Failure is the #1 killer of motivation and enthusiasm.
Just imagine if Mike Tyson lost his first 5 fights, or if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak didn’t sell their first 200 computers in 1976, or if Michael Jackson’s first album – Got to Be There – turned out to be a dud.
Would these brands still be successful? Would the individuals behind them have had the commitment and perseverance to power through their initial setbacks?
Maybe yes – and maybe no. We don’t know for sure, but we do know this. The last thing you want to do is find out the answer from your own failures.
This is especially true in business, where defeats aren’t just moral but also fiscal – and where a single failed campaign can end your organization or product.
Ideally, what you want is to have a fool-proof plan for doing business profitably; a step-by-step guide to acquiring leads, making sales and maximizing each customer’s lifetime value.
In the digital age, the first step to making this a reality is an effective landing page that starts the customer journey right, maximizing your lead conversion rate and setting you up for future sales.
But how do you make a landing page that does all of this (and then some)?
In the post below, we’ll give you the answer in the form of 5 insider tips.
We won’t mislead you by saying they guarantee success – but provided your offer is good, they will bust conversion plateaus, take your list building to the next level and help you build a perfect landing page.
Tip number one is to…
Make your sections smartable and let go of mundane manual tasks with Smart Sections! An easy way to manage bulk changes.
1. Use Personalized Landing Pages
We previously mentioned personalized landing pages in this case study – and here’s why.
In an analysis of over 30 million landing pages, the average conversion rate for a non-personalized landing page was about 5%. With personalized landing pages, which are targeted at specific target audience segments, that number went up to 20%+.
Obviously, that’s a massive difference. An average boost of 400% in a 30-million strong sample is incredible. These numbers explain why the savviest marketers have been using personalized pages for years.
Just check out this targeted page Obama’s team made for Redditors in the 2012 campaign:
As the image suggests, the page was made for traffic coming in from then-president Obama’s “Ask Me Anything” page on Reddit.
In the past, making pages like these for separate audiences, campaigns and traffic sources was complex – but these days, services like Landingi make it easy to create targeted pages in seconds.
Oh, and speaking of president Obama – there’s one other hack his campaigns can teach us about landing pages. Check it out below!
2. Use Lines of Sight
Check out 2 more landing pages from Obama and his team. Pay particular attention to where the president is looking in the photographs:
In both cases, Obama’s looking towards the opt-in form and up at the headline. This may seem accidental; presidents often look up and to the side to project power and dignity.
However, consider that a study of 106 subjects showed that we tend to follow the line of sight of the characters in ads we watch. This is because of a natural impulse to see what someone is checking out – even if it’s a headline, a CTA, etc.
The takeaway is simple. If you’re using photos of people on your landing page – and you should be, because images improve conversions – make sure their lines of sight point at what you want people to see first.
And by the way – don’t worry too much about making your page look perfect, because…
3. Ugly Landing Pages Work Just Fine
Have you ever gone to a landing page or website for an offer you really want… Or a company that you know has the money for a top-notch designer… Only to see something like this?
This landing page belongs to “Lean Belly Breakthrough”: a top-selling ClickBank offer that’s projected to make 7 or even 8 figures in its lifecycle. As you can see, it’s pretty darn ugly – and yet it’s clearly effective. (You don’t become a Clickbank top seller unless what you’re doing works).
Why?
The answer’s simple. The point of a landing page isn’t necessarily to show you’re perfect. It’s to grab a viewer’s attention and keep it on you – which the page above does.
Here’s an example of an ugly corporate-style page. It’s from Hermes: a clothing and textile company worth over $36 billion. You’d think they could do a little better than this with all their money, but…
Again – as you can see, the page is both ugly and underused (no social media links, no opt-in form). Nevertheless, a company doesn’t get to $36 bn in market cap by being incompetent – so you can count on this page working just fine, thank you very much.
All in all, having a beautiful design is only important if you’re in an industry where it matters. In most other cases the importance of looking pretty is overstated.
Another aspect of landing pages that’s often misunderstood is…
Create landing pages without programming skills!
4. The Perfect Form Length
Noah Kagan had a 4-field submission form. The fields were Name, E-mail, URL and Revenue – and all of them seemed pretty important…
Until Noah removed Revenue and saw an instant 26% increase in his conversion rate.
Since then, it’s become common knowledge that the shorter an opt-in form is, the better. However, we find that this isn’t always the case. Just take a look at the opt-in form for HubSpot: a thought leader in inbound marketing (which includes landing pages):
As you can see, there’s a lot of fields here. A few of them are relatively superfluous. And yet, HubSpot keeps the form this long. Why?
The answer is twofold. First, the lead magnet here is the State of Inbound report: a popular annual read for online marketers. It’s understood that people will be fine with filling out a longer form to get it.
Reason #2 is that HubSpot is targeting high-ticket customers here. They want to know whether the individual or organization is a real lead or a tire kicker – and if they’re the former, they want to have as much information as possible to make a quality sales pitch.
In this sense, these 2 approaches are illustrative of how deceptive metrics can be. Noah Kagan’s form had high conversions, but HubSpot’s example definitely provides higher-quality leads. The question is simply whether you want numbers or quality.
Fortunately, the next tip will improve your results several times over no matter what your goal is. Here’s why.
5. Videos are Easy to Make. Use Them.
It’s not exactly an insider secret that landing page videos work like gangbusters. They don’t just improve lead conversions by 2-3x; they make a user 64-85% more likely to make a purchase online, too.
What you may not know, however, is that videos are also easy to make these days – and you don’t even need to own a camera or know editing to make one. All you need is a few bucks, a little time, and services like the ones below:
- Fiverr.com – you can get an explainer video made for your page for as little as $5. It won’t necessarily be the best, but remember – ugly isn’t always a bad thing.
- Powtoon.com – this website is often used for entertainment purposes, but it’s also a smart place to make videos for your business. It’s free, too, which means you don’t even need five dollars to boost your conversions.
- Biteable.com – known as “the world’s simplest video maker”, this is another free-trial offering that lets you make great videos without paying a red cent.
Put simply, videos are the future – or, rather, the present. Users expect them, and in most cases, you want to have one on your page. (Alternatively, you may want to use an animated image – like Biteable.com did on their own website).
To recap, let’s go over our 5 landing page insider tips:
- Use Personalized Landing Pages
- Don’t be Scared to Go Ugly
- Use Lines of Sight Effectively
- Short and Long Forms Both Work Depending on Context
- Videos are Easy to Make. Use Them.
These tips are simple, but powerful enough that adding 3 or 4 can double or triple your conversion rate. Remember: President Obama smashed both McCain and Romney in his campaigns, and basic tweaks like these ones were a major part of his success. At a high level, beating the competition and acquiring leads effectively isn’t about high-falutin’ wizardry; it’s about doing what works.
The only question is, how can you tell what works in your campaigns? How do you measure your success and evaluate whether any of lead generation strategies is working or not?
