change  October 20, 2010

Elodie Bouneau, Ozone Marketing Intern

Ah, the landing page. It’s all too easy to slap one together as an afterthought to a lead generation campaign. After all, if a prospect has gone this far, you’ve probably got him in the bag, right?

Unfortunately, we online marketers often turn off landing page visitors right before they become leads – and then blame our lackluster campaign results on the offer, the list, or some other element.

How can you turn an underperforming landing page into the ultimate lead machine? Here are some guidelines:

Drive Your Prospects Towards Your Offer
Why did you build a landing page in the first place? That’s right: to convince each prospect to take one specific action. You want him to sign up for your newsletter, download a free trial, or buy your product.

To keep your prospect moving towards the goal:

• Don’t give options. If you offer your prospect the choice of buying either the standard or premium version of your product, she may mull it over for a few moments, give up, and leave your site. Instead, offer only one option per landing page.
• Make the offer easy to get. State your call to action at least two or three times throughout your page. Make a big, bright, appealing call-to-action button, and place it in highly visible locations.
• Be brief. If you’re asking prospects to provide contact information, keep the form short enough that they’ll be able to complete it before distractions arise.

Keep it Simple
According to Interactive Marketing, Inc., the largest percentage of landing page visitors leave within 8 seconds. The lesson? It doesn’t take much to turn off a website visitor.

A good offer speaks for itself. So, there’s no need to clutter a landing page with graphics and special effects. Instead, keep things simple, professional, consistent, and easy to read:

• Make sure there’s enough color contrast between your background and font.
• Use no more than two fonts per page: one for your headline and one for your body copy. Also, use boldface and italics sparingly.
• If you’re using photos and videos to engage prospects, keep them professional – and remember, less is more. 
• Keep your header, product name, and first call-to-action above the fold. Most people don’t like to scroll.

Earn Their Trust
Before your visitors pull out their credit cards, they’ll want to know they’re buying a good product from a reputable merchant. Your landing page can build trust by including:

• The logos of any security technologies you use, such as Trust-E Web, HackerSafe, or Verisign
• The logos of your big-name, well-respected partners
• Quotes from third-party reviews of your product
• Brief customer testimonials

Keep Improving
Don’t settle for “good.” Keep shooting for higher conversion rates. To do so, you’ll need to set up a tracking system. Here’s an easy way to get started:

1. Install a unique visitor tracker on your landing page. Then, to calculate your conversion rate, simply divide your total number of conversions against the total number of unique visitors for the same time period.
2.  Use this data to gauge the effectiveness of the improvements you’re making on the landing page.
3. When you’re ready to dive into hardcore testing, try the amazing Google Website Optimizer. The multivariate testing feature lets you test different variables repeatedly so you can identify which ones are working best. Even small tweaks can have a noticeable effect on your results. Where to begin testing? Conversion Rate Experts has written an in-depth guide to using Google Website Optimizer.

Never stop looking for ways to clarify your content, simplify your design, and earn your prospects’ trust as you lure them towards your offer. Your conversion rates will improve – and your bottom line will be sure to follow.

The Creative Director's Perspective

Jon Anderson, Creative Director

In the early days of my career, I stuck to my silo. Creative was my only domain, and the Sales team was a distant afterthought – as distant as the far side of Pluto. After all, I was an Art Director fresh out of design school, and I was completely focused on conjuring up brilliant concepts, winning awards, and getting a job.

As the years wore on, I heard from Strategists and CMOs about their business strategy and realized there was a huge gap between Sales and Marketing. Creative would often present to a room full of executives, and Sales would consistently struggle with creative direction.

It felt as if Sales and Marketing were on different planets.

This is a struggle as old as advertising itself – one that challenges even the best of companies. It trickles all the way down to the creative process. By the time the Creative team presents their work, the Sales team typically has little connection to it. On the other extreme, when Sales has too much influence in the creative process, the result is typically an over-the-top, hard-sell message featuring concepts that would be best served on a toilet paper roll.

The good news is that there's a fairly straightforward way to include the Sales team in the creative process while ensuring the creative product will be sophisticated and savvy. Just follow these steps.

#1 Identify Sales’ pain points
Hold a meeting to find out what Sales’ biggest challenges are and how Marketing might be able to help address them. Now, there won’t necessarily be a Marketing solution to every Sales challenge, but just listening and brainstorming can be amazingly helpful. For example, if Sales is receiving too many unqualified leads, perhaps Marketing can build a better pre-qualification tool into the company’s landing pages.

#2 Get the Creative team involved
The Creative team should spend some time brainstorming and present some ideas on how to address Sales' issues. The results can be surprising: a microsite that has a fun ROI calculator, a Facebook campaign that promotes a new Sales initiative, or a mailer to hot C-level prospects.

#3 Include Sales’ solvable issues in the Creative Brief
This is huge. Assuming there’s a good creative brief for all projects (there should be!), be sure to include Sales’ pain points. Make sure the Sales team signs off on the brief. This will not only give the Creative team insight into Sales’ issues, but will also influence the final creative product.

#4 Refer to Sales’ pain points during the creative presentation
When the Creative team presents their work, be sure to explain how it addresses Sales’ specific issues outlined in the brief, and how it might provide more qualified leads. Now, instead of Sales feeling like a third wheel, they’ll realize they have a stake in the game.

No matter what you do, Marketing and Creative won't solve all of Sales’ problems. But you can make an enormous difference by listening and being inclusive. And once you have a couple of successful campaigns under your belt, you may find that your whole relationship with Sales has changed – for the better.

Sean Shoffstall, Director of Product Marketing

I believe the answer to this question is obvious – and yet you’ll hear a wide range of opinions depending on who you ask. This is a hot topic within the Marketing Communications Group on LinkedIn, with people all over the world chiming in. Of course, the answer ultimately depends on your marketing needs.

I think a more useful question to ask is, “How can you integrate print into your marketing mix?” Print has reinvented itself to remain a viable marketing tactic in the digital age. It’s just too bad more marketers don’t realize this.

Today, as part of an overall marketing strategy, you can deliver personalized direct mail messages to your customers and give them an experience similar to a personalized email message. If you marry the digital piece with Personal URLs (PURLs), driving recipients to personalized landing pages, they can receive relevant offers and information, from multiple channels, in a real-time manner.

Like email, digital direct mail relies on knowing your customer segments. In either medium, if you send out the same generalized message to a 20-something college student and a 70-year-old retiree, both will probably judge your message as irrelevant and ignore it. So, you must know your segments and send them targeted messages. Print also gives you an opportunity to provide someone with a true tactile experience. This can be anything from a complex, pop-up-book style message (see, even print has pop-ups) to a C-level mailer printed on fine linen paper.

Our other print friends, the magazine ads and bus stops, needn’t worry about becoming irrelevant. They can be part of the mix too. With QR Codes (2d bar codes) and digital printing, we can now drive and track responses from specific display placements. Working with the right publishers, you can also conduct A/B/n testing with your offline ads and start seeing results in your online analytics program the day a campaign drops. The same testing rigor applies online and offline: always test your creative, placement, and copy to drive higher response rates.

Lastly, remember that in today’s online/offline world, it’s all about integrated marketing. We incorporate social media with our email campaigns, use telemarketing to follow up on trade show leads, and send an up-sell email after someone purchases from a store. Print can be a part of the introductory messaging, the follow-up response, or anything in-between.

MINI (maker of the Cooper, not the mouse) does a great job of integrating the follow-up experience with email and direct mail. After you purchase your new sport go-kart, MINI continues the experience by sending you a personalized print media kit that keeps you involved with their brand. Shortly after, they start email campaigns that mirror the dynamics and quirkiness of the printed kit and keep that brand experience going.

So is print viable? Most definitely – and with a digital marketer’s touch, it can be more effective than ever and give you greater insight through detailed tracking. So, roll the presses!