Generating Ideas for New Landing Pages

In this webinar, Jana Fung, the marketing manager of MixRank, talks about the different types of landing page tests. In the previous article, we also gave tips on how to conduct a successful landing page test. And lastly, how to know when a test is complete and when to stop it.

Now, how can we improve our conversions based on this knowledge? We must first determine what our clients want. Then, We will take a deeper look into some examples of some actual landing pages from some of the industry leading marketers and see what we can learn from their experiments. Lastly, we will give you some tips for making a good landing page.

Visitor’s Goal

When talking to customers, be more of a listener. Listen to what they want and don’t forget to ask them why they want it. In these customer interviews, you can do like 10 to 15 minutes chat with your users. It’s better if you can have them in front of a computer in your office or anywhere where you can meet them and let them evaluate your site. You can learn much from their evaluations may it be a nice evaluation or a harsh one. The important thing is you have to make notes based on these evaluations.

[Tweet “Know what your clients want. Engage in a conversation with your users and get an idea on what they want”]

You can also get some insights about what the real problems are. After you find out these imperfections you can set your main goal. That goal will be the performance indicator for your business. Make sure you also know what drives your business. The main task of everything you do on your site should always lead towards that. With all these gathered information, we can then start our hypothesis generation.

Learning from the Pros

Conversion experts have their own methods of things and their main goal is usually obvious at first sight. Now, let’s take a look on some sites from these conversion rate experts and see what we can learn from them:

SiteTuners

This site is run by Tim Ash. They offer a small business service wherein they help you with their landing page optimization. They let you click on Express Fix, or something else which basically leads you to the same thing. The secondary option is that you can call them. So what is their main goal? It is for you to contact them about an express fix. Other than the headline and sub-headline, all text are made less intense because their main goal is to let you click the button, which leads you to a form on the next page. What they did very smartly is putting a red image on top wherein it lets you focus on it.

Unbounce

This site creates landing pages and can also do A/B testing. What’s their main goal? They want you to start a free trial. And similar to SiteTuners they also have a headline, a call to action and all others are made less intense. They also have a list of 4000 companies that uses their services. This is also very important. It shows you some social proof that what they do is effective.

Ncover

This site has a light menu, it has only four options. It looks very professional and explains what it does. What you need from them is already there. It’s hard to miss because it’s a big, in-your-face download “Ncover 21 day free trial”. Very clear, very logical.

Mozilla

Firefox is the king of call to actions. Very clear buttons, very simple pages. It’s different by design, it’s a browser, it’s proudly non-profit and it has free things; like Firefox free download for Mac. It’s exactly what we want. This is what they want you to do. There’s only one option. If you want to dive deeper and click on the mobile Mozilla, it shows a menu and it dives deeper into other features.

Some of the principles are repeatable and can be generalized but one of the most effective landing page tasks are industry specific and are also time specific. When you’re looking for ideas of what to test or when trying to think of different variations a particular element is, you want to see what the particular marketer in your industry are doing with their landing pages. Take a look at what your competitors or other similar marketers are testing right now; what landing pages they are running; what’s winning and what’s losing. You can’t spend hour and hours refreshing different websites in your browser and hope that different variations of your competitors’ landing pages will show up.

Things to remember when optimizing a landing page

When optimizing a landing page, it is important to keep in mind certain things before making changes or running tests. These five things can help in making sure that you maximize the optimization applied to the landing page.

1. Connection
2. Clarity
3. Distraction
4. Urgency
5. Options

Connection

Every time you get people from one page to the other make sure you deliver what you promised to deliver. Make sure there is a connection between the ad and the page you’re leading your customers into.

Clarity

Text should always be readable and in context to what you are expected to deliver. Make sure they see what they need to see. People take one or two seconds to look at your site. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they are gone.

Distraction

Concentrate on things that your users want in your site. Avoid distracting stuff like moving images or any visual clutter. Get straight to the point.

Urgency

Introducing urgency will encourage your customers to make decisions quickly. You can add something like… a counter showing how many users are in that page at the time of one of your users visit. If what you offer is limited, introducing urgency may give you a higher conversion rate.

Options

Giving too much options will lead to a problem. The more options and the more choices you give to people, the less you convert. This causes anxiety among your consumers and will eventually lead them out of your site without even buying anything. So offer only one or two options so they can move forward.

As shown in MixRank, in order too understand conversion, you need to understand who your customers are. Know how they look at your site and build a hypothesis. As soon as you have a hypothesis then you can become a mad scientist. You basically go and test everything. Eventually, you’ll have a good landing page with a high conversion rate. If you want to learn more about this,
you can view the entire webinar here.