Multivariate Testing Success Stories

Ever wish you could find the perfect combination of landing page elelments that boosts your conversion rate? Well, we’ve got good news for you. Multivariate testing is a great way to test several page elements like different headlines, images and call-to-actions in hundreds of different random combinations on one landing page.

Here are three case studies that we hope will help convince you to start using multivariate testing. Click on the company name to read the whole case study. 

1. American Greetings

American Greetings creates innovative social expression products and they were looking to both decrease their cost-per-acquisition and increase their conversion rates. Through testing they accomplished both of their goals and more. On Mother’s Day alone, a real-time change in traffic based on test results resulted in over $45,000 in incremental revenue. That’s revenue that would have been lost without testing and real-time analytics! 

2. TEKsystems

TEKsystems is an IT recruiting agency and they needed a lower cost-per-conversion on their PPC ads. Anvil Media used LiveBall’s MVT and A/B testing featues to help decrease TEKsystems cost-per-conversion by more than 50%! 

3. Closed Loop Marketing

Closed Loop Marketing, an online marketing agency, uses LiveBall to create and test landing pages for their clients. For their client, Blurb, they launched an aggressive testing plan that included both A/B and MVT and nearly doubled Blurb’s conversion rate. 

We love seeing the great conversion lifts our customers get from using the code-free multivariate testing tools that are part of the LiveBall platform! If you are a LiveBall customer and aren’t using multivariate testing, give us a call and we’ll help you get started.

All landing pages should communicate in a nanosecond

Over the weekend I was skimming “Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent)” by George Lois, and I stumbled on a gem. If you are a marketer, this applies to all of your work—no matter if you are into direct mail, email, PPC, broadcast media or anything in between. And it definitely applies to landing pages! Here you go—enjoy!

All creativity should communicate in a nanosecond. Certainly the greatest advertising, poster, packaging, magainze cover, book cover, logotype design, etc needs to connect instantly with the human brain and heart to remain memorable…In the business world, long, drawn-out, uncommunicative, fumbing presentations are the norm. As you read this, thousands of speeches, powerpoint presentations, and off-the-cuff talks are leaving audiences catatonic. Understand this: if you can’t express your thinking concisely and surprisingly—and literally communicate it visually in a nanosecond—it’s not a Big Idea.

If your landing pages aren’t communicating in a nanosecond, you won’t have a chance to leave your audience catatonic. Because on the web, your audience will land and leave in the blink of an eye—never to return, never to convert.

Give Your Landing Page Design a Makeover

We all get stuck in fashion ruts and routines. Whether it’s a certain outfit, haircut or even a shade of lipstick, once we find something we like and that works for us we tend to stick with it. It’s important to know what works well on you, but it’s also important to keep testing new ideas too. Styles change over time, and even the most classic pieces are slightly tweaked and modernized too. 

It’s the same story with landing pages. Although your favorite landing page template might be getting great results, you’ll never know if a new makeover idea could have even better results unless you test it out. Plus, unlike your hair, landing page makeovers that don’t meet your expectations can quickly revert back to your tried and true style. Here are some landing page makeover ideas to test.

Landing Page Design Makeover Ideas

Button color – Whether it’s your call-to-action button, the button to start a video or any other button, the color does mean something. The right button color will make your landing page design pop and it will pull your visitor’s attention towards the action you want them to take.  

Images – There is so much you can test when it comes to images. Should you include people in your images or not? Does it make a difference if you show a man or a woman? Whatever images you decide to try out keep two things in mind. First, make sure that the image is high quality and secondly make sure the photo is relevant to the message on the rest of your page – even if that pet is really cute!

Video – Try spicing up your landing pages with video. Instead of just using static images, video can make your landing pages feel more interactive and lively. Test different positions on the page, messages and lengths to see what works best.

Font – Ever been to a landing page that used an ugly font? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. Comic Sans, anyone? For your makeover, be sure to use a stylish and readable font; not one that will want to make your visitors run for the hills!  

Text color – As long as it’s readable (big caveat!), don’t just settle on dull and boring font colors for page elements like headings and your call-to-action that you really want your visitors to see. The right color can make these elements really stand out from the rest of the page.

Above the fold – You want to make sure that your most important stuff is ‘above the fold’ (i.e. they shouldn’t have to scroll down). If your visitor doesn’t immediately see what they want and how they can get it, they are less likely to stick around. Test which page elements matter most in convincing more of your landing page visitors to convert. 

Distractions – You didn’t just spend all of this time on your new landing page makeover to let your visitor’s attention get distracted by extraneous links, sidebars and navigation. Your conversion action should be the only ‘head-turner.’ If other page elements are taking attention away from your conversion action, test taking away extra links and test adding new design elements that bring more attention to your conversion action with implicit and explicit visual cues. 

Makeovers are fun and when done right they can boost your conversion rates!

Are you looking for a way to make sophisticated, stylish landing pages without code or help from developers? Try LiveBall, ion’s landing page software solution.

Why Mobile Landing Pages are a Must

A mobile-optimized landing page made with LiveBall.If you’re not already launching mobile landing pages, then this stat may cause you to think twice. According to an article in Internet Retailer, mobile traffic accounted for 13% of web traffic in the fourth quarter of 2011. 

So why should this matter for your program? It’s simple. If you neglect the importance of optimizing for mobile visitors, you are losing out on a continuously growing number of prospects and possible leads.

Let’s discuss the top three reasons why you should be using mobile landing pages and why they are important for your conversion rate.

Why Mobile Landing Pages are Important

1. Confusion and frustration reduce conversions – Have you ever visited a landing page with your mobile device that wasn’t optimized for mobile visitors? You probably became frustrated pretty quickly after pinching at the screen again and again to resize it.  It’s also very likely that your frustration caused you to just move on to something else. Frustrating user experiences are not good for conversions. Redirecting mobile visitors to mobile optimized pages will help your mobile visitors focus their attention immediately on your conversion action, instead of resizing your page. 

If you are a LiveBall customer, LiveBall can handle this for you by automatically sensing mobile visitors and creating mobile-optimized versions of your landing pages for you. 

2. The need for speed – Most on-the-go visitors don’t have much time, and that means they want a quick and reliable experience. Avoid using Flash or other page elements that take too long to load or that aren’t compatible with mobile browsers. They will slow down your audience, and they greatly increase the risk that you’ll lose out on conversions. Similarly, when it comes to the design of your mobile pages make them easy and quick for visitors by editing your mobile pages down to only the absolute most important items for conversion. Long lead generation forms are a turn off to begin with, but on mobile pages they look even worse. Keep forms short so that your mobile visitors can convert quickly.  

3. Give good brand – Studies have shown that typically people remember negative events more strongly than positive ones. If a customer tries to visit a landing page that hasn’t been optimized for mobile, they are not only very likely to bounce, but they are also very likely to have formed a negative impression of your brand. Your landing pages are your first impressions, and first impressions matter a lot in online marketing. Give good brand by making sure your mobile visitors are served up an exciting, interesting, mobile-optimized landing page.

Mobile isn’t going away and landing pages that have been built with mobile web users in mind are a must-have.

If you’re a Liveball customer, and want to learn more about automatic mobile-optimization or how to make mobile-optimized landing pages please contact your account manager. If you don’t have their contact information handy, you can find our basic contact info here. 

5 Types of Headlines to Test on Your Landing Page

Your headline just may be the single most important element on your landing page. Time and time again we’ve seen the headline prove to have a huge impact on conversions. Headline writing, however, is an art and one that takes time, practice & patience.

To help inspire your headline testing, we’ve outlined 5 types of headlines to test on your landing pages.

1. Benefit-driven

One of the first techniques you should explore is transforming your major benefit into a headline. To write a successful benefit headline, you must know your target audience well, so you can offer them a powerful, compelling “reason to believe.” You must do your homework though in order to know what benefits will motivate your prospect(s) to take action. Then test and test to find the one that resonates the best. 

 

2. Offer-specific

Think: Save 25% Off, Try for Free, Free White Paper, 30-Day Free Trail. Try testing your offer in your headline. One of my favorites is Phanfare’s secondary headline — “Try Phanfare free for 2 weeks. We know you’ll love it.” Simple. Direct. And personal.

 

3. Question

I tend to feel that question headlines work best for segmentation experiences. You must ask a question that gets your visitor involved and leads them into the conversion funnel. This examples from iomega asks “Which Network Storage solution is right for you?” — office or home? 

4. Direct

The direct headline should be used far more often than it is. No cleverness. No jokes. No wordplay. The direct headline gets right to the point. An example from SlideDeck tells us they are “hands-down, the best content slider on the web.” Its not dull, but it is direct.

5. Attention-grabbing

Attention-grabbing headlines can be one or more of the above types — they can be provocative and shocking or use a play on words. Testing clever, attention-grabbing headlines can be risky, especially if “provocative” is not your typical brand voice. Be careful not to offend your visitors.

 

In order to grab the attention of your visitors and keep them on your page you need a strong, capitivating headline. Have you experimented with the one or more of the five types above?

We’d love to hear your headline testing stories!