Due to limited time or budget, the landing page is often given the least priority in a marketing campaign.

Some marketers feel that a great external campaign is more important than a good landing page.  Our research has found the opposite to be true.  Even a great campaign needs the correct conversion architecture. Therefore, the landing page design is key.

The Landing Page Handbook by MarketingSherpa recommends three simple ways to turn every page into an effective landing page.

Sprinkle plenty of offers

A consistent Offer In Navigation (OFIN) will manage this task nicely.  It adds to the overall continuity of your site. This may include an email request form, catalog request, retail locations, access to customer service or a search box, all located above the fold.

Floaters are a quick, yet aggressive way to capture an unknown users email address.

If nothing else, every page should have a highly visible email signup form.

Mequoda Daily Landing Page with Floater

Include hotlinks to more relevant pages

Convert visitors who are in the “information-seeking mode.”  Since a visitor may “land” anywhere on your site from a search engine query, help them find the information they seek immediately.  The easier it is to find, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Try adding a “Related Articles” or “Most Popular ___ List” to the end of every article.   Fill in the blank with appropriate articles, patterns, pictures, videos, books, newsletters, etc.  According to MarketingSherpa, this tactic can boost conversion rates up to 30%.

Recent articles about landing pages from Mequoda.com

Test, Test, Test

The most repeated advice we give to clients is to continually test.  When done properly, it’s the best return on your investment. Testing will improve conversion rates.

This not only applies to PPC and email blasts, but also to organic search landing page testing.  Just because it’s free traffic doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize for it.  The Mequoda System focuses on optimizing your marketing for just that – converting organic search traffic.

Join us at the next Mequoda Summit for more landing page optimization tips.  Read more of The Landing Page Handbook by MarketingSherpa at SherpaStore.com

Honest Seduction is a compilation of ION blog posts and articles over a period of two and a half years.  Here’s a great take away from Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers.

Nine Rules for Making Landing Pages That Sell:

1. A web sales path should not be truly linear. Of course there must be the obvious ”NEXT’ type choice, but don’t forget about floaters, OFIEs, OFINs, free form fields, and “choose A or B” fields. Limit the number of choices and outcomes without limiting their involvement.
2. Exude speed and efficiency. If your screen loads fast and looks clean and simple it screams, “I promise not to waste your time.” Who doesn’t appreciate that?
3. Get smarter at every click. The customers’ choices should narrow the selling message.  Make your questions smart enough so that you learn something valuable.
4. Be clear and don’t ask unless you need to. Don’t ask your customers anything irrelevant. It wastes their time and they’ll question your motives.
5. Stay focused. Don’t distract your customers. Resist the temptation to go into every detail.
6. Don’t ramble or waste their time. Limit the number of screens in your path – three for simple products and no more than seven for complex or high ticket products.
7. Be honest and up front. Build trust by clearly displaying where they are in the process and what step  they are on in your path.
8. Barter for information. Build trust and equality into the relationship by giving something in exchange for the information they provide.
9. Sincerity wins the day. This is an extension of a real, flesh and blood relationship. Trust and mutual respect need to come across on every screen. Don’t be the used car salesman.

Testing – One, Two, Three

If you have been reading Mequoda Daily for a while, you know we are big proponents of testing.  There’s micro-level optimization and macro-level concepts.

Micro-level focuses on aspects such page orientation testing, shuffling minor variations of content to see what flows best.  Macro-level looks at the big picture, the structure of a sales path – not just a single landing page.  One test is never enough.  Using both multi-variant (MVT) and multi-step A/B testing requires more strategic and tactical input, but the results are worth it.

Read more from Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers by Scott Brinker, Justin and Anna Talerico at Amazon.com

Before you can start building your landing page, you must define exactly what you want your visitors to do. The goal, or conversion objective of your landing page should completely drive the development of the page.

To identify the conversion objective, ask yourself, “What do I want visitors to do when they see my landing page?”

Landing page objectives may include:

• increase sales
• create or update customer information base
• gain subscribers
• execute a viral marketing campaign

Whatever it is you want visitors to do, it’s imperative that your landing page be clear, easy-to-read and focused on the conversion objective.  Can you have more than one goal?

The Landing Page Optimization Handbook by Invesp Consulting recommends caution.  While your site can have multiple conversion objectives, you should have one primary goal for each landing page.  Otherwise, your conversion rates will drop as focus is lost.

Best Practice Testing

No matter how good you think your landing page is – TEST IT!  Here are a few of our best practices guidelines for testing:

1. Have a techie in marketing – somebody who understands the Google technology and how your site works
2. Have your techie go through Google’s Adwords training program.
3. Test big things first (page design, headlines, long vs. short) before little things (color of buttons, size of text)
4. Test high-volume pages and apply those lessons to low-volume pages
5. Limit your tests to pages that get traffic from a common source – e.g., a Google Adwords campaign
6. Keep your tests simple
7. Test “distracting” links, like “free sample issue”
8. Consider the ROI of the entire process, not just a single page
9. Keep records of your tests and take screenshots of everything
10. Share what you learn with the email marketers and web designers
11. Use your web-analytics data to uncover high-impact pages or user paths to test
12. First, Choose your goal.  Then, decide which elements to test
13. Know which metrics will be used to declare a winner and make sure you can get those numbers

Every element on your page must be evaluated as it relates to the primary goal. Find the elements that divert the visitor’s attention from the conversion goal and correct them.

Once established, test the winner.  If the long page beats the short page, you can still improve it.  It’s an iterative process that never ends.

Our mantra is “optimize and test again.”  If you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table.

Learn more about landing page optimization at the next Mequoda Summit.  Download The Landing Page Optimization Handbook by Invesp Consulting.

Brady told those in the audience today during a Landing Page Optimization session, that “a good ad makes a big difference—fast”. He told publishers that a change to a single word in his ads have increased conversion rates by 3x the original conversion rate.

“In the golden age of direct mail, there was a lot of A/B testing – headline, color, copy – and it worked, but it was very limited. The problem was that it could take 4-5 months to analyze the results, and the cost to create so many version was just plain expensive,” Brady reminded publishers.

Brady told the audience that he’s been in many conversations with other publishers who insist that certain colors or headlines work, but reminded us that every company is different and what works for one, might not work for another. This is why Brady stresses that everyone conduct their own tests.

In comparison to their original multi-variate testing platform, Vertster, Brady suggested that the while the tool is useful, it costs 18k a year and Google Analytics is free.

Josh Baker of Business & Legal Resources went on to show the results from a few of their multivariate tests.

In the following case study, the folks at BLR were performing multivariate tests on their membership website sign up page that offers a free trial to their robust library of HR resources.

They swapped several elements in the test, including the main headline, main body copy, premium (with or without), and the registration form headline.

In this test, which was receiving traffic from paid search, the user would get several of variations of these elements, but otherwise, the registration form itself was identically the same.

According to Baker, the top combination of all four elements increased conversions by 52%. The winning registration form headline improved conversion rates 15.74% all by itself.

In another test that Baker showed the audience, he was testing an email registration page that currently saw 3,000 visitors a month with a 37% conversion rate.

Baker told the audience that “the winning page combination brought us from a 37% conversion rate to a 63% conversion rate”.

Here is the winning page combination, which included body copy that was previously an empty space, along with a much shorter sign up box and a new headline: Become a Member of the HR Daily Advisor. Baker noted that the new headline only showed a small increase in conversions, but the overall combination is what made the difference.

Baker also offered publishers a few quick tips:

1. Test the pages that will impact your business.
2. If you can’t test certain page areas or elements due to technological hurdles, test what you can.
3. If you’re not testing, you’re guessing. Baker joked that it’s fun to make bets within the workplace to see which combination will win. He also noted that you’re usually going to be wrong.
4. If you don’t beat your control it’s still a win if you walk away with lessons learned about your page and visitors that can be applied in the future.
5. Always run a head-to-head follow-up test to confirm results.

The essence of online marketing is building a database of potential customers and marketing to them, both on your website, and with editorial and advertising email messages.

Email can account for up to 60 percent of online revenue. In fact, some Mequoda publishers tell us that every name and email address in their database is worth an average of as much as $70 annually.

Job #1 for an effective website is building your database — adding names and email addresses to your list. This is true for both B2B and B2C publishers, both ad-driven and product-driven.

The Rapid Conversion Landing Page initiates an online relationship. It always requests an email address from the user in exchange for permission to send additional offers. You may also know it as a squeeze page or a name capture page.

The power of a free-with-free offer

The most effective technique for quickly building a large opt-in email list is called “free on free.” It’s a takeoff on the department store cosmetics counter offer known as “free gift with purchase.” Only in this case, it’s a free gift for agreeing to accept a free email newsletter or free email tips.

As an incentive to subscribe to the free email newsletter, you also offer a free gift — usually an instantly downloadable PDF book or report on the same subject. Thus the name, “free on free.” It’s a second incentive for the user to give up their email address.

Studies have shown that leading with the free-with-free offer usually gets a higher response than leading with the free email newsletter offer.

Frankly, how many users really want to subscribe to another free email newsletter? Your response is more likely to increase when you entice the user to accept the free downloadable report while simultaneously and somewhat surreptitiously obtaining her agreement to receive “free email updates.”

Since we get asked so often about how to create a Rapid Conversion Landing Page that ranks on page #1 in Google and drives massive amounts of email subscribers, we’ve put together a new white paper called: Rapid Conversion Landing Page Optimization Guidelines. Check it out!

Do you shop online?  With online sales continuing to rise each year, chances are very likely that you do.  And so do your customers.

So after making the decision to buy something, what is it that made you commit to a sale from one online retailer over another?

• Simple design with easy to read fonts or a bright flashy design?
• Clean, uncluttered page or lots of annoying banner ads?
• Easy to follow links or confusing, unclear directions?

When you think of these options, can you think of some examples you’ve encountered recently?  Now go to your companies landing page.  Would you buy something or click away after a few seconds?

Test the Offer

Everyone is in agreement, testing is the key to success.  Initially, the offer must interest them, and there are many ways to influence visitors to take action.  Here are some items Tim Ash, author of Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions recommends testing and tweaking:

1. The primary offer
2. The total solution surrounding the offer
3. Headline
4. Sales copy
5. Images chosen
6. Call-to-action text and graphical element
7. Repetition of the call-to-action in multiple screen locations and formats
8. Offer context (by bracketing the desired action in a bronze/silver/gold set of options)
9. Limited availability or other scarceness indicators (deadlines, remaining inventory)
10. Pricing

Tim Ash also answers the following questions about landing page design and optimization: What does a landing page look like from your perspective? How does it fit into the overall marketing picture? Can you really convert every single visitor? Are you devoting enough attention to your landing page?

Read more from Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions by Tim Ash at Amazon.com

This week we’ve been at the 2009 SIPA 33^rd Annual International Conference in Washington, D.C.. Yesterday there was a fantastic session called “Use a Proven Testing Method to Build Landing Pages That Work” with Bob Brady and Josh Baker of Business & Legal Reports, and Greg Krehbiel of Kiplinger.

The session focused on the many A/B and multivariate tests both Business & Legal Reports and Kiplinger have performed, and several ways they have boosted email and membership website conversions.

Two big take-aways from the session

One big take-away I got from Greg at Kiplinger was that response to one of their salesletters dramatically decreased when they added the price to their salesletter above the fold with a big red “order now” button.

Once identifying the depression in response, they removed the price entirely from the salesletter and now only feature the price on the second page of any given orderflow.

The second big take away I got, from Bob and Josh at Business & Legal Reports came in the form of their email newsletter signup page.

They found that these two changes, as identified by the results of a multivariate test, boosted email registrations by a whopping 73%:

- Removing the fields that asked for a username and password in the signup process
- Adding benefit copy to the registration page, which had previously been a simple registration form

Sufficed to say, it was (from the feedback I heard, and in my own opinion), one of the best sessions of the entire conference. The take-aways gave publishers a solid notebook full of items to test or implement the moment they get back to work.

Coincidentally, Bob, Josh and Greg will be presenting the same material with us on June 10th in a webinar called Landing Pages that Work. If you missed this session at SIPA or were unable to attend, I urge you to attend with us in this “second chance” ideal situation.

There are many more take-aways that you’ll get from Landing Pages that Work: Using a Proven Testing Method to Increase Conversion Rates, though:

If you are a publisher, marketer, copywriter or website designer, you will walk away with tons of new ideas and a new found motivation for testing your landing pages, I promise.

Go ahead and register for Landing Pages that Work on June 10th at 12:30EDT. If you can’t attend at that time, you can always register for the webinar CD instead and we’ll ship it to you by June 12th.

Register for Landing Pages that Work today.

We’re big on landing pages. I mean, who isn’t? Every page on your site could be considered a landing page. After all, a landing page is merely the page that a user “lands” on when they find you through a link or a search engine.

This week we’re at the 2009 SIPA 33^rd Annual International Conference in Washington, D.C. and while I’ll be throwing all kinds of coverage up on the blog later this week, I thought today, given our very busy schedule at the conference, I’d do a recap on some great landing page research we’ve posted recently.

Here’s our list of 15 landing page tips to talk about (and share with your colleagues):

1. How BLR Increased Membership Website Conversions 15.74% with a New Headline
How a more robust registration headline on this membership website brought conversion rates from drab to fab

2. Organic, Dedicated and Hybrid Landing Pages – Oh My!
It isn’t enough to know how to design a landing page, you should also understand why writing for the web is not the same as writing for print

3. Five Essential Elements for a Great Sales Letter Landing Page
Forget the cash register. First, make sure your landing pages answer this question for your users: “what’s in it for me?”

4. Why Google May be Ignoring your Rapid Conversion Landing Pages
The simple website architecture requirement that virtually guarantees your offer will be found and indexed highly by Google

5. Bob Brady’s 10 Google Website Optimizer Best Practices
Thirteen best practices to consider when testing the elements of your website landing pages

6. Top 15 To-Do List for Multivariate Testing with Google Website Optimizer
Google Website Optimizer tips from SiPA’s 25th Annual Mid-Year Marketing Conference: Gain. Market. Share.

7. Why Susan Boyle is Like a Good Landing Page
Test your landing pages, because 9 times out of 10, snap judgments will prove you wrong

8. Don’t Forget the End-Goal of Your Link-Building Efforts
Why it’s critical to have one authority page, ideally a Rapid Conversion Landing Page, as the reservoir for all your internal and external link juice

9. Test Your Copywriting Expertise
This publisher’s “winning” titles routinely generate 50 percent more sales than the “losing” titles

10. Landing Page Tracking: 3 Online Tools
Diagnose the health of your landing pages with these three online tools that will tell you more about your visitors and how well your design/copy is converting

11. Elements of an Excellent Email-Capture Page
A checklist of 9 must-haves for a list-building rapid conversion landing page

12. Usability Testing: 5 Heat Map Tracking Tools to Watch What Your Visitors Do
Supplement your analytics with some cool visuals from online heatmap tracking tools

13. 8 Reasons to Use a Solo Orderflow
Maximize conversion rates with solo orderflows and independent information products

14. Landing Page Keyword Research
Choosing relevant keywords for your rapid conversion landing page will put you on page one and build your email list

15. The Best SEO Keyword Strategy – Picking SEO Keyword Fights You Can Win
All SEO keywords are not equally important—volume and competition matter!

We also have tons more in our archives of landing page articles and landing page reviews.

Do you have any landing page article favorites? Be sure to share them in the comments!

Speaking of landing pages… That’s right—we have a webinar coming up on June 10th that goes into the nitty gritty of how to perform A/B and multivariate testing on your landing pages, plus tons of case studies from speakers Bob Brady (Business & Legal Reports) and Greg Krehbiel (Kiplinger). It’s called Landing Pages that Work and we hope you’ll join us. The early-bird rate of $197 ends this Friday!

We’ve written a lot about a/b split and multivariate testing lately, haven’t we?

For example, just yesterday we wrote about How BLR Increased Membership Website Conversions 15.74% with a New Headline.

We also gave you Bob Brady’s 10 Google Website Optimizer Best Practices and a robust Top 15 To-Do List for Multivariate Testing with Google Website Optimizer.

Here’s a secret… all of these tips are coming directly from a 90-minute instructional webinar that we’ll be hosting on June 10th.

We’ve brought in two of our favorite “test junkies” for this webinar on how to test and measure your landing pages called Landing Pages that Work: Using a Proven Testing Method to Increase Conversion Rates.

This SIPA/Mequoda webinar features two experts: BLR’s Bob Brady and Kiplinger’s Greg Krehbiel. You’ll learn:

• 13 best practices for website testing and evaluation.
• How to use the free Google Website Optimizer tool to do A/B and multivariate tests on landing pages.
• How changing just five seemingly innocuous words in a headline improved response by 36 percent.
• The ideal duration of an A/B test for reliable results.
• How to structure URLs for maximum effectiveness
• and more…

For $197 you gain UNLIMITED ACCESS to this 90-minute instructional webinar.

That means for one low price, you can invite your entire development team into the conference room and train them all at once. When the webinar is over, you can send them off to start developing their own tests!

As always, we guarantee your satisfaction, or you’ll get a prompt refund.

Sign up today and start maximizing conversion rates though multivariate and A/B split testing.

The folks at Business and Legal Reports (BLR) are gluttons for A/B and multivariate testing. Similar to Google, their pages are designed based on numbers and results, not opinions or a creative web designer.

In the following case study, the folks at BLR were performing multivariate tests on their membership website sign up page that offers a free trial to their robust library of HR resources.

They swapped several elements in the test, including the main headline, main body copy, premium (with or without), and the registration form headline.

We’re going to show you just the registration form headline test below. To see the rest, register for our upcoming Landing Pages that Work webinar.

Here are the registration form headlines they tested:

• Control: Try HR.BLR.com Free
• New Headline #1: Start Your Risk Free Trial Now
• New Headline #2: Complete this form and Get Your FREE and UNLIMITED Access

In this test, which was receiving traffic from paid search, the user would get one of these three registration headline variations. Otherwise, the registration form itself was identically the same.

According the Bob Brady, CEO of BLR, the top combination of all four elements increased conversions by 52%. The winning registration form headline improved conversion rates 15.74% all by itself.

Which registration headline do you think won?

“Complete this form and Get Your FREE and UNLIMITED Access” was the winner.

Now, this doesn’t mean, “Complete this form and Get Your FREE and UNLIMITED Access“ created an immediate 15.74% increase in sales, Bob told us.

“On the end you’re going to lose some of those people. The job of this page is to move them along to the next page, and unless you’ve done something dramatically different on the next page—like change the offer—the results still stand. The important thing is to get them to the next page and then let that page do its work”.

In a couple weeks, on June 10th, Bob Brady from BLR and Greg Krehbiel of Kiplinger will join us for a co-sponsored SIPA/Mequoda Webinar called Landing Pages that Work: Using a Proven Testing Method to Increase Conversion Rates which will feature many more case studies like this.

So, multivariate tests aren’t smart enough to tell us why things work better. What’s your theory on why the winning headline converted best?