Landing Pages - Marketing's Indispensable Tool. 2/23/15 Presentation - Boston Marketing Technology Group
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Landing Pages Primer - reviewing the fundamentals. What are landing pages, why they are important, 3 basic landing page categories (click through, lead generation and personalized), the types of campaigns that yield consistent results and 2 landing page examples critiqued.
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Landing Pages - Marketing's Indispensable Tool. 2/23/15 Presentation - Boston Marketing Technology Group
- 1. Dennis Kelly, CEO www.boingnet.com www.boingnet.com/blog @boingnet Landing Pages: Marketing’s Indispensable Tool
- 2. Today’s Talk Landing Pages – What are they and why are they important? Landing Page 101 – The Fundamentals Landing Page Review - Audience Critique! Q&A
- 3. What is a Landing Page? Web Page Designed to Convert Clear & Consistent Headline & Subhead Single Call To Action “Message Match”
- 4. Why use them? Landing Pages Convert Speed & Cost Measurable “Liquid” vs. “Locked Down” The Numbers Don’t Lie
- 5. What are they used for? Selling – ecommerce Lead Generation Lead Nurturing Events Promotions/Sales Product/Service Launches
- 6. 3 Types of Landing Pages Click-Through LP Often used in e- commerce Designed to facilitate click Single & easy to find CTA
- 7. 3 Types of Landing Pages Lead Generation Most common B2B Landing Page Highlighted Form Offer of Value
- 8. 3 Types of Landing Pages Personalized pURL Profile driven content Can be form or click-through based
- 9. Your Home Page Isn’t a Landing Page! Multiple Messages 7 Calls to Action Designed to help you navigate Designed for SEO
- 10. Home Pages vs. Landing Pages Single CTA vs. Many CTA’s Designed to Convert vs. designed for SEO
- 11. Landing Pages Channels Online SEM/PPC Display Ads Social Email Marketing Offline Direct Mail TV/Radio/Print Ads
- 12. Online Channels - Lead Generation
- 13. Email Marketing - Selling & Nurturing
- 14. Offline Marketing - Direct Mail
- 15. Most Important Channel - Mobile 20-50% of Landing Page Traffic Mobile Smartphone & Tablets Design for mobile - 300% higher conversion from mobile users
- 16. The New Mobile - Responsive Design Build Once – run anywhere One set of code Automatically resizes for desktop, tablet & smartphone
- 17. Landing Page Reviews 2 landing pages designed by customers
- 18. Landing Page Review Time! 12 Nav Links 2 Headlines, 2 CTA’s Fighting for Attention
- 19. DICOER – Tech product insurance
- 20. DICOER – After
- 21. A Quick Word on Boingnet
- 22. Thank You! Time for Q&A 60 Day Free Trial boingnet.com/freetrial : 781.421.6291 : dennis@boingnet.com : @boingnet www.boingnet.com
- 23. A Quick Word on 3 URL types Unfriendly! Friendly URL Personal URL or pURL
- 24. Personalization & Relevancy 100%-300% higher conversion vs. control (DMA) Profile Driven Content
- 25. Landing Pages 101 Home Pages aren’t Landing Pages Landing Page Channels & Examples
- 26. Message Match - Super Bowl Ad
- 27. Message Match - Quicksilver Card?
- 28. Thank You Pages - Nice & Smart Good Manners! 2nd CTA’s Social Newsletter Suggested Content
- 29. EduGuide – Click-through LP Simple, Friendly URL No Nav or CTA Distractions Clear Call to Action Redesign?
- 30. Curriculum Associates – Click Thru with Geo Personalization Friendly URL Light-box pop up Simple, clear & helpful Strong Headline Nice CTA button! Kill or push down the Footer content
Editor's Notes
- Landing pages are web pages designed with a single purpose - conversion! By focusing their intent on exactly their goals, landing pages deliver better results than “normal” web pages. 1.) All Content and all Navigation not needed to achieve the conversion is stripped away – images, text, linkes, buttons, etc. 2.) The Headline of the page is clear, simple and to the point. If a sub head is used, it builds upon the headline with simple, clear language describing the product/service or offer. 2.) There is a SINGLE call to action on a landing page. By limiting the choices of actions that a user can take, you are purposely driving them to accomplish the one task you’ve set out to do – CONVERT! That call to action is usually the focal point of the design of the page – the layout, use of “whitespace”, the coloring choices should all be driving the eyes to focus on the Call To Action (CTA for jargon). The CTA will often be expressed in a button that requires the user to click. 3.) The primary messaging of a good landing page will match that of the messaging that DROVE THE USER TO THE PAGE. It doesn’t matter if the user got to the page via a Google search, an email message or an offline advertisement. The messaging needs to be consistent or you will lose a high % of your potential targets when they arrive at the page. We call this “message match” & we’ll dig in on this shortly.
- Why use landing pages? Because they work!! Conversion Statistics – The main reason why marketers use landing pages is that they work better than non landing pages at moving campaign targets through a marketing or sales “funnel”. We’ve figured out that we can take buyers step by step through a buyer “journey” while using landing pages as their guides. Statistics for landing page conversion vary dramatically by industry & campaign, but it is not uncommon to see conversion rates rise by between 10% and 300% when landing pages are designed and used properly. There are several common sense reasons why landing pages work so well, we’ll talk about several of them here today. Speed & Cost – These are two of our favorite words. Landing Pages, using today’s marketing platforms, are quick to build, change, take down. Just like marketing campaigns. No need to work through IT – marketers can build pages quickly and inexpensively with today's technology. Measurable – because landing pages can be built quickly, easily & inexpensively, marketers can deploy unique landing pages for each & every campaign they run, These pages are measured individually, giving incredible detail about the performance of each channel in each campaign. When traffic is sent to the primary website of a brand in a campaign, it gets mixed in with all of the other traffic, losing the measurement & ROI impact that marketers today crave.
- We’ve talked about what Landing Pages are, why they are used, and the primary types of landing pages. So, what would I use them for? While the history of landing pages is rooted in online marketing, today they’ve expanded to be used as the focal point of online, offline and multichannel campaigns. Examples for each Selling via ecommerce – Landing pages are quite often used to help “close the deal” in e-commerce businesses. These pages are will be where someone ends up when they click on an ad for a product. The purpose of these pages is to give enough information to get someone to click the “Buy” Button. Lead Generation – Probably the most common use of landing pages – these campaigns have messages that go out across online & offline media that are designed to drive people to pages that are built to capture information in forms. The example on this page is a typical lead generation landing page. Lead Nurturing – You’ve already got some information about a prospect that has indicated some level of interest in your product or service. Your goal is to move that client to the next step in the process – set up a call, attend a presentation, visit a store, watch a video of how the product works. Lead nurturing is a great use for landing pages – in exchange for something of value – the prospect with often give up a little more information about themselves, giving the marketing & sales team more to work with. Events – these are often “top of the funnel” lead generation activities – landing pages are almost always designed to gather information for people to register for events. In fact, the page you click on to attend this event was a landing page. The events don’t have to be online. They can be grand openings, sales, fundraisers or any other type of offline event as well. Promotions or sales – want to line up prospects for your sales team? Get people signed up to get access to a promotion or a sale. By offering the access to the promotion, you are giving them great value in return for their contact information, product preferences & more.
- Click-through landing pages are designed to facilitate a single objective - to click on the primary call to action (CTA) to progress to the next step in your sales funnel. Typically used for product based ecommerce, click-through landing pages enhance the upstream ad message (paid search, email or banner ad) and explain the features and benefits of the item being offered. Important characteristics of a successful click-through landing page are: focus, message clarity, on-brand design integration and a targeted value proposition. This is a pretty cool click-through landing page designs for an iPad app development company. This has a strong visual of what the product is, and a clearly indentified CTA to get a person to click through to the Apple App Store to buy the app.
- Lead Generation Landing Pages are what many people think of when they think “Landing Page”. These are pages designed to capture information from people who are directed to the page so that they can marketed to or sold to later. The 2 things that clearly identify a Lead Generation landing page are: 1.) They always include a form to be filled out that is the highlight of the visual presentation, and the best pages have large, clearly defined CTA buttons like this one. 2.) There is something offered of value in exchange for the form being filled out. Free Consultation as you see here. Registration for a webinar. A free quotation. A case study, whitepaper or e-book. Ability to watch an instructional video. The key is to know the target audience and to develop an offer that will be valued by the audience.
- Personalized Landing Pages are the final primary category of landing pages. Personalized landing pages typically are the highest converting of all landing page campaigns, as they take information that is already known about the campaign targets, and use that information to help create an experience that is highly relevant to each person in a campaign. By focusing the content experience so deeply, the marketer takes on the role of the trusted advisor to the target, providing them with exactly the information they need to make a good decision. In this case, the marketer has used information about the buyer’s purchase history and credit score to devise a personalized cash back offer for a car that has also been selected for them. As you can see, the target is greeted by name, and more importantly, the form is pre-filled – giving the user the option of just clicking the button to get started on their “buyer journey” Personalized landing pages are most often used in email marketing and direct mail channels, and are now starting to show up in text messaging based campaigns in the B2C market. The URL’s of Personalized Landing Pages should be both personalized and friendly. By using pURL’s, marketers are able to track the responses down to the individual level! This fine grained approach extends the value of Landing Pages even further, by targeting and monitoring the campaign at a one to one basis.
- The home page is a wonderful portal to many things, and rightly has huge time and effort put into it to ensure it accomplishes its many tasks. What the above example points out is that it just can’t keep up with marketing. Marketing campaigns come and go quickly – they are, by definition, limited time efforts. Home pages really struggle with message match – the ability of a marketing effort (in this case, web page) to line up with the messaging that originated the viewing of the page. Marketers have learned that by building landing pages and microsites with the sole purpose of acknowledging and building upon the messaging that prompted the consumer to act, conversion rates skyrocket.
- The most dramatic improvement a marketing team can create in their conversion rates is when the home page is replaced with a well designed landing page as the starting point for campaign targets to land on. The example here is a real life example of a customer who was sending email marketing messages with links to their home page, which was designed to do many, many things. The home page was converting less than 1% of their traffic into buyers of their ecommerce products. The landing page, within 3 months of creation & adjustment, started converting at over 8.5%. The increase in conversion here represents an improvement of over 1000%. While we can’t promise this level of improvement for all landing pages, they will definitely do a better job than your home page in conversion rate comparisons. Finally, home pages just can’t possibly contend with the concept of message match. As we discussed, message match an important part of why pages convert, or whether they lose traffic.
- Landing Pages are Multi-channel by definition – Landing pages are destinations that targets arrive at after responding to some sort of a search, advertisement, link, promotion or some other prompt. Typically marketers are driving targets to landing pages through a campaign or several campaigns using various channels. The better those channels are coordinated, the better off the performance. The earliest and deepest use of Landing Pages has been with online channels like search engine marketing, Pay Per Click marketing like Google AdWords, Online display ads of various types and social marketing. These channels lend themselves to a high degree of measurement, testing & analysis, and so the adoption of landing pages makes a lot of sense.
- As everyone knows, mobile usage is on a massive growth curve Smartphone & Tablets are being used more & more for all purposes When landing pages are designed for mobile – they convert mobile traffic at a much higher rate than non mobile. Think about your own experiences, if you have to zoom, scroll around, pinch and do a lot of extra work, you are much more likely to click out & keep moving The answer for the past few years has been to build mobile designed sites & pages, or build apps designed to use the screen properly. You’ve probably seen a URL like “m.boingnet.com” or similar URL’s. These are completely separate pages & sites, requiring double the time, money & effort to not only build, but maintain. By raising the costs to play in mobile, usually only large projects (that take a lot of time) are allocated, leaving marketers with their fast moving deadlines & tight budgets out in the dark. But in the past year, a new answer has come around:
- Next up is Dicoer with a Lead Generation Landing Page This page has some good strengths. The URL is pretty simple – while I’m not a huge fan of the “?/refreshed” in the URL, it isn’t overly disruptive. They Headline & Sub Headline are very strong. Visually, your eyes are drawn to the value proposition “Protect your school’s mobile device investment!” and the description “Insurance specifically designed for school iPads, tablets & laptops”. The main concern with this page is that it is too long and there are too many non topic navigation choices to make in the header & footer. I’m guessing this Landing Page was built in WordPress. Wordpress is a wonderful product for websites, but by default it creates pages with standard header & footer navigation – all of which distracts & potentially reroutes your traffic from your one & only goal – getting them to fill out the form. 2 other thoughts – the form is asking for a lot of information. We advise clients to really scrub their form hard & determine only the exact fields that MUST be asked for in this step of the relationship. Research shows that the fewer the fields that need to be filled out, the better the conversion rate. People are lazy, and can get intimidated by big forms. Make it easy on them if you can. Second, the CTA button is pretty small and doesn’t “Pop” off the page. We’d recommend making the button bigger and bolder.
- Here’s what the page looks like with the top & bottom navigation stripped out, the spacing pulled in a little bit and the CTA button emphasized. The HTML of this page was pretty standard, so I was able to use some Boingnet tools to “suck it in” to our editor so I could make some simple changes. I think this takes an already strong page and maximizes your chance for conversion.
- The URL choice for your landing page is an often overlook, yet really important part of the equation. The way that you structure your URL sends a signal to your campaign targets, as well as the search engines of the world, what the page is all about. The best landing page URL’s are written in plain language, so that a person can type it into a browser without too much difficulty. It also typically contains the most important keyword for the page. The keyword should be related to the primary topic of the page. Since landing pages are supposed to be stripped down, simplified versions of web pages, this is usually not that hard to figure out. Lets take a look at the 3 URL types. 1.) Unfriendly URL’s – we’ve all seen these seemingly random collections of letters, numbers and symbols that tend to go on and on. There are many reasons not to use these types of URLs. 1 – they don’t tell you, or the crawlers constantly indexing the web, what the page is all about. With no descriptive words, both people and search engines tend to ignore them. Marketers can’t use them in a campaign – imagine a radio spot trying to direct people to these URL’s! The voice talent would need to be one those fast talkers who through in all the legal jargon at the end of radio ads. You can’t print them on anything. While you can embed them in images & buttons online so that people don’t know what they are clicking on, people certainly don’t refer to them – “Hey Jim, check out this cool offer” won’t happen with a 120 character URL. Don’t use these. They can only hurt your cause. 2.) Friendly URL’s As you can imagine, Friendly URL’s are the opposite of Unfriendly URL’s. Friendly URL’s are short, to the point, and describe what the page is all about. As a marketer, you can feel comfortable that both humans and search engines can understand what the primary topic of the page is, just by using the keywords properly. Marketers can use these URL’s in all sorts of online or offline campaigns without concern, and studies have shown that people are far more likely to share friendly URL’s on email, on social media and through offline means. Tying the URL to the campaign name is a common and great strategy – keeping the consistency of the brand and the campaign very clear to everyone. In this case, it’s pretty easy to figure out that the page is a part of a Cambridge University English campaign. It exists outside of the primary domain of Cambridge University (it happens to be http://www.cam.ac.uk/), but it is probably more recognizable to the campaign targets by just saying “Cambridge English .org” 3.) The third primary URL type for landing pages are Personal URL’s or pURL’s. These URL’s indicate that the page and the content of the page are designed for a specific person. These URL’s are designed to be used in targeted, direct marketing campaigns where you would like to personalize the content of the landing page based on profile data that you’ve collected about your targets. pULR’s should also be friendly, as they are quite often used in offline campaigns in targeted direct mail pieces, as well as in email and online campaigns. In this case, Watson’s Candy has designed a page for Megan Roth. Megan can figure out that the page is her’s and her’s alone pretty easily.
- A quick word on Personalization & Relevancy Personalized Marketing is a hot phrase in marketing currently, for good reason. When presented with pURL’s and profile driven content & CTA’s, the DMA reports that conversions have increased between 100-300% over control pages with generic information. Clearly, the ability of a brand to connect with its targets with personalized recommendations & content is the way to go. Until the past few years, it has been a very expensive, difficult thing to do. There are now marketing platforms in market that can help you crank out landing pages that can define their content based on profiles gathered or purchased by the brand. This personalization is often used in loyalty campaigns, as the example here shows a birthday reward for a woman named Jodi as a part of the Blizzard anniversary campaign. In exchange for gathering the email address of Jodi, she gets a coupon to print out for her blizzard. This was a direct mail post card based campaign designed to help DQ build their email address. Over 18% of the post card recipients responded online and gave out their email address. With typical direct mail campaign results running in the 1-2% range, you can see how providing personalization & profile driven content can make a huge difference.
- We’re going to roll through an example of a campaign that did not utilized message match or landing pages, so you can see the result. Picture this- a guy like me is sitting on my couch watching the Super Bowl. If you remember, this years game was a dud (unless you are from Seattle). So, like most folks, I’m zeroing in on the commercials. In order to run a commercial, brands are spending at least $1 million, if not several more to develop & run ads. It’s the biggest media event of the year, and I’ve got my iPad on my lap ready to take a look at some products. (click) Up pops Samuel L Jackson on my TV. He starts with a calm demeanor telling me all the things that this card is not. He’s hitting on all of my frustration points (rotating reward categories, sign up for rewards each quarter & more). Click Now Sam is getting excited, and so am I. He tells me that this card has no games, no messing around, this is the DO I LOOK LIKE I’M JOKING AROUND HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD CARD!! I’m ready to go. Sam is ready to go for the close. Click Finally, the commercial is ending, and I’m ready for more. Sam is giving me this look like I’d better get off my couch and get this card. Since I have a beer in my hand, I do the next best thing and grab my iPad. What should I do? Sam didn’t tell me where to go! The imagery in the background just repeats what I hear from Sam – “What’s in Your Wallet” – the Capital One tagline. I do next what most people will do when they see something of interest from an offline channel – they run to Google & type in Capital One. (click)
- After getting through the competitive maze that is a Google search result page, with offers bombarding me from Chase, American Express & others, I finally arrive at the Capital One Home page. This is what I see. Can you see the problem? Despite offering 19 different places on the home page to connect with consumers, there is no mention of the Quicksilver card. After spending a robust 3 seconds scanning the page and not seeing anything related to the commercial he watched (and they spent over $1 million running), I’m off, distracted by Puppy Love and Beer, or perhaps a truck commercial (truck makers don’t target guys watching football, do they?). What went wrong with this campaign experience? Let us count the ways (click) 1.) There’s no mention of the capital one quicksilver card, and no image of Samuel L Jackson. Visually, after my 3 second scan, I’m on to the next thing. 2.) Lets say I was really interested in digging in. Where would I start? There are no fewer than 19 different actions that I can take on this page. What are the odds of me finding the action to learn more about the Quicksilver Cash Back Card? The primary image is about bonus miles with a picture of a hut on a beach. My eyes are drawn to the Account Sign In. We can go on & on here. The bottom line is clear. Your home page is not a landing page. Start building landing pages for all of your campaigns, you’ll see better results.
- EduGuide has sent in a well developed Click-through landing page. The clearly defined, single goal here is to get people to schedule meetings. The URL is simple and descriptive – we all know what this page is about. There’s no unnecessary navigation, links, calls to action. Just a subtle phone number (having leads call is always a good thing) and a tiny home button on the far right. Finally, the simplicity of the page makes is clear what the call to action is – Schedule a Partner Meeting While the tone of the coloring, fonts & imagery is pretty subdued, I’m guessing that’s‘ what the intent was. It might be interesting to run a test with some bolder fonts & perhaps some images of happy people meeting in a professional environment. The page can use some help with the design at the bottom in the CTA area. The grey box serves to outline the visually space that could & should be used by the page to get people to take the desired action. The fact that there’s so much empty space, and not aligned vertically, makes it feel as though there are two different things going on. While I couldn’t edit this page, I envision the pictures of the team made larger and aligned with the content on the left. I think the blue telephone button is distracting, since I tried to click on it to no avail. I’d ditch that button, but use that nice color on enlarged buttons that say “pick date & time”, as these are ultimately the buttons that the page is trying to drive you to. I think with some slight variations, this page could increase its conversion rate signficantly.
- Curriculum Associates has developed a really nice Click Through Landing Page that incorporates some basic personalization around the user’s geography. As you can see here, when the page is first visited, a “lightbox” pops up saying “Welcome, for a better website experience please confirm you are in and the default is MA. This is an interesting technique that uses some internet technology to make a rough approximation of the user’s location before showing the page’s content. The user has the option of changing states, in case the geo detection is off or if they are browsing while in a different geography than where they might be buying for. You’ll notice that the “pop up” has taken over the screen, eliminating the ability to do anything else, yet showing the user in the background that by taking a simple action they can get to the main landing page. These lightboxes are becoming more & more popular. In some uses, they can be overly intrusive, causing frustration on the part of the user. I like this use, as Curriculum Associates is clearly defining something of value in exchange for a simple click. I’m happy when a company is able to quickly help me locate the most pertinent products & content, it feels like great customer service to me. The URL is nice & friendly, written in plain English with easily identifiable keywords. I suspect the page was designed with the search phrase “Ready Sample Lesson” in mind. The last element of the URL –natl.aspx is not friendly. It is a residue of the software used to generate the page (Microsoft’s .NET platform). But, in the grand scheme it doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the URL, so I’d give the URL a good grade. After we click through the light box we come to the main CTLP. You can see that the company has taken the geo information and inserted the state into the headline. I suspect that buyer’s of this product identify themselves by state specific education mandates, so this seems to make a lot of sense to make the state a big part of the headline. The Sub Head is a logical next step. There are some small social distractions over to the right side. I would probably hold these off until the buyer reaches the Thank You Page. The page uses “white space” well, which draws the eyes to the colorful images of the product and the large, strong CTA button. The primary content of the page here is really well thought out & designed properly. My primary critique of the page you can all probably guess by now, which is to get rid of the footer, or at least push it down “below the fold” (design jargon for content that appears only after you scroll down). As it stands now, the stark black with white text links really compete with the intention & purpose of the page. It probably isn’t accomplishing anything and is just a standard part of the way their system generates pages.