to drive conversions, not win awards. 

                    2. Have a Singular Purpose 

We love choice –it’s the mark of an advanced economy. But the choice is very bad for conversions on your landing page. The “Paradox of Choice” more often than not paralyzes our visitors into not making any choice at all. Dedicate your Landing Page to one conversion goal. If you have another goal, create another Landing Page for that. 

     3. If Content is King, then Clarity is Queen 

Don’t be overly clever with your written copy and graphical elements. And don’t be subtle…subtlety is great for novelists, but terrible for landing pages. You need to be very clear about what you want your customers to do: CLICK HERE is the online marketer’s most useful pair of words. 

Don’t use “Please” or “We would suggest” or ‘Maybe.” Tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do. It works like a charm. 

                   4. Keep Your Promise 

Do you want to annoy your customers (and Google) at the same time? No? Ok, then your landing page must fulfill the promise of the Google Ad, the email subject line, the Tweet, or the postcard you just mailed. Some of the biggest failures of online marketing campaigns have happened when the visitor clicks a link because she was promised something in the title or header, and finds a landing page that had nothing to do with the title. 

Keep your promise and your conversions will go up. Sounds simple, right? But it’s amazing how many online marketers miss this one. 

     5. Test and test some more 

No matter how many “best practices” or “rules of thumb” you learn about, there is nothing like testing different landing pages, and different elements within a landing page, so you can improve the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign. 

Are conversions lower than you expected? 

• Add a bigger call-to-action button , and test both versions (the one with the big button and the original one) using an A/B split test tool, and see which converts better. 

• Use the words “Click Here” on one version and “Sign up Now” on another version, and see which button gets more clicks.  

• Ask for a full name and email address on one conversion form, on the other one ask for just the first name and email address. 

Some of the best landing pages are those that have been tested almost to perfection. The final result is a landing page that keeps converting and converting and converting. 

Make Your Landing Page Headlines Heroes Not Villains 

It’s often said that the internet is a visual medium. Certainly, with the vast variety of pictures, videos, and graphics you experience as you move within and between web pages, this statement appears true. But in practice, it normally takes words to make sense of all this on-the-eye action. And it’s especially true with landing pages which, after all, are designed to make the person looking at them respond as you want them to. 

Three Golden Rules 

So here are three golden rules that will help you create better, higher converting headlines for your Landing Pages: 

• Focus on the user benefit. A person looking at your landing page wants to instantly know how your offer will benefit them. So make sure your headlines clearly communicate the practical difference your product or service will make to their life.  

• Know who you’re talking to. Consider the desires and concerns of the people in your target audience and shape your headlines around these. Be careful to use words and phrases your customers and prospects use themselves, and avoid jargon like the plague.  

• Add some energy. An easy way to increase the engagement and urgency of a headline is to start it with an active verb – or ‘imperative’. ‘Go’, ‘Get’, ‘Choose’, ‘Own’, ‘Save’, ‘Protect’ and ‘Enjoy’ are just some examples. Use this technique carefully to create headlines that have the same energy as, and complement, your calls to action. 

What Is A Call to Action?  

A term used to describe a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text on a website meant to prompt a user to click it and continue down a conversion funnel is how Wikipedia defines a ‘call to action’ or CTA. 

Well, we think a CTA is a lot more important than just a button! In fact, we’re certain it’s the most important element of your landing page. Without a CTA you may have no conversion at all. Nil. Nada. Zilch. 

A clear call to action is how you tell your visitors what you want them to do: download your eBook, signup to your app, buy your product, or whatever else you desire! 

Improving Your Call to Actions 

All rules are made to be broken, I hear you say. Well follow these three and we guarantee your Call to Actions will rock: 

• Be Specific! Make sure you choose your words wisely. People are more likely to click on your CTA if they understand exactly what they’ll find after doing so. Messages like “Next” will confuse your visitors and give them Click Fear.  

• Make it urgent or exclusive! People online often ask themselves “Why should I click?” But if they know your offer has limited availability or won’t go on forever, they won’t want to miss out, right?  

• Stand out from the crowd! A Value Proposal is a must. Placed before your CTA, it tells people why they need your product, what makes your company special. And why they should choose you instead of all those other businesses offering something similar. 

One or two Copywriting tricks just for you 

Everybody knows you need great content to make your digital marketing strategy work. But the term ‘content marketing’ has been used and abused. Most business owners and marketers roll their eyes when a marketing consultant tells them they have to use ‘valuable’ and ‘compelling’ content for their marketing strategy. 

The term ‘Content marketing has turned into ‘social media’: overused and devoid of meaning. 

But don’t go dusting off your old telemarketing or TV advertising playbooks just yet. Despite the fact that ‘content’ has been overplayed like a top 40 song, content is more important now than ever. 

When it comes to content, copywriting is one of the most important things to pay attention to. Creating a relevant and valuable copy to attract a target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action is a must. 

Writing the copy for landing pages has one or two tricks and we would like to share them with you: 

• Write headlines that keep your visitor oriented and engaged. As we said on “Essential Elements for a Successful Landing Page” you need to be sure your landing page’s headline refers to the place where your visitor started their journey.  

• Start with an active verb - e.g. “Go”, “Get”, “Choose”, “Use”, “Increase”, “Maximize”, etc. This will give your landing page a sense of urgency and action. Also, Use the word ‘you’ frequently this makes the copy more personal and engaging. Try to make the copy contemporary and to give the user a reason to read it now- e.g. “Only available for the first 100 users”, “Just for today”, “Do it NOW!”. 

• Write a copy with one clear objective (First, you know your objectives right? If not, well... define your primary objective dude!). Imagine that your objective is getting conversions, getting leads, capturing data, whatever! You are not writing to win an art contest, you are writing to get to that objective. Always keep that in mind! 

Improve Your Forms, Get More Leads! 

While form creation is quite easy, getting prospects to sign up can be a much different story. There are tricks to making the most of your website forms, and we’re going to share four of them today. Once you implement these best practices, you’ll be on your way to greater conversion rates on your forms! 

Include the form link in emails 

In the case where your form is filled out by people who you email, simply embed the link in your email message signature. This makes it nice and easy for them to not only spot it but get the form filled out efficiently and seamlessly, which makes it user-friendly. 

Newsletters: Get creative! 

With so many businesses nurturing their sales leads and new customers by way of regular newsletters, this is an excellent way to get the word out even more about your form. Put it right in front of them, and get creative! Use a unique font or a different color that will stand alone to capture their attention. 

It might sound simple, but it can be very effective. The marketing options in a newsletter are literally infinite since all it takes is some imagination. 

Give something away! 

Yes, that’s right. When you give your prospect the incentive to sign up, you’re dangling the cheese in front of a mouse, and we all know how that goes. A little giving goes a long way in return when you offer your potential leads something shiny and new, such as a 20% discount on your latest product, or a free one on one consultation, or a complimentary mention in your weekly newsletter! That last one can be a real win-win, for instance. Advertising is everything, so don’t be afraid to think outside the box and again – get creative! People love that. 

So there you have it – four rock-solid tips for increasing sign-ups to your online forms. Now go out there and prosper! 

Improve your Landing Page 

Integrate Your Landing Pages into Your CRM System 

Sales and marketing seem so random. Sometimes it feels like it’s one big crapshoot (and it very often is). You wish you had more control over the whole process, but that seems impossible. 

There is so much you can’t control: customer behavior, the world economy, and your sales people (you can cajole, threaten and bribe your sales team, but you can’t control them). 

But there is one thing you can control: the sales process itself, from lead to closed sale and the post-sale. 

Or rather, you can control what resources you dedicate to the sales process. 

The modern Customer Relationship Management System (CRM system for short), lets you see what’s going on in your sales process, and gives you the data to decide how to spend your valuable sales and marketing resources. 

How a CRM System Can Help You 

A CRM system, such as Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Zoho CRM or BatchBlue, lets you track and view prospects, turn those prospects into opportunities, and check how contacts relate to companies and opportunities. 

A CRM system records your communications with prospects and customers. For example, each email you send to a prospect, each conversation you have with them each contact with one of your service people or project managers, can be recorded to create a running history of your customer. 

A CRM system enables you to cross-sell and up-sell because of the intelligence provided by historical information. 

Finally, a CRM system provides you with built-in customizable dashboards where you can see your critical sales numbers. 

If a CRM system gives you unparalleled control over the sales process, then why aren’t your landing pages connected to your CRM system? 

Your Landing Page is your Online Lead Generation System 

Your landing page is not a random web page that the marketing team creates to amuse themselves. Landing pages are the critical entry points for leads entering your sales process. 

But what typically happens when a valuable prospect fills out that form to download your white paper or to sign up for your newsletter? They go straight to an email system that nobody in the company knows about. Instead, you should connect your landing page to your CRM system so leads can enter the sales process automatically and immediately. 

Here are five reasons why you should integrate your landing pages into your CRM system: 

   Speed Up The Sales Process 

Getting your leads into your CRM system used to be a manual process. This time-consuming process delayed lead follow-up and was also subject to errors. If an administrator “forgot” to enter a lead, that potential sale was lost forever. 

Now leads are automatically created in your CRM system when visitors to of your landing page fill out a form or press the “download now” button. You can now take care of them immediately and speed up the sales process. 

  Take Better Care of Leads 

When a landing page lead automatically becomes a lead in your CRM system, it can be instantly assigned to the appropriate sales rep according to criteria such as geographic information or which landing page he came from. 

For B2B companies this is critical. If a sales representative is trying to penetrate a named account, they can be alerted if somebody from that company downloads a white paper. The sales rep can take extra care of the lead armed with the historical knowledge of the account from the CRM system. 

  Better Sales Intelligence 

Most landing pages can collect lots of data on your prospect such as what form they filled out, what they downloaded, what ad they responded to, what keywords they used, what state they’re from, what was the source of the referral (social media, direct, Google, Bing, etc) This can now be captured in your CRM System. 

  Campaign Improvement 

You can also track and improve your marketing intelligence, enabling you to predict the future more accurately. Track your visit-to-customer rate and lead-to-customer rate, and determine which leads from which resources are more likely to turn into customers. 

        Prioritize Resources 

When a visitor becomes a lead, you can track all their activity. When they download a white paper or case study, click on additional landing pages, then download some more reports, that usually means they’re in buying mode. You can then make the decision to dedicate resources to follow-up with the prospect and close the deal. 

Your next steps 

Connecting your landing pages to your CRM system increases the control of your sales process because it fills in that critical information gap: where your leads come from. But it’s easier said than done. 

The Secret To Social Media Marketing Success 

Social-media landing pages give you the power of whole networks to promote your message for you. And that’s true whether you want your page to deliver hard sales or sales leads for you to follow up. For many businesses, targeted social media landing pages are more effective and affordable than whole blitzes of emails 

Such landing pages have three unique qualities. They enable visitors to share the page or promote it through their own Twitter, Facebook, or other networks. They ensure that social bookmarking sites can log them. And they allow visitors to leave comments. 

So here’s how to optimize your social media landing page:  

Include buttons for the right networks  

Each time a visitor clicks on a social network button you’ve included on your landing page, they make that page available for their whole network. In addition, if it’s a Facebook ‘like’ button, by clicking the add entries to your Facebook wall stream, adding credibility to your offer. And if it’s a Twitter tweet button, the visitor can add a message to your landing page before sharing it, for an extra personal touch. 

Show you’re for real  

You can use the Twitter Faves widget to show a live stream of network comments on your products, services, or offers. Crucially, this feed is verifiable – visitors can click on the widget to view the profile or stream anybody commentating, proving that they’re genuine. 

Be discreet  

Remember the response you want your landing page to deliver, and be sure your page’s social connectivity doesn’t get in the way. You may want to place your social media buttons in a secondary position on your landing page. Or better still, on a subsidiary ‘confirmation’ page they see once they’ve fulfilled your desired call to action. That way, they won’t compete too strongly for your visitors’ attention. For non-professional designers especially, perhaps the easiest way to create effective social network landing pages is with a dedicated step-by-step application. 

How A Social Media Landing Page Can Increase Social Marketing Success 

Does your Facebook fan page have thousands of fans? Do you have tons of Twitter followers? Do your YouTube videos go viral? That’s great for you…but what about your bottom line? In the current social media-obsessed environment, many people mistake social media follower count as a sign of a successful social media campaign. 

But it’s not. 

Consider the sad story of a friend of mine. A few weeks ago he called me panicked because Facebook disabled his company’s fan page. He had 7,000 fans. 

And that’s all he had. 

He wanted me to help him convince Facebook to restore his page and give him access to his 7,000 fans. I had to tell him the bad news: Facebook owns all that information, and they don’t owe you anything. My friend had become a digital sharecropper and suffered the negative consequences of not owning his customer list. 

What’s the solution? 

Get your fans off your social sites and on to your website. No matter if your social media strategy has a content-oriented approach or conversation-oriented approach, lead generation is always the main objective. Or, at least, it should be. 

After you develop content in the form of blog posts and articles and share it through your preferred social media channels, you must add one very important element to each piece of content you share: a link to a social media landing page. 

A social media landing page is the key to get people from your social networks and into your commerce network. 

What’s a commerce network? 

A commerce network is any path that leads online visitors into a commercial relationship with you, whether it’s a subscription to your email newsletter (or auto responder) or a direct purchase of a product. 

Your next steps 

Getting people off your social networks and into your own commerce network is the secret to social media success: you’re taking them off property you don’t own, and bringing them into your own place of business. What’s the best way to do this? 

Set up a social media landing page so you can convert fans, followers, and connections into customers! 

SEO: Really that important for landing pages? 

Landing pages, unlike a regular website, must have a particular purpose. When you are creating a landing page you must have a clear objective and build the page around it. Every marketer pays attention to having an amazing call to action and an incredible value proposal. But there’s one more especially important thing to keep in mind: Your landing page needs traffic. No traffic, no conversions. 

With this in mind, every time we build a landing page there are some practices that will improve our landing page performance. At least, it will come up with a great position in the ranking. Keywords will help us increase our landing page traffic and get the conversions we expect. 

SEO Tips to improve your landing page 

Titles and meta descriptions: 

Headlines (The <title> HTML tag ) and meta-descriptions are really important factors for SEO. Google uses these tags to create search snippets. When people do searches (query) with Google, snippets appear. We need to get the most out of these snippets and capture the user’s attention. When we write our landing page headline, we must keep keywords in mind and remember some tips: 

• Google shows up to 70 characters (including spaces) of a page’s title in its search results.  

• If a page title exceeds 70 characters, Google will show as many whole words as it can, and the rest are replaced with an ellipsis 

• Meta-description must show the benefits of your page. Including a value, the proposal is a must. Also, we need to add a call to action and the end of the snippet. This will help us avoid click fear and maximize CTR. 

Writing our landing page meta-description, we must pay attention to these details: 

• Google shows up to 156 characters (including spaces) of a page’s meta description tag.  

• If a page’s meta description tag exceeds 156 characters, Google will show as many whole words as it can, and the rest will be replaced with an ellipsis (...).  

• If the web page includes a published-on date, Google may include that date as part of the snippet. In these cases, the date counts as part of the 156 characters. 

• To make sure your web page’s snippet can fit a published-on date and the entire meta description (without getting cut off by the ellipsis), keep your meta description tag shorter than 139 characters (or 140 characters, if the published-on date is from a single-digit day of the month). 

Content optimization: 

Years ago, search engines used to evaluate the keyword density only to determine how important a web page was. This continues to be important, that’s why the phrase “Content is king” is so popular. But, there are other factors we need to bring into consideration. Follow these tips, make Google love you: 

Create your content structure using header tags: 

The header tags are HTML tags that allow you to organize and give different hierarchies to all your landing page content.  

<h1>: This hierarchy belongs to the headline. It must explain what our landing page topic is. You should only include one h1 hierarchy. Try to include keywords so Google finds it as relevant as possible. Also, it must be USER and SEO friendly. 

<h2>: This hierarchy should be used in subheadings.  

<h3>: Sometimes we need to establish different topics below our subheadings. If there’s something called sub-sub headings this hierarchy should be used for them. For example, if our landing page is about “Mediterranean Food” our header tags structure could be something like this: 

H1: Best Mediterranean Food Ever 

H2: Amazing stuffed tuna gets  

H3: Stuffed tuna gets the recipe 

This kind of structure helps you enhance your long-tail SEO and improve your landing page keyword relevance. 

Why Keyword density is for newbies 

As we said before, five or six years ago, repeating a keyword used to help you improve your page relevance. Nowadays, Google algorithms are far more intelligent that’s why our content must be really good. Repeating a keyword on and on is just for newbies. 

Improve your content, improve your PageRank: 

• Try to create a 500 words (or even more) copy. Google loves well-developed content.  

• Always focus on content editorial quality. Do you know why Wikipedia ranks so well? Those guys know how to do it. They divide their content into topics, include references and header tags. Also, pictures and videos help a lot! 

So, what are you waiting for? Start with Search Engine Optimization, you know all the secrets now. Improve your landing page and get more traffic. 

Testing and Measuring 

Why Analytics is Critical to Online Success 

In the movie “Moneyball”, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill portray Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane and his analytical sidekick, Peter Brand, as they turn the team around during the 2002 baseball season. 

The A’s had the lowest payroll budget in Major League Baseball. They couldn’t afford the big-name hitter’s teams like the Yankees and Braves used to win championships. 

An entertaining and inspiring movie, “Moneyball” turns a boring topic, analytics, into the central character of the film. 

Using analytical methods devised by Brand, a Yale economics graduate, the Oakland A’s were able to recruit undervalued players that helped them finish first in the American League West that year. 

How did they do that? 

By using analytics to view statistics objectively. They discovered under-utilized data points that were better predictors for winning games: base hit percentages and runs scored, as opposed to the traditional measures like RBIs and batting average. 

what does baseball get to do with internet marketing? 

Using analytics and objectively measuring the right data, you can turn your internet marketing campaign into your own “Moneyball.” Many internet marketers are creative people, and while I’m not knocking creativity (we have a lot of creative types at our company), there’s a tendency to fall in love with your creation and rely on your anecdotal knowledge of internet marketing to choose actions which will supposedly result in high conversions. 

But our creative sensibilities can lead us down the primrose path of disaster. 

How to Use Analytics to Ensure Internet Marketing Success 

The first place to start is your goals: what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to sell goods online? Or are you trying to generate leads for your B2B sales team? 

Let’s pick a direct sales campaign. Using Google Analytics or any other web analytics tool, you should measure Entrances, Abandonment Rate, Goal Completed, and Value per visitor. 

Do this for various landing pages assigned to different campaigns, and compare which pages generate more revenue for your company. 

You can do the same thing for a B2B campaign. Instead of measuring sales, your analytical tool will let you assign a value to a conversion goal (download white paper, sign up for webinar). Objective data on the conversion value of your landing pages will enable you to be cold and ruthless about the effectiveness of your landing pages. 

Get rid of the ones that don’t work, and replace them with more of the kind that does work. 

You’re now starting to use objective data to improve the bottom line. 

Other metrics you should measure are: 

• Your A/B Split Tests. 

• In-page analytics. 

• Segmented traffic (e.g. PPC, organic search, social media, sites that link to you) 

• Bounce rate. 

• Cost per acquisition. 

• Revenue per conversion. 

If it seems complicated, it isn’t 

Setting up an analytics program seems overwhelming at first, but there’s help. Most landing page platforms and websites give you a special snippet of code you can copy and paste into your landing page’s header or footer. 

And it doesn’t take up too much time either 

With all-new endeavors, there is a learning curve. But once you set up your initial reports and integrations, all you need to do each day is log in to your analytics dashboard, view the results, and make decisions. 

It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes each day. 

The Beginners Guide To Multivariate Testing 

So do you want to become an Internet Marketing Expert? 

Maybe the better question is: Do you want to close sales? You can have all the knowledge in the world about internet marketing, but if your landing pages aren’t “sales closing machines,” then what good is all that knowledge? 

The best internet marketers create simple but solid landing pages that convert suspects into buyers (B2C) or into leads (B2B). And the best internet marketers create slightly different versions of their most successful landing pages, test both versions, and see which converts better. 

Because closing more sales isn’t about being an internet marketing expert – it’s about conversions. The basic elements to test for are: 

Headlines 

This is probably the most important item since it is what gets the rest of your landing page read. If you get this one wrong, nobody will visit the rest of your page, and you’ll have nothing more to test. 

Call-to-action items 

If you’re driving for opt-in email subscriptions or direct sales, you need call-to-action elements, such as buttons or conversion forms. Test for placement of call-to-action items, text and colors. 

Product positioning 

How do you describe your product or service? Who is it for? What images are you using? 

Product benefits 

Play around with different benefits to see what appeals to your audience. You might think one set of benefits appeals more to your prospects, but an entirely different set of benefits might appeal to them. 

Copy length 

Will long or short copies convert better? Most people think short copy converts better. But many times long copy drives more conversions. Test for a long copy vs. a short copy. 

Video or text? 

Are your customers primarily visual or text-driven? Don’t know? Test for it. 

Other Split-Testing Testing Tips 

Beginners are often impatient. They don’t stay with their tests long enough to get statistically significant results. They want to test too many things. They’re not tracking their tests. 

Test for your conversion goals 

Your goal is to convert visitors to prospects to leads or leads to sales. Whatever your landing page goal is, test for it. Don’t test for anything else. 

Give your tests enough time 

Let your tests run until you have a 95% confidence level. Don’t stop your split-test just because you feel one page is converting better than the other. 

Test one thing at a time 

The most efficient way to muddy the results of a test is to test for too many elements at one time. Be very clear on which change of your landing page caused particular changes in visitor behavior. Testing one item at a time will help you do that. 

Track and measure your experiments 

Measure your results. Sounds logical, but too many marketers don’t measure their results. Instead, they perceive that one test is doing better than the other.  

Also, track your tests. Document what works and what doesn’t. Build up a knowledge base of best practices. 

Your next steps 

You can improve landing page conversion rates when you test different versions of your landing pages. Data from real people interacting with your landing pages is a more reliable indicator of success than “logic.” And real results defy logic. 

A/B Testing and Conversions 

You’ve launched a website with a landing page(s) for your latest product, and your hard work will pay off, right? You might be in for a real surprise. What’s going on? It’s not converting! 

Not only have you invested in a rock-solid Pay per Click (PPC) campaign, a stellar Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy, an amazing Social Media Optimization (SMO) plan, and engaging content that even the best in the business would envy. You’re frightened that all your effort is going down the drain! First of all, Do you even have a landing page? If you do, then the odds are that you aren’t getting as many conversions as you could. Here’s an excellent tool to be sure you have put yourself in the best position for maximum conversions: 

A/B Testing – it’s not just for scientists! 

A major part of conversion success is what the industry calls A/B testing. Though it might sound bizarre and scientific, it’s actually quite easy to perform, and it allows you to test specific areas of your landing page to see which style captures more interest in the users by way of lowered bounce rates, and subsequent conversions. 

A/B testing tells you what variables bring in the most user engagement (conversions), and it’s widely used in the marketing realm. All you do is try two different versions of your landing page such as one web design vs. another or one headline compared to a different one. You can set your webpage up to randomly interchange the two designs, and keep track of which one brought in the most conversions. While it takes some time to do it yourself, a landing page platform like Lander helps you get it done in just minutes, the payoff is huge! After all, you want to know what your target market responds to best. 

Psychologists have proven that certain colors affect a user’s behavior in certain ways. Even the way your copywriter words things has a huge role in your webpage and the ability to secure conversions, whether they are in the form of email opt-ins, direct sales, comments given, links back to your site, or whatever else you are trying to achieve (convert). 

The key with A/B testing is to keep the comparisons to one aspect of your webpage at a time. The more specific you are, the more you test different combinations, the better your overall results will be. Don’t treat A/B testing as an option; rather utilize it as a critical tool for your bottom line. It’s time well spent. In the end, those who perform proactive A/B testing win out by securing new relationships, conversions, and brand recognition. When you think about it, you can’t afford to test your landing page and do it often. 

Now start converting! 

With that brief refresher, you’re free to convert your traffic to leads and customers like never before. Start building professional landing pages and faster.