Archive for the "Landing Page Optimization Tips" Category
College Information Landing Page Inspiration – Part One
Looking for a college is like looking for new cereal at the mega-grocery store. You have a rough idea of what you want, but your choices are endless. You find yourself just staring at the boxes, dumbfounded.
Plenty of websites have popped up to help students move from “dumbfounded” to “college-bound.” We’re going to tear down some of their landing pages to help build your expertise, starting with DegreeLeap’s College Finder Tool.
Whitespace is not blank-space
I commend the designers of this page for their minimalist approach. It’s always good to have plenty of whitespace so it’s easy to look at the page and so you don’t find yourself squinting and wondering what the heck it’s trying to say.
But this page goes a little too far. Almost one-third of the main section is completely blank, and it makes the bullet points look like they’re crammed under the headline. The whitespace appears to be encroaching on the other elements, rather than letting them relax and spread out, which completely defeats the reason for having whitespace in the first place. These guys should test spacing out the bullet points and adding some content below them. Perhaps an image of a smiling student next to a quote about why they love DegreeLeap?
There is also a good-sized piece of unused real estate under the form. Right now, that space is showing off the page’s nifty background, which isn’t doing much for conversions. I would test adding a trust logo, testimonial, or some other call-out to make this section start achieving some goals instead of wasting space (like a lazy college student).
I know what to do — why should I care?
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Opt-in Email Newsletter Popup Best Practices for 2012
If you’re like the other gazillion websites trying to get people to sign up for an email newsletter, then you probably have an opt-in popup form. You know, it’s that annoying lay-over popup box that asks new visitors to opt-in with their name and emails.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there were landing page optimization best practices for designing these? Then your opt-in popups could grab many more subscribers right out of the gate. At the very least, it would be good to know which elements are worth focusing on in testing.
Since we thought it would help a LOT of people to get some straight answers on popup opt-in forms, we got Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker on the phone (Conversion Voodoo is very lucky to work with the best of the best in online marketing). We had an idea for him:
“Whaddya think about us running some tests on the opt-in popup for your newsletter?” Jeremy’s reply was about as easy as they come, “Have at it!” So we did.
Not only that, but Jeremy requested that we post the results for his audience. All we could say was “absolutely!” We rarely get to publish results because 99% of our clients want to remain anonymous — so this was sweet!
Our goal was to test the “default” settings on the popup to see if there were the better ways to convert visitors into subscribers. We hoped to find some best practices to share with you for your website that may not have a horde of visitors every month like the Shoemoney blog. Although we counted more than 30 different elements in opt-in popups, we whittled that number down to the most relevant (i.e. the ones you should care about), which you’ll see in the tests below.
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Boost your Christmas conversions by 10.2% with a simple JavaScript trick (code included)
Hot off the conversion press and just-in-time for Christmas.
Last year we posted about our Merry Christmas v. Happy Holidays test we ran for one of our clients. This year we decided to some landing page optimization tests with variations of the Christmas theme.
If you’ve followed our blog before, you know that creating a sense of urgency for your users to act usually increases conversions. Since we practice what we preach, we decided to run a headline on one of our client’s websites doing just that. We tested a headline that reminds them how near Christmas is. We came up with 2 variations of this headline: one that just states the days, and another that states the days, hours, minutes, and seconds and counts down in real time.
The test:
Here’s the day countdown:
10 days til Christmas.
Here’s the realtime seconds countdown, +10.2% in conversion rate:
9 days, 13:22:03 til Christmas.
Landing Page Inspiration for Auto Loan Websites – Part 2
Alright, you’ve gotten someone on your website. They like what they’re seeing. They want a loan. They take a look at your online application and — that’s it. They think “Wow. That looks like a ton of work. I wonder what’s up on Facebook?” And away they go.
We’re continuing our three-part series on auto loan landing pages today, and we’re hitting on something almost every loan site screws up: form pages. The forms are way too cluttered! They’re traumatizing to look at and even more painful to fill out. People would rather redeem beer cans for nickels than use these to apply for a loan.
Normally we focus on landing pages, but today we’re opening it up to online forms. Too many companies are killing their completion rates. We can stand by no longer.
The vertical groove
Whether you realize it or not, there is a rhythm internet users get into when filling out form fields. It goes something like this: first name, last name, email, address, city… and so on. When the fields are in a single column, the information just flows out. The users keep going until they’re done. You never want to interrupt this rhythm. But when there are multiple columns, it disrupts their flow. They have to stop, scroll up, think about what to do (ugh!), and start again. So keep it simple, keep it vertical, and don’t make them work anymore than they have to.
Our tests have consistently shown that having a single column of form fields on a longer form increases conversion rates, even without any other changes (when compared to a multi-column newspaper style layout). This makes sense when you think about it, because a multi-column format is confusing.
Who the heck are you?
Brands like Wells Fargo have a big advantage: people know them. Their logo conjures up feelings that have been embedded by millions and millions of dollars in advertising. The logo is like a big stamp on the page that immediately tells people “We’re not some fly-by-night internet scam. You know us. Don’t worry.”
So why not use that asset to your advantage on your form pages? That’s what Wells Fargo did by including it at the top of their auto loan application page. That logo makes people feel better when, while typing in their social security numbers, they look up and think “am I sure I this is safe?”
You, savvy marketer, might not be as lucky as the marketers at Wells Fargo. The people filling out your form might not know much about your company — and that’s OK. You just need to provide some assurance that you won’t use their information to do something unsavory, like buy mail-order pain killers from Mexico.
Landing Page Inspiration for Auto Loan Lead Generation Sites – Part 1
Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by checking out all the other sites in the same industry/niche market. It helps us to see what else is out there and gets us inspired to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on form pages for auto loan lead generation campaigns.
We’ve received many requests to make more detailed comments and give example ideas for these landing page inspiration posts. Starting with this post, we’ll break down our landing page optimization reviews into multiple posts. In this series we’ll look at 3 auto loan websites, and will post separately over the next few weeks.
You haven’t made a sale yet!
A big problem with most form pages is that people forget to keep selling their product or service to the customer. Many users will get to a form page and say “ah-yeesh, guhhhhh, see-ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!” and bounce. You can help prevent this by continuing your sales pitch from your landing page. The form page is a great place to use customer testimonials and well-known trust logos such as McAfee, as well as what’ll THEY will get (Benefits).
Eye Tracking studies can KILL conversions if you focus on the wrong things for your landing page optimization tests!
Conventional wisdom states: You should use images that guide a user to the actionable elements (or interest/desire elements) on the page. That’s what we’ve been told and that is what most of us have believed up until now. This idea stemmed from eye tracking studies where an image of a person looking or pointing at your call-to-action guides the user to look in the same direction, and it works! Doing this is great if you want your users to look at your call-to-action rather than click on it.
Eyes Can Guide Your Eyes
Just look at this cool image from Human Tracking. Clearly the eyes glanced to the left will guide the viewers eyes to the left.
Guiding potential users to your call-to-action using page elements or images is common practice in conversion optimization. But we hypothesized that, while guiding a user to a button can increase conversions, we had a belief that conveying emotion is more important than simply guiding the eyes of the viewer.
Now I know some you are saying to yourself “Duh!” But look around… Most sites focus on guiding the eyes, not conveying emotion. Since we are heavy on “copy” in our company, clearly emotion is something we yearn to elicit in people who visit our sites.
Before we go on, I want to give a BIG shout-out to our massive-traffic clients who let us do crazy tests to learn from and to grow their conversions. Without them (and the massive amount of traffic) we couldn’t do these types of tests. And just FYI, a little disclaimer: No landing pages were harmed in the making of this blog post. In fact, we were able to chalk-up another W in the win column for our incredible clients. (Whew!)
Emotion vs. Eyetracking
Landing Page Inspiration for Internet Startups
Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by checking out all the other sites in the same industry/niche market. It helps us to see what else is out there and gets us inspired to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for internet start-ups.
We made some basic notes on some of the elements that stand out to us. But there is one part of the landing page that every single internet start-up seems to screw-up on their landing pages (usually their home page): What is it your freakin’ product does for ME?
Use headlines to grab them by the throat
It’s nice to know that one of your buddies at mashable wrote an article about you, and you get to put their logo on your site as a solid trust element. Kudos. But no “real people” outside of “the valley” gives a flying fig newton about what they say, nor how brilliant you are. (no offense, we like mashable, but we’re not “real people” either.)
Real People. #1 search result for "Average American" in Google)
Real people, those average visitors that you are begging God to fall in love with you and your product, only have their internal radio tuned into one station: WIIFM. “What’s In It For Me”.
Out of the 3 sites we reviewed, I think Addroid did the best in terms of quickly explaining their benefit. But even then, they could improve their copy on the landing page as well.
The “real people” for your market may be different than the “real people” for ILoveTacos.com, but they are still tuned to WIIFM like everyone else on the planet.
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Landing Page Inspiration for Insurance Websites
When we begin a new Conversion Rate Optimization project we like to start out by seeing what else is out there to help us get inspired and to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for insurance websites.
For our landing page inspiration blog posts, we like to run though and point-out the good “best practices” on the pages, as well as highlight some of the elements that we would recommend testing.
Please use the comment area below to post some critiques and questions. Please add your thoughts on elements that should be pointed out on the pages. Often times, there are more gold nuggets there to find.
To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.
Landing Page Inspiration for iPhone App Download Pages
Whenever we start a new landing page optimization project we like to start out by seeing what else is out there to help us get inspired and to see what the competition is doing (and not doing) these days. This week we focused on landing pages for iPhone app download pages.
For our landing page inspiration blog posts, we like to run though and point-out the good “best practices” on the pages, as well as highlight some of the elements that we would recommend testing.
Please use the comment area below to post some critiques and questions. Please add your thoughts on elements that should be pointed out on the pages. Often times, there are more gold nuggets there to find.
To see our comments, just rollover the images and our good/try notes will popup.
Using an ancient JavaScript technique to drive conversion rate . . .
Despite running dozens of new tests for our clients every day, it was just two weeks ago that we finally rolled out a new landing page for ourselves.
Here’s the fun part – our landing page looks completely different depending on what day of the week or hour of the day you look at it thanks to an old-school JavaScript technique – here are a few examples:
