Part two: Extreme Landing Page Makeover

Last week, Michele Hickford, ion’s director of strategy, posted a recap of an ion client who made over a landing page and achieved a 12% lift in conversion. This weekend, I received a great follow up question about the landing page makeover from a good friend of ion’s, Chris Villar with FrontPoint Security. Chris was kind enough to allow me to share his email with you. Here’s what Chris asked me:

Great success story for sure!  From the blog, it sounded like they moved from an initial 5 segmentation page to going direct to the lead capture — no segmentation.  Is that right?  Or was are segmentation pages still before the lead capture?  I just searched online and the ad I got went right to the lead gen page.

Curious… seems to go against one of the core ideas you guys talk about — segementing, more refined messaging, and getting data about those people who don’t submit (not just those who do).  Intersting to see that, in this case, going direct to the lead gen must work better.

Hope you have a great weekend!

-Chris

This is a great question, because indeed the success story Michele blogged about doesn’t use segmentation, which is a key post-click marketing best practice. So, here’s how I responded to Chris:

Hi Chris! I am so glad you asked. When we saw the results of the makeover, I didn’t hesitate for a second that the ultimate winner wasn’t a segmented path.  A best practice isn’t a rule, it’s just a best practice. We test landing pages against a conversion path all the time, and more often than not, a conversion path will work much better than a single landing page. But when a landing page wins, then it’s the landing page that runs!

The client we showed in the blog post even has some conversion paths winning for other traffic sources. But for the particular traffic source where this test ran, this is what drove the results. I am so glad you asked this question as it represents well what I blogged on yesterday about “no hard and fast rules”.

So there you have it! Thanks again to Chris for his great question and allowing me to share it with you all here.