Note from Khalid: This is a guest post from Samantha Gonzales

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway a fence-sitting prospect to the other side with a little charm.

A business website speaks for you and everyone associated it. Though real people aren’t there to greet your prospects when they visit, your landing page can say exactly what you and your employees can’t. It can do the charming, the smiling and the persuading. In the most competitive of markets, your landing page can even be a rallying cry. It can inspire your prospects to heed a call-to-action and buy your product.

Continue reading Turn Your Landing Page’s Call-to-Action Into a Rallying Cry

Tags: Conversion Optimization, Landing-Page, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Ecommerce, Sales & Marketing

One consistent question we receive is whether or not we utilize some type of a baseline design for landing page projects.

The truth is that every client that comes to us has a unique product/service, a different customer base, and project expectations and plans unlike any other. That being said, there are templates that can be used as a jumping board for specific industries, services etc. We’d like to test to see whether our subscribers would benefit from a couple of templates we’ve created, and have used in the past, that can serve as a baseline for a landing page. These specific templates are related to more of a service type of offering on the landing page, although they can easily be customized to offer products as well.

These templates are available to our RSS subscribers. So, if you’d like, check these templates out, and please let us know whether you think they are useful or not! If we get positive feedback we’ll continue to roll out more templates for subscribers interested in this service.

Tags: landing page templates, Landing-Page
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

We’ve addressed an entire section in our recently released landing page handbook to explaining the difference between exit rate and bounce rate. When each of these terms is explained, it’s very easy to assume that they are the same number, but each calculates when visitors leave a site at a different point.

A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a website within x number of seconds without visiting any other page. So if you were to search for the term “baby party favors” on Google the following would be the results:

Clicking on the first organic result would land you on the following page:

This site may look too “kid” focused and not specialized enough towards babies. So if I was not satisfied with what I initially see and close the page then I would be someone who ‘bounced’ out of the site because I didn’t navigate away from the page I landed on.

An exit rate on the other hand is the percentage of visitors that leave a website after visiting other pages on the site. So the main difference between the two is when they leave the site. So looking at our previous page, I may be intrigued enough by what I initially see to take a look at what types of baby favors they offer so I click on the top “party favors” button and am led to another page:

I like what I see so far, and am curious to see what the “Babies” section has so I click on that button and am led to:

So at this point I found what I’m looking for, but it’s a bit pricey for my budget, so I decide to exit the page and start a new search. At this point, since I’ve visited a page other than the landing page I would be calculated in the exit rate.

Both bounce rates and exit rates are very important numbers and tell you very different useful information about your site. A bounce rate is an extremely important metric to measure how well a landing page on your site does. If people are clicking on a ppc campaign or an organic search result and landing on your site but leaving before navigating to any other page then you know right away that there is a problem with your landing page and can address that.

An exit rate helps determine where there are other problems on your site. For example, if visitors click from your landing page to a category and then to the product page but before making a purchase leave, then you know that there must be something preventing them from completing the process.

Landing page optimization: The complete guide goes into detail on how to improve both your exit rate and bounce rate to improve your site performance and ultimately increase your conversion rate.

Tags: bounce rate, exit rate, Landing-Page, optimization, ppc campaigns
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Do you expect your customers to shop in ways you wouldn’t behave yourself? You would be surprised how many marketers do.

Here is one example just from this last weekend: How many times have you seen a banner ad go straight into a credit card details page?

Have you ever purchased a reasonably expensive product, previously unknown to you, directly from a banner click? I am guessing you are saying ‘no’.

Our customers are the same. Yes, we do make impulse purchases, but in the majority of cases we need to know some facts and imagine ourselves owning and using the product. It is not enough to see the product is available and be shunted straight to the checkout.

Customers have various buying modes, from not even in the market to highly motivated to solve a problem. These modes are on a spectrum, and we can move between categories as we gain more information, get distracted or lose urgency.

Just looking at how motivated the customer is, you can see how your strategy has to adjust:

• Zero motivation - Not even shopping, unaware your product even exists, or that they have the problem your product solves. Many products sold directly work on this type of customer. They grab attention, bring the problem to the surface, then provide the solution along with an order form. This person is not shopping so Google Adwords are not going to work, but “push” advertising, such as direct mail or email list might.
• Some motivation - This person has a problem and would be open to solutions. Imagine a person who knows they have financial problems, their solution might be debt consolidation or might be blogging for cash, etc. It would depend on their own biases and the persuasiveness of your message. Awareness advertising with the right message would inspire this customer. A trusted blog or opt-in email list in the right niche would warm these people up perfectly.
• Motivated - The customer knows there are products on the market and would like to buy, but needs a good deal. They are researching and comparing prices, rather than go direct to a supplier they will use consumer guides and price comparison sites eg. Flights and Hotels, Credit Cards. Education and soft-sell are key, they will be ready to buy when convinced and not before. Affiliates make over half their commissions from this type of customer. Think also of blogs such as Engadget and magazines like Which.
• Highly motivated - Have a specific problem and need a solution, right now. These people will search on Google, to make the sale you need to appear visibly and with the right offer. They would happily take a free option but are ready to buy. This is a highly tactical requirement and involves fitting to search behavior and matching the exact need. My friends PDF to Excel converter fits this type of buyer. Solution-focused blogs and forums are a good way to attract a wide number of people with various problems, or use a well-optimized and heavily linked landing page for a specific solution product.

As you can see, a number 1 Google result is not going to capture the first category, those people are not even looking, while the last category will have highly motivated people searching frantically for your product if you would only put it where they can find it.

We have many strategies and tactics at our disposal but it always comes down to the same thing. Knowing your product and your customer!

Tags: copywriting, Landing-Page, marketing, sales, SEO, site-conversion-rate
Posted in Sales & Marketing

Did you ever click on a PPC ad for Victoria’s Secret? You do not have to explain to me, I know that you wanted to get a gift for your wife or girlfriend . But how about clicking on that Victoria’s Secret ad again, but this time to do some research on increasing your landing page conversion rate?  Victoria Secret’s targets a specific gender with their landing page, and creating gender specific landing page is the latest trend in landing page design.

Let’s go back to that Victoria’s Secret ad. You’ll notice that the landing page is designed with the female audience in mind in order to entice them to make that purchase right then and there. But that’s obvious, right?  I mean Victoria’s Secret has a target market of women 18 – 34, so it’s no surprise that they cater mostly to that group. Gender specific targeting is not a novel idea in traditional advertising. Nivea is the first to profile clients on ATM machines to display specific gender related ads.   How can such an idea be accomplished with landing pages? And what implications would gender specific targeting have on a landing pages?

Are there companies that are trying to create online gender specific campaigns?

HP launched an e-mail campaign that personalized each ad for the individual that received it; male or female.  Other companies are turning towards giving their client’s the convenience to log in to the site and adjust the settings to meet their specific mood, gender, and preferences. 

Creating gender-specific landing pages is no different.  In order to capitalize on your target market, you must address their needs, wants, and preferences through the ads and landing pages you create. Gender specific targeting is taking your landing page to the next level. 

But there are a few considerations you need to keep in mind:

1. Know your market:  Invest the time necessary to understand the demographics of your market. Only when you do so will you be able create the landing page that will fit your market criteria.  Don’t blindly decide that 90% of your clients are males; and only address them.  If you do, you may be losing a lot of potential business.  Through market surveys and site analysis techniques do the research, understand the breakdown of your customers, and decide who you will be targeting through your landing pages.  Once you do so you can determine whether creating a gender specific landing page works for you.  Also, a great way is to test with various landing pages to see what works and what doesn’t.  So targeting a gender may be wise or a disaster for your business; but after thorough research and testing with a single landing page you can determine that without creating damage to your company.

2. Create Personas:  Once you’ve understood your target market,  you must develop personas that the target the most complex of your target customers.  This will help you develop landing pages that are more personalized in nature because you begin to envision the personas and sell to them rather than the masses.  So, if you are Bose, (Bose.com) selling high end sounds systems, you will most likely develop male personas for your site. If you are selling genealogy software on the other hand, then your personas will be predominantly woman. Disney trying to sell a family vacation on their site will most likely develop a male as well as a female persona for the father and mother in the family. Remember that you should always create a landing pages to satisfy your primary personas. These personas are created to make you visualize someone when creating every element of your site; a real-life representation of your clients. 

Company x may have a target market of predominately men.  They will create a landing page to satisfy John and Ronald; their primary personas. These personas were created with in order to envision someone when creating the website; a real-life user-interface experience.  Rather than marketing to the large masses of men and their distinct personalities out there.  John’s personality, lifestyle, life, ambitions, and goals are much different than Ronald’s.  They each represent the most complex of personalities that purchase from company x; if you satisfy them, you satisfy hundreds of men with less complex traits.  The commonality between John and Ronald is that they both like to purchase from company x.

3. Copy:  When creating copy, you need to begin to understand what language will appeal to your market.  If you are addressing a female in your copy, you need to use words that would appeal to her specific personality traits (that is determined through the persona you create) but also address the fact that she is a woman.  Woman generally like long copy. Men on the other hand generally like short copy pages.

It is probably true that on the whole, women are more collaborative, men more competitive. Women are more likely to engage with students in active learning, men more likely to keep a distance through lecturing.

What does that mean for your landing page? Generally, men are more competitive, so the landing page must answer questions such as: what is in this for me? Or how can you help me. Whereas, women are generally more humanistic in nature, so the landing page should answer questions such as: how did your product or service help others? How many clients do you have?

Remember, it’s not always the case that women are humanistic and men are competitive; you need to always refer back the personas created.  Although the persona you created may be a female, she may have characteristic traits that were found in many of your women customers such as competitiveness and spontaneity.

4. Design:  Similar to the copy, the design of the landing page must appeal to the target audience.  Victoria’s Secret targets females ages 18-34, although they do not all have the same personality traits and preferences, they are able to construct pages that will appeal to that entire age group. 

Remember, the entire purpose of personas is to create hypothetical individuals with complex personalities that encompass all the rest of your market.  Because by satisfying your personas; you can satisfy everyone.  So if you create a gender specific page targeting Jane, a 34 year-old stay-at-home mom and Hannah, a 50 year-old construction worker; your page needs to address them BOTH, and they are VERY different.  Although Hannah is a female, because of her profession and being around men constantly, she is and always has been tom boyish.  So, your site design needs to address this aspect.  Making a site filled with images may appeal to Jane, but not to Hannah; you need to find a middle ground.  But don’t dismiss Hannah’s femininity either; she’s still a woman.

5. A note about the ad:  In addition to constructing your gender-specific page, you also need to construct an ad that will appeal to your target market.  Remember that the content, picture, or headline of the ad must be echoed in your landing page to avoid confusing your potential client.

Tell me what do you think? Have you considered creating landing pages that target specific gender? What are some of the challenges in doing so?

Tags: increase-conversion-rate, increase-online-sales, increase-sales, Landing-Page, online-marketing, Personas, PPC
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Last week we had fun creating the ad copy and talked about the importance of including variations that we will later test in the actual campaign. This week we are going to work on the second step to ad copy writing: writing the copy for the landing page.

Step 2: Writing the copy for the landing page:

This is the second half of the challenge. After we successfully have users click on our ad, we need to have a landing page that will convince the visitor to take the intended action on our site, and increase our conversion rate. If not, then we basically have lost money on that click, so this part is equally if not more than the creating the ad copy.

Here are the tips that we followed to create ours:

• Length: when creating the landing page it’s important to keep in mind that we don’t just fill the page with as many words as possible. The goal is to communicate our message and not add anything more or anything less.

• Style: we found that it is best to have an interactive style when creating the landing page. We did this by including some probing questions to keep the user engaged. Of course we provided the answers in the page as well.

• Headlines: there are two things that need to be kept in mind with creating headlines:

• First, all headlines and sub-headlines need to be powerful attention grabbers that will catch the eye of the users and retain them on the page.
• And second, the headline MUST match the titles on the PPC ad. It would be a huge mistake to for someone to click on our PPC ad to find a completely different headline. This seems like common sense, but you would be surprised with what you see!

• Audience: the most important part of creating both the ad copy and landing page is knowing who our target audience is and creating a copy and landing page to reflect that. For example, since we chose to create a campaign for a couple of industries (medical and technology), we needed to create two separate landing pages that would adhere to their interests and targeted them specifically.

It just so happened that a couple of members on our team were attending a seminar that Friday, where they brought back some very valuable information that helped us with completing this part of the campaign.

As I mentioned before, it’s crucial to know your target audience very well. At the conference, Ayat learned a lot about the different personality types of people that may be clicking on our ad, which I will describe in detail below. In our discussion I learned that on average there are 24 different personality types that visit the landing page, and they can be categorized into 4 general types: methodical, humanistic, competitive and spontaneous. I’ll briefly explain each one and then tell you why this information greatly benefited us.

Methodical: This personality is what I believe to be very similar to a Type A personality: very detail oriented and going through all the text line by line. To attract and retain clients with this personality, we needed to make sure that all information on the page is organized and explained very well in addition to adequate information being available for this personality type to go through in detail.

Humanistic: These users LOVE testimonials and hearing how other clients benefited from our services. They remind me of myself whenever I’m going through a diet website looking at before and after pictures of each of the members and how much they benefited from that particular diet! To satisfy these users, it’s important to include the experiences of previous users on the landing page.

Competitive: This personality type is probably the most difficult to please, because they are essentially looking for perfection. To satisfy this type we need to make sure that we clarify that we are the best in our industry and more importantly why.

Spontaneous: Don’t I wish everyone could have this type of personality!! They’re very easy to please and just want straightforward reasons of why to choose our company outlined in an easy to ready method, such as bullet points. They just want to know why to choose you and how to contact you and are pretty quick to make a decision.

So how do we create an ad copy that will satisfy all four of these personality types?? Well first we look at which ones need immediate attention. What I mean by this, are those individuals who have a quick response time, which according to the above mentioned personalities are the competitive and spontaneous personalities. We also have to keep in mind the humanistic and methodical personalities. So what we are attempting to do is include the following information in our landing page:

1. Why we are the best.
2. Enough information to entice the humanistic and methodical personalities.

The humanistic and spontaneous personality types are somewhat easier to please and addressing their needs does not pose much of a challenge. For the humanistic users we will have a couple of testimonials or perhaps a link to the testimonial page. Seeing other clients’ successful experiences and feedback will motivate the humanistic individuals to choose our services. And for the spontaneous personality type we’ll create a user friendly format of the page that clearly identifies “why INVESP” and how to contact us. We also included the benefits of using our SEO services and as a variation will include a promotional offer such as: Call us today for an additional 10% off!

Taking into consideration these personality types in addition to the initial ad copy and landing page guidelines mentioned at the beginning of this blog will help create a successful PPC campaign. As the PPC campaign runs, it’s time to measure the results and utilize the variations mentioned in the previous blog until you find which ad is produces the best results and increases the conversion rate. Next week we’ll actually launch the campaign and I’ll report the results. Wish us luck!

Check out My adventures with PPC series:

• My Adventures with PPC: Creating effective ad copy
• My Adventures with PPC: Finally I have a list
• My Adventures with PPC: Keyword Selection
• My Adventures with PPC: The first week

Tags: increase-online-sales, increase-site-conversion-rate, Landing-Page, online-marketing, Personas, PPC
Posted in Sales & Marketing