As it relates to marketing automation, a landing page is a web page that has two functions: to convert a lead and to serve up information. So we should start there. Converting a lead means to take a prospect (or “lead”) and convert them into a contact or an opportunity.
Across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. – Search Engine Land
The way a landing page converts a lead is usually by a form. It is typically reached through clicking a link or advertisement. It is a key component of any marketing campaign, and exists as a way to measure campaign traffic.
The most valuable thing you can get from a landing page is a person’s email address. In exchange for that, you can offer all sorts of things like:
Coupons
Downloadable content
Free trials
Access to a cool video
What should it look like?
A landing page should be uncluttered. Visitors typically only spend about 5 seconds interpreting what is needed from these types of pages. The call to action should be clear. For example, “Submit your name and email address for a 50% off coupon!”
If within 3 seconds, the visitor can’t assimilate how the page will benefit them in any way then they won’t stay. – True Conversion
It’s common for landing pages to exist on their own, without navigation to the main website or menu. The page should look like it is a part of your website (same color scheme, logo, etc), but only have one option: to collect the visitor’s information.
With the right software, you can build trackable landing pages into your marketing campaigns in no time.
This article was posted as a Guest Blog Post by our affiliates at Trumpia.
Google is now reporting that 42 percent of B2B buyers are starting their research process on their phones. This number will only continue to rise as the B2B buyers increase with Millennial professionals who are well-versed in mobile technology.
Websites that aren’t optimized for mobile are seeing a downward ranking on Google (who knows full well that their users are often on devices with smaller screens). Users that land on pages poorly designed for their device are likely to back out and go somewhere else. No one wants to pinch and scroll just to read the marketing message or try to click in tiny links to navigate a page. Instead, companies need to use optimized web site designs so that their pages fit on any screen. Optimized pages load quickly and are set up differently to fit on smaller screens.
1. Design Responsive Emails
Along with your website, your emails are going to be likely viewed on mobile devices as well. In order to have easily readable emails, you will want to utilize responsive designs that will adapt to the screen size they are viewed on. Keep your subject line brief, preferably 3-5 words so that it won’t be cut off by the device. Limit your graphics and compress them to a small size so that you won’t even add a second to the email load time.
2. Build an App
Apps are frequently used by mobile users. Many businesses are finding that an app specific to their brand products or services can help increase retention with users. Apps can help draw back customers by managing rewards programs, streamlining the order process, enhancing the purchase experience and more. In order to create an app that really adds benefit to your customers, you will want to identify a very specific type of customer or lead and then focus on services that will directly address a business pain or marketing strategy for that type of customer. Don’t make your apps too broad or they will cease to be of any real value to anyone.
3. Utilize Established App Platforms
When you realize that mobile marketing is important to snagging a major part of your audience, then you will also realize that many apps are already getting a lot of attention. Use popular apps, like Facebook and LinkedIn, to address an audience that loves to browse content. Pinterest and Instagram appeal to leads that love looking at visual inspiration. Make sure you keep your profile updated with valuable content and fill out all details (especially contact information), so your viewers don’t have to search to find you later.
4. Create Optimized Landing Pages
If you’ve already optimized your website and email campaigns, then you will want to start creating optimized landing pages. These are going to be different than your typical landing page, because they will be designed to fast action and streamlined CTAs. Keep your pages short, sweet and visually straightforward. Remember that keeping information “above the fold” (before the user has to scroll further down on the screen to see more) is important for getting your message across immediately.
5. Trim Your Content
All of this optimizing for smaller screens is going to mean that you need to write content that is concise. While an article can be a longer form of content, your web pages, landing pages and emails all need to be to the point. SMS is a great way to deliver snappy content directly to a user’s device. It is especially important to keep your headlines short, as well as subject lines and headers that break up your content.
6. Foster Sharability
There are several things you can do to increase sharing and engagement from your B2B audience:
Don’t focus on your brand — focus on what your audience needs and wants
Post about industry important topics, trends, tips and stories that are not product- or service-related
Utilize emotion to drive importance — users that feel empowered, sad, scared, enraged or inspired are more likely to share the content they identify with
Use images to intrigue readers to stop scrolling and click on your content — images throughout the text will also keep your users eyes moving
7. Streamline Your Funnel
Finally, make sure you are very careful to create a sales funnel that does not have rabbit trails for your leads. Mobile users are making decisions quickly, while they are on the go, taking a short break or waiting on something. Keep your CTA clear and singularly focused so they are not distracted before getting to a decision point.
What’s Next?
How do you ensure that your customer is getting the best mobile experience possible when interacting with your brand? Make sure to share them with us in the comments below. I would love to read them.
Author Biography
Sophorn Chhay is the marketing guy at Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that allows users to customize their one-to-one marketing efforts by interconnecting and optimizing all digital platforms. As an innovator in two-way SMS/MMS marketing, Trumpia’s mission is to empower brands and public figures with interactive access to their audiences, reaching targeted affinity groups in a personal way. Trumpia delivers world-class content such as video, ticketing, polling, products sales, contests and giveaways.
Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.
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Many new website owners shudder at the thought of doing landing page testing – particularly when a website has just been redesigned or newly launched. A few months after a new website is live, many site owners are sitting back and enjoying a few web-hassle-free months. Unfortunately, it might be in a business owner’s best interest to jump right back on the web accessibility horse, even when a new site or redesign is only a few months old.
Landing Page Testing: We’re Sorry
Because landing page testing often seems unnecessary or too complicated, many business owners gloss over it and continue worrying about lead gen strategies. For many businesses, this can be a bad move – particularly when the website serves as a primary storefront for the brand.
It’s a smart idea to not only set a newly designed website up with Google Analytics or comparable marketing automation tools, but to begin immediately making observations about traffic data. Some questions business owners should be asking include:
Were visitors more interactive with our old site?
Is our bounce rate increasing?
Are users taking the new conversion actions we’ve set up on the site?
Do users find the navigation helpful?
What, if anything, should we include in future plans to make the website easier to use?
The answers to these questions will often determine whether a business owner should begin planning landing page testing right away.
How Landing Page Testing Can Make the Difference
Many business owners assume that building a new website will automatically yield better navigation, a more pleasing look and therefore higher conversion rates. Many new websites don’t split-test an older look against a new look, so it’s difficult to get an idea of how user-friendly visitors find a new website compared to an older version.
In a perfect world, business owners would make former elements of a website such as buy buttons, forms and login links as easy to find on a new website, but it doesn’t always work that way. The ability to set up testing before a website would be great, but not all business owners will do this. One alternative is to create a landing page that looks like the previous design of the site. This page could serve as a gateway to the new design. Business owners could execute landing page testing to gauge the effectiveness of the new page compared with simply sending visitors to the new site.
Marketing automation can give business owners a deeper insight into how landing page testing and new designs affect lead generation. Lead Liaison’s visitor tracking capabilities go much deeper than Google Analytics or heat maps. To find out more, visit www.leadliaison.com.
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Conversion optimization is the key to continually improving landing pages. Your landing pages have only one purpose – driving sales. Regardless of whether your landers collect email information, pop up a chat box, inform people about your services or simply brand your product – or all of these things – landing pages are there to sell you and what you have to offer. For some small businesses, landing pages are so poorly optimized that a potential sale is dead in the water less than 30 seconds after a new customer hits landing pages.
Conversion Optimization and Landing Pages
One of the biggest problems with conversion-optimized landing pages – and web design in general – is that the design expectations of the business owner don’t fit what customers need to see. Many business owners don’t make an aesthetic distinction between what their personal website and business website should look like. The result is two-fold:
The landing page doesn’t meet the needs of the consumer. Meaning the look, general appeal or feel of the site are a turn-off to the user. This can happen when the business owner goes for a site that matches their own preferences and aesthetic rather than meeting the needs of his/her target audience.
The landing page doesn’t meet the customer’s needs for conversion optimization. This can mean several things, including lack of a clear path to leave an email, no contact information for the business, sales copy that isn’t compelling or missing listings of key product features.
Don’t Just Use Your Imagination
When it comes to conversion optimization, let the data speak for you. Google Analytics is one way to get an idea of how users are moving through your website. Marketing automation like Lead Liaison can give you a fuller picture by identifying web actions with a particular user or company. This sort of deep analysis and business intelligence can help you ensure your conversion optimization is timely, cost-effective and enhances your website.
Business owners should also remember that multiple pages on a site have multi-functional purposes. Running an Adwords campaign that sends people to a business index page isn’t always the best way to go – for starters, index pages often aren’t keyword or service themed and using a .com index page as an Adwords destination URL can decrease your quality score. This can drive up the costs of your advertising and CPA when using Adwords.
Instead, create multiple pages that speak to all your services, then practice good conversion optimization on those pages over time as data comes in. In this way, you can ensure your customers get what they need and your business keeps closing sales.
For more information on how a well-placed marketing automation platform can inform your conversion optimization efforts, check out Lead Liaison today!
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Marketing automation isn’t just about lead management – well it is, but it’s also about finding out how to get those leads into your funnel and keep them there. One of the most critical and overlooked metrics related to lead management is your individual pages’ bounce rates.
We’ve talked about bounce rates before. Yes, you need to lower them. Yes, you need to be able to see that clients are staying engaged and your site design and layout aren’t prohibitive to that. However, there are some things you could be doing with your landing pages that are prohibitive, and you don’t even know about them. Today we’ll be focusing in on one aspect of a landing page that plenty of advertisers aren’t really thinking about when it comes to their own sites. Let’s show you how to optimize landing page content and sliders in this article.
The Landing Page Slider
A slider is one of those slideshow-type deals on your landing page that allows customers to click through a series of side-scrolling images. Some sliders change automatically without the user needing to engage. Yahoo News has one:
For a news site, the slider is a great idea. Different content on the site is highlighted and the user has the ability to click to a news story that catches their individual interests.
These days, business websites that sell products and services also feature the slider. If your company sells retail products – much like a news site – it makes sense to utilize a slider. You can use the images to let customers know about special promotions, featured products or just to generate interest in a particular product category.
Sliders for Service Websites
Consulting and service oriented websites don’t have it so easy. If your site was designed by a company that isn’t concerned with branding you, or if you’ve uploaded images to the slider yourself, you may be using stock images that aren’t necessarily reflective of your branding or what you have to offer.
Many of these sliders take up most of the page they’re featured on. They tend to make a website look slick and modern – but if they’re taking up the entire page above the fold, your users aren’t really getting anything from them but pretty pictures.
Optimizing Your Sliders
If your landing page features a slider, you really have two options. You can either nix the slider altogether and have your web designer create something new – or you can optimize the images you’re putting into the slider.
For instance, if you’re selling marketing consulting services and one of your slider images is your logo, try changing up or adding text to the logo that really pushes your products. Ensure this text contains some sort of call to action,
“Learn why Lead Liaison Services is the Best out There.”
“Read Customer Reviews to discover why Lead Liaison is the Best Choice.”
The idea behind customizing the sliders is not just to add a different look to your landing page, but to get a click-through to a different page that details your products and services. This strategy is intended to decrease your bounce rate by allowing customers to learn more about you and go to a page with a higher chance of capture. The secondary page should feature a form to fill out or a number to call so you have a better chance of capturing customer info.
Lead Liaison staff can hook you up with analytical tools that will help you keep track of your landing pages – how they perform, what you could do better and how to integrate landing page metrics into the rest of your marketing via an advanced marketing automation interface. Find out more today! We’d love to help you.
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KISSmetrics has a great article and infographic discussing the particulars of bounce rates by industry. Average industry bounce rates are at about 40.5%, while lead gen websites can expect a 30-50% bounce rate. Service and retail sites rank in at about 10-40%, while one page sites exist simply to gather info or as a cart tend to have a higher bounce rate – 70-90%.
What Is Bounce Rate?
If it sounds like we’re speaking Greek, it’s time to get in the know about your bounce rates. A bounce rate refers to the number of viewers who visit your site, then leave without looking at any further pages or taking any further action on your website. Bounce rate is one of the top ways you can assess landing page improvements. Once you make these improvements, you can bring in a wealth of new web leads. You can find your bounce rate by taking a look at any analytics tracking platform (might we suggest Lead Liaison’s stellar lead management software for this?).
Knowing your bounce rate is important because the higher the bounce rate, the more you’ll be able to get an idea of the necessary landing page improvements. Modifying landing pages is a good way to ensure your customers:
Know what you have to offer
Understand the value proposition of your services
Can get in touch with you multiple ways if needed
Will leave valuable information you can use to get the customer into your funnel
If your landing pages aren’t doing any of these things, you’ll see your bounce rates increase. Landing page improvements can keep people looking through your site for more information about your company, which better increases the chance they’ll engage.
Landing Page Improvements
Landing page tracking will show you what areas of your page need improvements. Some areas you might need to focus on:
Header. The top of your site should feature your logo and contact information. If users land on your page and aren’t sure what to do, they’ll bounce. Try to develop a common look and feel to your landing pages which provides visitors with “familiar territory”. Consistency is good thing with your landing pages. Use Lead Liaison’s landing page builder to easily create templates, just like you would with a PowerPoint slide.
About your company. You’d be surprised how many companies leave this out – even on their homepage! Immediately tell your users who you are and why you’re the best at what you do.
Offer. Landing page improvements should focus around what you’re offering and what you’re looking to get from your customer. For instance, if you’re offering an eBook in exchange for an email address, make sure the sign up form is above the fold of your page.
Structure. Users are used to seeing crisp-looking professional pages that are well-put together. A graphic or video that highlights your service followed by more about your company and the offering should all be showcased above the fold of the page. Most users read from left to right- just like a book – so it’s good to give users a visual or text representation of who you are followed by a call to action (e.g. fill out our form, watch our video, etc.). If you’re interested in placing a video on your landing page then Lead Liaison’s landing page builder can help you drag/drop YouTube videos or other flash content directly on your page.
If you see your bounce rates are higher than industry standard for certain pages – particularly your landing pages – make the recommended landing page improvements and watch to see if your bounce rate decreases over time.
Landing page improvement tracking is best measured through landing page ROI. If you’re not sure your landing pages are getting you the best possible ROI, Lead Liaison can help! Our suite of solutions can help you assess whether your landing pages are performing as needed. Bounce rate assessment is an important part of that info. We’d love to hook you up with effective landing page ROI solutions today!
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B2B marketers have a plethora of tools available to gather information about marketing leads. One of the more effective methods is using online lead forms. Using a form to capture relevant data about a lead allows you to organize leads, personalize marketing messages, and score behaviors. There are three key rules for developing lead forms.
Developing effective forms requires thoughtful consideration about what information you want to gather and how forms will be used within a lead nurturing system. The first rule of lead form development is: don’t get greedy! Asking for too much information too early in the qualification and nurturing process can put any future relationship at risk. The most effective lead forms for a newsletter subscription or white paper download will only ask for a name and email address. Once the email address is collected it becomes an alternate communication channel, and an opportunity to deepen the relationship. So ask for minimum information up front then earn permission to request more.
The second rule of lead form development: keep it fresh! Rotating questions is a form development technique in which new questions are posed each time a lead revisits a form. For instance, a lead that visits a product page must enter a registered user name and answer a few questions that reveal qualifying criteria – such as company size, revenues, and industry – in exchange for an in-depth video about the product’s features. The next time that lead visits the same product page, she enters her username and answers three different questions that reveal need – such as purpose for visiting page or growth expectations – in exchange for a live chat Q & A session.
Protecting personal identifiers should be an essential factor in developing lead forms to gather information. Therefore, the third rule of lead form development is: keep it safe! Security verification certificates are commonplace among internet vendors providing online transactions, and should be included in any marketing page that contains a form. Secure socket layer (SSL) certificates present you as a trusted vendor to your leads, and can provide them peace of mind when sharing company information.
A final note: default form fields should be left blank. If your form has a default setting which returns a certain score in your lead scoring matrix, then the possibility exists that the lead will not select the another option. Often a lead will plow through a form by selecting the default option. Therefore, the score may be inadvertently skewed, and worse, not clearly represent a lead’s actual circumstance. For example, using “executive” as a default setting for a lead’s position may not clearly specify her position within the organization. If the associated score for a response of “executive” is 100, but the lead turns out to be a middle manager with a score of 15, then the resulting score won’t accurately reflect that lead’s appropriateness.
Lead Liaison offers companies professional-grade web form and landing page design solutions. If you’re interested in visually creating forms and landing pages using drag/drop technology and using advanced techniques such as progressive profiling, form pre-fill and more let us know! We’d love to earn your business.
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