Start Thinking About Landing Page Optimization

Imagine that you are in charge of online marketing for your organization. You have slaved for months to tune and optimize your campaigns. Countless hours and days have passed in a blur.

You have constructed keyword lists, written pay-per-click ad copy, properly set your bid amounts, bought additional banners and exposure on related Web sites, optimized your site for organic search engines, created a powerful affiliate program with effective incentives and set up the Web site analytics needed to track the return on your investment in real time.

You are standing by with a powerful series of e-mails that will be sent to prospects or customers who respond to your initial offer or leave their contact information on your site. This should significantly increase the lifetime value of the relationship with your Web site visitor.

The first visitor arrives — and leaves in half a second. The next one lands on your site, clicks another link, and is gone as well. More and more visitors flash by — a virtual flood. Yet only a tiny percentage will take the action that you would like them to take.

What’s wrong?

It’s hard to figure it out:

• You have their fleeting attention for a split second.

• You don’t know who they are.

• You don’t know what they are thinking or feeling.

• You don’t know why the vast majority of them leave so soon, empty-handed.

It seems like a hopeless situation. You are forever doomed to suffer from the poor marketing program economics that result from a low Web site conversion rate.

All of your hard work comes down to the few precious moments that the Internet visitors spend on your Web site.

Your landing page is not written on stone tablets. In fact, it is the most ethereal of objects — a set of bits that resides on a computer hard disk that is accessible to the whole world. No one is forcing you to use the particular colors, page layout, pictures, sales copy, call-to-action, or headlines that comprise your landing page now.

You are as free as an artist in front of a blank canvas. Maybe you will create a masterpiece that will move most people who see it. Maybe you will create bland and uninspired mush that will bore and turn away everyone.

The promise of better performing landing pages is often tempered by a fear of making things worse than they already are. How are you to know in advance what will or won’t work better? Yet you are supposed to be the “expert.” Shouldn’t your landing page already be perfect based on your extensive online marketing experience? What if your landing page design knowledge was exposed as nothing more than pompous subjective posturing and guesswork?

Don’t be afraid. You actually have access to a real expert — in fact, thousands of them. You are interacting with them daily already, but you have mostly ignored their advice to date.

You may never be able to answer why a specific person did or did not respond to your landing page. But there are ways to determine what catches the fancy of your Web site visitors.

In fact, landing page optimization can be viewed as a giant online marketing laboratory where your experimental subjects voluntarily participate in your tests without being asked.

Their very actions (or inactions) expose them, and allow you to improve your appeal to a similar population of people. Web sites have three desirable properties as a testing laboratory.

Three Keys to Online Marketing

A relatively steady and large stream of visitors allows you to use statistics to find and verify the validity of the best landing page designs. The best versions are proven winners.

Unlike previous designs, they are no longer based solely on subjective opinions. Nor are they the results of popularity contests within your company.

Accurate tracking: Web analytics software supports the accurate tracking and recording of every interaction with your Web site. Each visit is recorded along with a mind-numbing amount of detailed information. Reports can tell you where the visitors came from, their path through your site, the time that they spent lingering over certain content and whether they were persuaded to act.

Although Web analytics software is not perfect, it provides a standard of data collection accuracy that is almost unheard of in any other marketing medium.

Easy content changes: Internet technology offers the ability to easily swap or modify the content that a particular Web site visitor sees. The content can be customized based on the source of the traffic, the specific capabilities of the visitor’s computer or Web browser software, their behavior during the particular visit, or their past history of interactions with your site.

In other experimental environments it is very expensive or time-consuming to come up with an alternative version or prototype. On the Internet, countless Web site content variations can be created and managed at minimal cost for a landing page optimization test.

Online marketing can be divided into three key activities:

• Acquisition Getting people to your Web site or landing page

• Conversion Persuading them to take the desired action(s)

• Retention Deepening the relationship and increasing its lifetime value

Each step feeds into the next.

Inefficient acquisition activities will limit the traffic to your site. An inefficient Web site with low conversion rates will restrict the number of leads or customers. Inefficient follow-up retention activities will fail to extract additional value from your current prospects or clients. Ideally you would like each step to have the highest possible yield.

With high Web site traffic volumes, statistical analysis allows you to find verifiably better landing pages and to be confident in our answer.

Acquisition activities focus on generating traffic to your Web site or landing pages. The goal is to create an awareness of your company or products and enough interest for your target Internet audience to actually visit your site.

Brand awareness is demonstrated by someone typing in your company’s Web address directly into their Web browser or when somebody uses your brand names as a Web search.

This means that the person is specifically looking for your company. Although not strictly an off-line traffic-driving method, brand awareness traffic is usually achieved as a result of multiple exposures to your company in diverse settings. A high proportion of brand awareness traffic is an indication that your brand is strong in your industry sector and that you are “top of mind” for prospective customers.

It usually results from a combination of all the other online and off-line activities.

A conversion happens when a visitor to your landing page takes a desired conversion action that has a measurable value to your business.

The desired action can be a purchase, download, form-fill, or even a simple click-through to another page on your Web site. Conversions can also be measured by having someone interact with a particular feature of your site (such as a product demo tour). A conversion can also be measured in more subtle brand interaction terms by looking at the number of page views, repeat visits, and the time spent on your site, or by interactions with content that includes product placements from your company. The main point is that the conversion action must be trackable and its value can be calculated or estimated.

Intention and commitment

Not everyone who visits your site has the same intention and commitment to act. Visitors’ frame of mind depends on their demographics, psychographics, personality type, role, time of day, day of week, physical environment and the presence of distractions, and their position in the buying/decision cycle.

Most sites and landing pages have very poor information architecture and interaction design. Fixing major usability, coherence, and cognitive problems can have a major conversion rate impact.

By emphasizing too many items on a Web page, we destroy visitors’ ability to find key information and paralyze them from making a decision.

Every contact with a potential customer can impact their eventual behavior. This often involves a complicated and tangled thread with multiple exposures to your brand and products across several online and off-line channels. Accurate tracking and measurement in this kind of environment can become nearly impossible. Even if you could track everything properly, it often comes down to interpretation about how to assign the proper marketing credit. For example, should you always count the initial source of a sense of belonging and being understood is a powerful motivator for people.

Once someone has become aware of your company and made initial contact, you must deepen your relationship with them in order to extract value in the future

Consumers are in almost total control and are increasingly impervious to traditional advertising assaults. They tune out most interruptions and focus only on what is important to them. If they notice you at all, they will give you very limited “permission” to interact with them.

Retention programs should seek to build on the initial permission with anticipated, personal and relevant ongoing communications. Over time, as you earn the consumer’s trust and continue to provide value, you are granted higher levels of intimacy and permission in return.

Retention programs start immediately after the initial conversion action on your site has been taken. This initial action may have been an e-mail sign-up for your newsletter, or a whitepaper download. It will often not be the actual initial purchase of your products or services. But you can leverage the right to contact the person by educating them and leading them closer to the ultimate desired action (an initial sale or a repeat sale).

The basis for all retention programs is the ability for the user to receive information from your company on an ongoing basis. So the minimum requirement is that they have given you their e-mail address or added your blog or news source to their data feed.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that every visitor is a potential prospect or buyer for your goods or services. That would be a delusion. The mythical 100% conversion rate simply does not exist.

There are three types of visitors to your Web site:

1. Noes Those that won’t ever take the desired action

2. Yeses Those that will always take the desired action

3. Maybes Those that may take the desired action

You should completely ignore the first two and concentrate on the last group.

The final group of undecideds contains a wide variety of people. Some of them are almost there — a small improvement in your landing page or Web site might get them over the hump and result in the desired action.

We worry about every single word in our e-mails as we test headlines and offers. We analyze “bounce rates,” “open rates,” and “unsubscribe rates” with almost religious fervor in order to extract the last penny of revenue and profit possible over the lifetime of our interaction with someone.

But we have almost completely ignored our Web site and landing page.

Sure, we occasionally do facelifts or even wholesale redesigns of our sites. But these changes are rarely tested. And even though we spend obscene amounts of money to buy traffic, the effort that we devote to the landing pages to which it is sent is negligible.

Many companies are now beginning to understand that Web site and landing page conversion can have a dramatic impact on online marketing program profits. That’s where the new battleground is in the coming years.

Your Web site and landing page conversion rates have been neglected for much too long — costing you a lot of money.

Tim Ash is the president and co-founder of SiteTuners and its parent company Epic Sky. Over the past 20 years, he has worked with American Express, Sony Music, American Honda, COMP USA, Harcourt Brace & Co., Universal Studios, Eaton, Guidant, TrizecHahn Centers, SAIC, Pyxis, and B.F. Goodrich Aerospace to develop successful Internet initiatives.