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

So you know your site needs to be optimized and now just need to find someone to do it. The following questions are ones you need to ask to ensure that you maximize your investment:

1. What increase in conversion rates should I expect?

Can a conversion optimization company guarantee a specific rate increase? I am yet to meet a credible company that is able to guarantee specific results. The truth is, every conversion project comes with its own unique situation. However, a good conversion company should invest time with you up-front to set target goals for any planned optimization work. Keep in mind though that pre-set targets can be both achieved and missed. The point is to focus on defining success parameters for the project from the very first day.

2. What time frame should I expect the project to be completed by?

Conversion optimization is not a one week effort. There is always room for improvements. Some companies will provide the work within a month and disappear after the initial implementation. Your best bet is to find companies that offer support services in the months following initial implementation.

Continue reading 14 Smart Questions to Ask Conversion Optimization Consultants

Tags: Conversion Optimization, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization

Just a few weeks ago we published our Landing Page Optimization Book, over 120 pages filled with tips and techniques to optimize your landing pages. The book retails for $95. Since its release, the book has sold close to 500 copies.

This Monday, we released the report Breaking the Digg Code, a step-by-step instructional program to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less.

The feedback on both the book and the report has been great. But we want to get more feedback from you, the subscribers and readers so we are offering a special deal: Write a review of Breaking the Digg Code and your name will be included in a chance to win one of 5 free $95 copies of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide.

If you write a review of the Breaking the Digg Code report on your blog you will get

• A link back from our blog to your review
• A possible quote on our testimonial page along with another link
• A chance to win one out of 5 free copies of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide

To be part of this, please contact us [or email khalid at invesp dot come] to let us know that you have completed the review.

Ideas for what you might want to write about

• What did you expect from the report before reading it?
• Did you hesitate to subscribe or download the book?
• Did you find the instructional report useful?
• Did you mention the report to anyone else?
• Do you think it would be easy to follow the program?

Looking forward to reading your reviews.

Tags: DIGG, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Miscellaneous

For those eager for the next edition of my Landing Page tips for webinar attendees, wait no longer! The next site has a name that is familiar to many: Dave Ramsey.  The site sells books, finance software, and all sorts of tools to help people with budgeting and personal finances.

This is the landing page the folks at daveramsey.com sent me. This particular page is offering the top 10 featured items.

The site looks nice overall, but what I found interesting was how the first 3 items were in a single row, whereas all other items had a row to themselves and users could buy those products directly rather than clicking on the link.

Tip #1: Stay consistent with the way you feature the items.

Tip #2:  Place an “add to cart” button for each item will be more effective in increasing conversion.

The link for “more special offers” was a bit distracting and could impact the end result for customers to convert.

Tip #3: Avoid placing random links below categorized items as this may take the user to another page and distract them.

The link takes you to this page:

And it really is a great page that has all kinds of special offers in addition to a link on both top and left navigations within the page.

Dave Ramsey has inspired many. This site offers great tools for those in need of financial assistance. But in order to help them, we must give them the means to find what they need in order to convert. A bit of optimization can make a big difference.

Tags: Conversion Optimization, DaveRamsey.com, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization

It’s an exciting time here at Invesp because we’re releasing our first book today: Landing Page Optimization: The complete guide. Why should you get this book now?

• Over 120 pages in length
• Tons of tips and methods to optimize your landing page
• 249 pre orders
• Sale – 30% off promotion expiring in 3 days

The book is an excellent source for great tips and unique methods to best optimize your landing page, and overall site with over 120 pages of information. By following the guidelines outlined, you’ll be sure to see an increase in your conversion rates right away.

We begin the book by taking a deeper look at traditional marketing as compared to today’s improving online trends. The book explains the different types of conversion and the accurate methods of calculating conversion rates. It provides numerous examples and case studies to clarify the concepts and methods of conversion and landing page optimization.

Following the introduction to the conversion concepts and formulas we give an insight to our conversion framework:

• Target market – persona development
• Trust and confidence
• Engagement
• Buying stages
• FUDs
• Incentives
• Test
• Iterative Approach

Each principle is discussed in depth and described in order for the reader to visualize and apply the concepts on their own.
The book details a step by step process of how to create successful copy that converts. Years of research and expertise are combined to give proficient advice in an simplified way. Once you begin to implement the strategies discussed in this landing page guide, you will be on the fast track to increasing your online revenue.

Over 249 copies have already been distributed at our discounted price. For those of you who missed the promotion, Invesp will honor a 30% off discount for only 3 more days, so hurry and purchase your copy today!

Tags: Conversion Optimization, landing page optimization book, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization

I want to thank everyone who attended our webinar hosted by Elastic path on February 14th, 2008. At the end of the webinar we had suggested to the audience members to send in their landing pages for a quick critique. Today is one of 6 posts in which I will review and give tips on a specific landing page. The website I will be reviewing today is: Pinkmascara.

Pinkmascara.com is a unique online boutique that offers designer fashions and latest trends. I clicked on the URL that features a popular product and this is what I found

At first glance the site has an overall clean look. I can see the dress is displayed and along the right side there are several different views. The left navigation features the designers, and the bottom is displaying a number of ads or locations to click on throughout the site.

At second glance, I notice some areas that can use improvement and optimization:

I thought the placement of these features in the right panel was nicely done, but I have a few recommendations.

All the items in this area provide a great support for the shopping experience. Adding a title such as “Shopping Made Easy” will re-emphasize the concept with site visitors.

Additionally, the phone number should include some text next to it “order by phone 1.866.740.7465.” The live chat is a great feature, but of course only when it’s available! So when it is offline I don’t think it should be listed. The Free Ground Shipping, when applicable, is a incentive that should be placed near the call to action rather than to right panel. It might be a great idea to add some enticing details about the return policy for example (no obligation 30 day guarantee). Lastly, there is no information here about the privacy policy which is always a concern to visitors.

I clicked on the sizing guide listed

Now, if I read correctly the designer was T-Bags, yet it is not listed here. Size guide should correlate directly with the product. What’s the point of having it if it does not address the concern of the visitor?

Try a larger, brighter add to bag button. I would actually test with adding an add to bag button when the user clicks on the image.

The images along the bottom, although necessary as links, display images that compete with the main focal point of the page. This is after all a product page, so the focus should be on the product on not on the items below.

Although I am focusing on the landing page, I have a couple of notes to add about the navigation. Now, if I land on this page, but choose to browse, I can navigate by Designer or by Department. For someone who is not familiar with pinkmascara.com, they may initially feel bewildered by the number of designers listed. Additionally, the list is poorly organized. Although it is alphabetically ordered it can still be further grouped to ease navigation. For example, as I clicked on a specific designer I landed on shoes rather than apparel, although I wanted apparel. Or as I clicked only two items came up. So my advice for both items would be to include the number of items available by that designer and group the designers by, shoe designers and apparel designers for example.

There are a number of things pinkmascara.com does beautifully. There are some items that need optimization as well. I hope I offered helpful tips that can be implemented immediately, you can always contact us for more help too

Tags: Landing page tips techniques, landing-page-optimization, Pinkmascara
Posted in Conversion Optimization

I wanted to announce to all of you that we will be publishing our Landing Page Handbook in a few weeks. The book will retail at $95, but for all of our subscribers we are going to be offering the book for FREE if you sign up for it within the next 2 days!!!! That’s right everyone: you have Monday, and Tuesday ONLY to sign up for your FREE copy of this amazing book full of tips, techniques, and ideas.

Our Landing Page Handbook will feature:

• Conversion Optimization: defined
• The 8 principles of conversion: a closer look
• Tips and techniques on how to optimize your landing page
• A number of case studies based on conversion work we completed in the last two years

So don’t miss out because after midnight Tuesday February 26th, this book is only available for $95.

We currently estimate that the book will be published on 3/17/2008. We will email your free copy of the book upon its publication.

Get more information about the landing page optimization handbook or reserve your free copy.

Tags: landing-page-optimization
Posted in Conversion Optimization

After my initial review for e-releases and PRWeb.com landing pages, I went back for a second look at both pages…

A Second Chance: Things are not always as they seem

I looked again at eReleases.com, but this time presumed that not everyone bails out in the first few seconds after opening a page like this:

• Headline – if you get over the design and highlighting, the headline does an excellent job of clearly stating the value proposition. Not a bad thing.

• The Chart – again, once we get around its brashness, it highlights well the features of the eReleases.com service and costs versus the competition. (Although, using a term like “Competitor A” instead of an actual competitor reduces the credibility of the information)

• The logos on the right – That’s the New York Times there, not to mention USA Today and Yahoo! Along with the BBB logo in the upper right, these are major icons of trust and familiarity for a press release service.

• Below the fold - the copy is bulleted for quick scanning.

• Form – one of the shortest forms I’ve seen and this should minimize any form fear visitors may have.

• Call to Action Button - stands-out and clearly states what will happen when clicked. Very nice.

• Testimonial - perhaps a little late, it probably should go above the CTA button and above the fold. But, it’s nice to have and it does the job of improving trust in the service.

A similar second look at PRweb.com shows that, even with landing pages, beauty might be only skin deep:

• Headline – well placed and spaced, but, on the second read, I realized the headline only tells you what anyone sending a press release would already know – press releases should grab attention, build traffic/customers and boost business, it’s basic public relations. The headline would do better to highlight a more specific or unique value proposition, like “PRWeb designs your press release to take advantage of the new web ecosystem”

• Image – It’s eye-catching, but does it get across any key messages? It’s one of those incongruous compositions – “businessperson on a rodeo bull” sort of thing - but does it get across the idea of broadcasting a message to a lot of people?

• Nice testimonials – that is, if you are a speed-reader. The testimonial crawl is too fast and only the static testimonial is easily readable.

• The copy – this is the first landing page I’ve come across that converts from a short-copy to a long-copy page at a mouse click. The clickable arrows lead to bullet points. An interesting device, except that the call-to-action button sets below the fold when any bulleted section is expanded. The arrows create another annoyance by needing to be clicked once to expand and once to contract each bulleted section. If you want to open and close each bulleted section, that’s a total of eight clicks – not for me, I’m gone.

• Video - It’s not until I’m half-way through the video for a second time that I hear the announcer mention the New York Times. Why bury this important credibility element in a video that you must leave the landing page to watch?

• Call-to-Action button – even if we forgive it for sliding below the fold as we expand the copy, it looks like a leftover from Windows95. The form title says “Create Your Account Now” and the button is labeled “Register” – it’s difficult for me to understand why someone would go to all the trouble to design a beautiful site, get multiple testimonials and produce a clever video – and then use a gray button labeled “Register” for the single most important element of the page.

Conclusion?

So which one wins? What I thought was the better site might be the worse one and the one I thought worse, might be better. Is it better to have a good looking page that falls short on other elements, or an ugly page that might have more elements, but they are poorly presented?

Maybe it’s not for me to say – it should be determined by testing and the CTR numbers. But, if I had to pick a winner, the better looking site takes it because it is more likely to keep surfers on the page for longer, however, this page is still not a “winner” because a good first impression needs to be followed up with similar efforts in all other aspects of the landing page.

So why are so many landing pages ugly?!

There are a lot of points I didn’t cover (the URL’s for both pages are paragraph length) and I would really like to get your feed back on these two pages – or any others - and the points I outlined.

Tags: conversion-optimizations, landing-page-optimization, ugly-landing-pages
Posted in Conversion Optimization

Why are so many landing pages ugly? Or at least bereft of many basic graphic design principles? These were the thoughts I had recently when I opened the first of two pages in a search for press release services.

I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but the eReleases.com landing page is UGLY. I’d love to see my eye tracking path for this one – it would probably look like a plate of spaghetti. My head spun with stimuli - headline with “MSWord” style highlighting – hey, there’s a NY Times and USA Today logo – Whoa! that chart looks pretty major – etc..

eReleases.com is lucky that I fancy myself a student of the Landing Page, if not I would have run away after a couple of glances. Poor page design causes confusion and the viewer is more likely to find fault with the page.

Most of you would have spotted the major issue with the eReleases.com page by now – where’s the CALL TO ACTION? That’s sort of strike three right there, but my post would be too short so let’s call it strike one and they have unlimited strikes – they need it.

Some other strikes against the page:

• The Chart – dominates the page and, without any real design, does so to the detriment of other elements
• Nothing to draw me below the fold – my screen resolution is 1024×768, the bottom of the page lies very neatly below the “exclusive partnership” paragraph under “What is National Distribution?” I could quite easily presume that’s all there is to the page.
• What kind of question is “What is National Distribution?” - it’s redundant, national distribution is national distribution.
• Headline – interesting, but dominated by the chart and logos to the right and, when I read it, I found the awkward highlighting somewhat destabilizing to my comprehension.

I could go on and try to emulate The Maven, but I’d probably fall quite short and I want to tell you about the second page I opened – PRWeb.com.

What a difference! I’m a big fan of whitespace and I was starved for it after eReleases.com . The design is superior to eReleases.com on almost every front:

• Well-balanced elements - center justified
• The image – nicely compliments the page. The model faces the copy and the mouth of the bullhorn aligns perfectly with the headline. Good, solid graphic design.
• Headline - easy to understand, outlines the value proposition, with just enough weight and space to standout without dominating any other elements.
• Testimonials - Clearly highlighted and numerous to instill trust
• The copy - bulleted for easy scanning
• Links - to a sample PRweb news release and a nifty video that quickly reinforce the value proposition.
• The Form - fairly short to minimize form fear
• Call to Action - above-the-fold – imagine that!

I thought it would be quite easy to determine the better page. But, as I mentioned, I fancy myself a bit of a LP student so I took another look at both pages. My second impression surprised me.. but I will have to leave that to tomorrow’s blog!

Tags: conversion-optimizations, landing-page-optimization, ugly-landing-pages
Posted in Conversion Optimization

I will be holding a joint webinar with Jason Billingsley from Elastic path on different ways to increase ecommerce conversion.

I plan on sharing some of the lessons I learned from architecting ecommerce sites and landing pages for Companies such as Motorola, Levelor, United stationers and American Express.

The webinar will be held February 14th 2008 - 9am PT. Space is limited so sign up today!

Tags: Increase-Ecommerce-Conversion, landing-page-optimization, Webinar
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing