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Landing on Success

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I like to think that “The Real Deal” is appropriately titled.

Like many a blogger that came before and the many that will follow, I, more often than not, have fun shooting the proverbial shite here. Be it in my blog, in a professional setting with a prospect or established client, or shooting the breeze with friends and family outside of work, I get a charge at whatever forum is available for me to talk about what Leverage has done, can do, and its place front and center in the ever-growing internet marketing universe.

“The Real Deal” allows me to have fun in discussing these things, but fun is always secondary to the topic at hand. Take away my (occasional and admittedly goofy) insights and the primary goal is simple: relay to readers what Leverage has to offer and back up each entry with a Leverage or industry-related issue that I will sign off on without hesitation.

Or, to turn a phrase here, I have not, nor do I plan to, write a check here that my arse can’t cash.

In fact, there are many services and tools we encourage our prospects to consider that Leverage relies upon and utilizes when it comes to our marketing goals.

Here’s an easy example: for many of our clients, we incorporate the use of landing pages into their marketing strategy.  Generally, landing pages aren’t accessible through site navigation. For the most part, they bring in traffic from social ads, browser ads or long-tail searches. When the search history of a consumer or prospect shows that they are either ready to make a purchase or take the next step as it relates to our client’s operations, the consumer is then taken to a landing page.

Landing pages are designed with a singular goal: to convert. The landing page is a shortcut from wherever a user might be online to a page that can close the deal immediately. Landing pages are not only used for the B2C sale of consumer goods, they can also be used for micro-conversions that give hot leads to your sales team. For example, landing pages can provide another type of transaction: information for information. A landing page can ask for a tidbit of the prospect’s information, such as an email address, in exchange for a white paper or case study. This acts as a stepping stone of sorts for the next phase in what the client hopes is a profitable relationship with the person or organization on the other side of the monitor or tablet.

We at Leverage use landing pages for ourselves to reach prospects when they are ready to do more than just browse for internet marketing companies. Our pages prompt the prospect to give basic information (name, e-mail address and phone number) that provides us an introduction of sorts. The end goal for the page is that they request initial contact with us. Once they do, we can move the ball further down the field.

Over the years, landing pages have proven successful for Leverage. At the very least, we received inquiries from companies seriously considering making an investment in the marketing of their company or overhauling their current digital marketing model. Our clients have also reaped many benefits, from direct online sales credited solely to the placement of our pages to bringing browsers further down the path to conversion.

To me, that’s yet another real – and good – deal.

How Important Is Landing Page Optimization?

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Landing Page Heat MapIf your company relies on generating leads or selling products online, landing page optimization (LPO) is essential to your success. Depending on the size of your company, you could be losing thousands to millions of dollars a year due to something as miniscule as the text on your call to action button. Let’s take a look at some of the factors on your landing page that could boost your customer conversion rate between 20%-300%.
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5 Tips For Improving Landing Page Relevancy – MSN AdCenter Advice

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Are you frustrated by ads and keywords getting disapproved by editorial ? Do you want to make sure your campaign is firing on all cylinders as soon as it goes live? Would you like to convert more site visitors into sales? When there’s a clear connection between the information contained in your ads and keywords and the information found on your landing page , your campaigns are more likely to pass through editorial with a clean bill of health and increase conversions . The landing page is one of…(read more)

What’s In Your Basket?

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There are lots of places we can go to find advice on improving conversions for our websites. However, some of the suggestions “feel wrong” or seem counterintuitive. This is why I like to go look into other people’s research.

There’s a term used in marketing – basket recovery – that describes a somewhat counterintuitive method of grabbing at least partial contact information from your site visitor even if they don’t complete your conversion process, leaving you a little less empty-handed.

The basis of this principle is requires the insertion of an email collection field BEFORE the call to action button. For example, if you have a page that offers a link to a free trial download of software, you could just have a button that says “click here to start the download,” and hope the customer follows up with you when the free trial expires, or you can put a single form field in there requiring an email address, then the customer clicks the button to start the free download.

Of course, I can hear everyone saying “I put fake email addresses in there all the time. That won’t help.” Ok, I admit this example is simplistic – but I’m illustrating how basket recovery works at its simplest. In the real world, it’s usually a little more sophisticated. Here’s an example from a test that was run by the researchers at Marketing Experiments last year.

Control Path before Basket Recovery
Control Path before Basket Recovery

The above image illustrates a free trial offer where the customer had to fill out a 6-field form anyway in order to get the free trial. The original green button was just a link with some basic call to action text.

The Basket Recovery Process
The Basket Recovery Process

In this process, instead of the landing page only containing a link to the mid-length form that is required before the customer’s trial account can be set up, they inserted an email collection field right above the orange button. Then the second page of the process included the email address that was already provided. If the customer changes their mind after seeing the rest of the form, there’s still a chance to recover that individual as a customer later with a follow up email to find out why they didn’t complete the form, because you already have the email address.

In this particular test, the basket recovery test page had an email address conversion rate of 2.16% while the original 6-field form completion process only converted .09% of the time. That’s a 2300% increase. If you’re operating a lead-gen site, a valid email address is all you need to make a sales introduction, offer a second chance, ask if there was a technical difficulty, etc.

Keep in mind that this technique will not work for every type of conversion as it actually increases user friction by adding a form field sooner. Careful testing will be necessary before you can decide if basket recovery testing pays off for your web site, but if you already have a multiple-step conversion process, basket recovery practices might help your end conversions.