Although it’s not rocket science, putting together the right killer mix of elements to your page isn’t always easy.  What works for one traffic source may not work for another, so it’s important to always try out new ideas and combinations.  However there are certain time-tested and true landing page best practices for increasing conversion rates that you should check your pages for if you’re not happy with your conversion rate.  Use these landing page best practices as a starting point for your testing ideas and plans. 

Top Landing Page Best Practices For Higher Conversions 

• Uncomplicated forms – I’ve been on landing pages with some very compelling messaging and I almost filled out their form – almost. Long, complicated forms are a hassle and a turn off. The best forms only gather what is absolutely necessary – nothing more, nothing less.  Nurture programs and progressive profiling can help you build up prospect profiles over time.  For initial lead generation forms, whatever your form is asking should be proportional to the your offer.
  
  
• Center their attention – If a landing page has you looking in all different directions with no apparent target, it’s likely you’re going to click the mighty back button. The focus of a landing page should be to compel your visitor to convert – and that’s it! Keep all of the content on your landing page clear and focused on getting visitors to the conversion point. Take a big step away from your landing page (both figuratively and literally), is it still clear what you’d like your visitors to do?

• Use a compelling call to action – A good, clear call to action is vital! You need to tell your visitor what to do and how to do it – if you don’t, they may go away, never to return.  Make your call to actions compelling- don’t simply say “Submit” but try using active, positive messages like “Download your free whitepaper now” that reaffirm what visitors are getting from you.

• Give them what they want – Visitors come to your page for specific reasons – to get something that helps them solve a problem or answer a question. If you don’t address their needs right away, you’ve lost that conversion. If you’re getting traffic to your page then you know that whatever offer was in your ad or email is connecting with your visitors; keep their attention by continuing with that same offer and conversation on your landing page.

• Mind the fold – You know that part of the page that lies “above” the scrolling point? That’s the area above the fold and generally for an effective landing page, you need to put your most important elements for conversion – the elements that you definitely want your visitors to see – in that space.  You only have a moment to convince most visitors to stay so use your best real estate wisely. Don’t make visitors scroll to find your call to action or form.

Use these best practices to form new test ideas and to get your conversion rates up!  In addition to these conversion techniques, another great way to get your page ready for higher conversions is by using our READY framework.

If you are looking for a way to create and test high-converting landing pages, schedule a demonstration of our landing page solution, LiveBall, & we cab help you put these best practices and others in to action.

Fill your lead funnel through content marketing!Content is a critical component of great B2B marketing today. Content can help position your organization as thought leaders, nurture prospects over time, and best of all, it can generate high-quality leads, too.

Without any further adieu, here are 7 ways to generate high-quality leads with content marketing.

1. Create content that attracts your best prospects

If you’re like most B2B marketers, you’ve identified a few sweet spots—those prospects that are most likely to close and become your most profitable, best customers. While you may already focus your PPC, search and banner efforts on attracting them, you can do the same with your content marketing. Make sure a portion of your content focuses on the pain points and interests of your most valuable and important segments.

2. Help solve problems and address pain points

All good content, whether white papers, blogs, webinars, or slides, addresses pain points and solves problems. Create Guides, Top 10 Lists, How-Tos etc. This is a critical step in attracting your best prospects, because when they are searching for you, they may not use words to describe your company or product—they’ll use words that focus on solving problems and improving their results. It’s your job to educate them that the way to solve their problem is with your solution.

3. Go beyond your specific offering

Sure, while you should always create content about your organization’s specific area of focus, you’ll attract a bigger audience if your content addresses other topics that are interesting and important to your best prospects. For instance, let’s say you market social media solutions to senior-level marketers. While I recommend becoming a trusted source of information and advice on social media marketing and creating content about it, you should also create content that focuses on marketing ROI, public relations, industry news, and SEO, because most senior marketers that are interested in social media, are also interested in those topics, too.

4. Become a trusted resource

Every marketer is now a publisher. It’s important for your content to be helpful and useful. Give away some secrets to the magic behind your company—really. Don’t shill. Don’t sell. And when your prospects are ready to evaluate solutions, they’ll go to you, not your competitors.

5. Delight and engage—let your prospects to get to know you

Don’t discount the importance of delighting your visitors and letting them get to know you and your brand via your content marketing. After all, buyers don’t buy from companies—they buy from people. And every touch point of your marketing, whether that’s content, social media, search, or email, is an opportunity for your prospects to get to know your organization and what you stand for. So delight them, engage them, and deliver awesome. The more you do, the more likely they will be to raise their hand, become a lead, and hopefully, a customer.

6. Include conversion points within your content

Think you can’t generate leads from blog posts? Think again. Every blog post is an opportunity to convert a visitor into a lead. For example, if you’re promoting a webinar on email marketing, you can generate interest in the webinar by writing a blog on the “Top 10 Ways to Improve Email Open Rates”, and then cross promote a call-to-action at the end of the blog to sign up for the webinar. You can also link to a landing page with gated content (ex: a white paper), which will allow visitors to learn more about the topic. (ion does that at the end of this blog post! See below.) You can also include banner ad on your blog, or a call-to-action within any white papers that get passed around. (Me? I use LiveBall to create landing pages that I link to from blogs and white papers.)

7. Make it easy to share

This may seem obvious, but the easier you make it for your visitors to share your content with their networks, the more likely they’ll be to do it. So, include share buttons for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and any other network that your prospects use. Don’t only use these buttons on your website, but also include them in any PDF content as well.

Want to learn more about generating leads from content marketing? Check out ion’s FREE guide, Conversion Content Marketing

1. Match Your Email Content According to Phases in the Sales Process

When a lead first gets added to your lead nurturing program, start the relationship—or courting process—by mailing them best practices information, quick tips—any kind of content that allows your subscribers to get to know and trust you. Then, once they start to engage with that content, deliver content that slowly introduces your prospects to your product or service. Finally, once they consistently show interest, send them product demos, sales call requests, consultant offers etc. I recommended creating a 3-phase map, with designed content for cold, warm, and hot leads. You can even include content that helps your prospects overcome obstacles in the buying process, such as getting budget approval or technical requirements. As always, it’s a good idea to run these emails by your sales team, to see if they have any recommendations that will make their job faster and easier.

2. Stay in Front of Your Leads

Frequency is a touchy subject. The more often you email your subscribers, the higher the chances they will unsubscribe. However, it’s important to find your frequency sweet spot—the ideal number of email touches required to stay in front of your leads while keeping them happy and engaged. I recommend monitoring your email response rates against your unsubscribes. Need a place to begin? Send emails once a week, and provide frequency options for subscribers who want to hear from your more (or less) often.

3. Use Progressive Profiling to Learn More About Your Leads

The fewer fields you require on your forms, the higher your conversion rate will be. When generating leads online, I recommend requiring the fewest fields possible. Then, once leads get added to your lead nurturing program, you can begin to learn more about them via progressive profiling. For example, on our PPC landing pages (see the LiveBall landing page), we only require leads to fill out their first name, last name, company name, and email address. Then, they get added to our lead nurturing program (we use Eloqua), and we ask them a few more questions in exchange for best practices content (see example 2 below). This allows us to cast a wide net at the top of our funnel, and then learn more about our prospects over time. It’s a win-win for both our leads and us.

An example progressive profile form.

4. Don’t Rush for the Close

While you may be tempted to mail product information or sales-focused messages early on in the nurture cycle, it’s important to hold those for when your subscribers consistently engage with your best practices content and show interest in your product or service by visiting product pages on your website or raising their hand.

5. Be Human and Personable

We’ve all heard the saying—people don’t buy from companies, they buy from people. So, add a human touch to your email campaigns, whether that means including a headshot of your sales team, a signature, or a personalized message. Use your lead nurturing as an opportunity to let your prospects get to know not only your company, but also the brains behind it. The more they get to know you, the more likely they will be to trust you, and ultimately, buy from you.

6. Add Humor to Your Campaigns

A little delight can go a long way. While it’s easy to get stuck in the rut of sending the same ol’ same ol’ week after week, mix in emails that that delight your subscribers with humor and personality, because whether you market to marketers or IT professionals, everyone likes to laugh, and humor can really set your campaigns apart from your competition.

7. Test Your Landing Pages

According to a recent MarketingSherpa study, the most effective element to test in email campaigns is the landing page.  So, before you start testing subject lines or email body copy, run some A/B tests on your landing pages—and test the desired action you’d like your visitors to take.

Are you running lead nurturing programs now? What has your experience been like? Let us know in the comments below.

• Marketing managers driving prospects to landing pages from email marketing campaigns
• Must be passing lead information into a CRM and or marketing automation system (Eloqua, Marketo, etc.)

What is progressive profiling?

• Using landing page forms to build lead profiles and qualification over time
• A few multiple choice questions are asked on the landing page each time a lead returns for nurture fulfillment
• Helps build relationships with prospects during nurture process

Why is progressive profiling important?

• Reduces number of form fields on initial conversion point, increasing lead conversions
• Builds valuable prospect profiles for sales
• Allows for scoring and qualification
• Surfaces HOT! leads
• Progressive profile forms convert up to 75% of visitors
• Progressive profiling is easy in LiveBall

Interested in learning more about progressive profiling in LiveBall?
Tweet us @ioninteractive or call 561.394.9484.

The basics of A/B testing

A/B testing goes by a few other names, like split testing, but no matter what you call it, it’s an essential part of effective marketing. This is where you test variances of your messaging or other another page element to see if one converts better than the other. To get the true scoop, it’s best to test multiple samples against a control. 

Some of the different areas to change and test include, but are not limited to: colors, images, headlines call-to-action, design and layout, or the actual conversion path.

I’ve always believed in thorough A/B testing, not once or twice, but multiple scenarios, until we get just the right data. Those statistics tell us what works and what doesn’t – which leads to positive changes in marketing campaigns.

Here’s an example of A/B testing:

Say you have a large mailing list and you want to send out an email campaign to funnel readers to a dedicated landing page and where they an convert by filling out a form. You might A/B test different calls to action as well as change the color of the button on your form. Once statistical confidence has been reached, with one version showing a higher conversion rate, you’ve found a better converter for your marketing campaign. With this and other information you found from your testing, you can more effectively forecast your ROI for the entire marketing campaign.

As you can see, testing is a must. Not only does it give you more comprehensive conversion data, it helps you calculate your ROI result. If you’re on the fence or don’t test enough, now is the time to jump that fence and start A/B testing to see what your prospects and customers want from you.

How A/B testing will help your business

I won’t lie to you, testing takes work and sometimes the answer isn’t always in front of you. With all that, the benefits outweigh any cons of A/B testing and the actual testing process can be made easier in LiveBall, which also supports multivariate testing (MVT).  So what are these benefits that you’ll get from A/B testing your landing pages?  These are just a few, but you’ll learn:

• What converts more prospects into leads
• Whether the path to your landing page needs a fix or if your landing page does
• What your prospects and customers like about your current marketing
• How to better plan resources and budget for marketing campaigns based on data from past campaigns

Now that you know the “why” of A/B testing, learn a little bit more about the “how.” Get started with Top 5 tips for effective landing page A/B testing or schedule a LiveBall demo.

1. Use specific landing pages

Whether you’re promoting your content through email, social media or SEM, the ad for your content piece should lead to a landing page specific to that piece.  This is especially important if you’re using content as part of a lead generation program. Don’t drop prospects off at a site where they have to click around to find the content you promised them.  If you make it clear and easy for your visitors to find out how they can get the content piece you promoted or advertised, they’ll repay you with a better conversion rate.

An example of a landing page we used for a content piece about content marketing!

2. Socialize your content

We share things we like, find interesting and helpful.  Since those are all things that you want your prospects to say about your content, make it easy for them to share your content with their networks.  When someone we know and trust recommends something to us, we are much more likely to read it or give it a try. On your thank you pages and your actual content, try including social media buttons that let your readers tell others through a tweet or Facebook post that they are enjoying your content. 

3. Bring people back online with QR codes

Scan to learn about making QR code landing page with LiveBall!Eventually and inevitably that white paper or guide you’ve been promoting online will be printed and left on someone else’s desk.  Bring those readers back online with a QR code that leads to a branded landing page where you can engage with them.  Try all sorts of call to actions – offers to more about your product, to read something else or to watch a related video. By bringing readers back online, you’ll be able to track and gain some insight into how often your content is shared, and you can keep the new reader’s experience with your brand going.

4. Suggest a next step

Just because someone finished reading your blog post or watching a video doesn’t mean that they are finished learning. Maybe they want to keep learning about a certain topic or maybe they want to learn more about you- the company that seems so knowledgeable about this subject that interests them. Make it easy for them to stay engaged and to reach out to you.  On thank you pages and at the end of content pieces, suggest a similar post or whitepaper for those that still want to engage with your content and provide a clear call to action like “Let’s talk” for those who are ready to convert.

A thank you page where we keep people engaged by suggesting more content. We also ask them to tell their friends through twitter or Facebook about the webinar they just registered for(see #2).

5. Leverage progressive profiling data

If you market your content to prospects in a nurture campaign, progressive profiling is a great way for you to learn more about a prospect with each subsequent visit.  Use the progressive profile information you’re collecting to create even more specific, targeted content. For instance, if you ask about buying timeframe then you can combine that information with your buyer personas, to send content that’s specific to buyers based on where they are in your buying cycle.  The more targeted and relevant your content is to someone’s needs the more likely they’ll be to want it.

6. Version content for specific segments

Smart segmentation will help you learn more about your landing page visitors and it will provide your landing page visitors with an even better experience – and a better experience means better conversions.  For instance, we know that a landing page toolkit will appeal to people who don’t have a landing page program and to those who do.  If you’re just starting a landing page program you’re going to need different slightly different information compared to those who have established programs, and while we want to talk to both groups, our conversations are going to be different.  By offering (aka segmenting by) a beginner’s and an advanced version we can learn something about our visitors and our visitors get a content bundle that speaks better to their needs.  Better, more specific content is what should drive the segmentation choice.

What the segmentation discussed in #6 looked like on a LiveBall landing page.

7. Test it all!

The only way to know if your target audience is going to like and convert is to try it out! Experiment with different content formats, landing page layouts, segmentation and traffic sources. We’ve seen content pieces do just okay in paid search, but then rock it in on LinkedIn or social and vice versa.  The more you test, the more you’ll learn about where your content performs best and what your audience likes.

How are you improving your content marketing conversions? Share your tips below!

By promoting and sharing content that’s relevant to your target audience you position your brand as a knowledgeable, helpful thought leader.  Content is also one of the best baits to use in B2B lead generation.  Whether you promote your content through social media, paid search ads, or email, you can direct those interested visitors to a landing page where they need to fill out a (hopefully short) form to access the content.  You can even try testing an optional conversion path where you provide direct, immediate access to the content, but also give visitors the option to convert through an offer like “talk to us” or “sign up to get more like this.” 

When you’re using content to generate leads, you’ll find that you are constantly looking for new content ideas. Sometimes we can all get a little writer’s block, so to kick off 2012 right, here’s some content marketing inspiration ideas that are sure to boost your B2B marketing efforts and generate more leads. 

12 content marketing inspiration ideas for 2012

 1. Utilize your RSS feeds – Here’s one I like to do on a daily basis. Setup an RSS reader, such as Google Reader, then read blogs that are relevant to your B2B marketing needs. View them often and apply ideas you find to your own content marketing strategies.

2. Scan blog comments – As you go through blog comments on your site and other blogs, check them for for ideas to use in your own content planning. You never know, that insightful discussion on your favorite B2B marketing blog could give you a week’s worth of content for your own blog.

3. Google news – One of the best sources for news is also a great place to find content marketing ideas. Since Google aggregates news from all over the world, you can take your pick of relevant headlines and stories to utilize in your own B2B marketing. 

4. Industry events – There’s a lot going on at industry conferences, but there’s some content marketing gold there, too. From the keynote to breakout sessions and others, make sure you keep good notes and find those opportunities for creating great content for your own prospects and customers.

5. Photo sharing – Not only do you have golden opportunities with sharing photos of your products and services, encourage your customers to share those photos and watch how they generate leads.

6. Reuse existing content – Generating great B2B marketing content isn’t just about constant, unique creation. Consider reusing and converting content into different mediums with different angles. For instance, take some sections out of your white paper and create some blog posts or articles to post on your site or on other industry related sites. 

7. Learning series – Some of best converting content is educational in nature. Plan out a series of learning videos, webinars, presentations and guides that educate prospects and solve their problems while incorporating your own products or services.

8. Social networking groups – One of the hottest places to find opinions on industry news and information is social networking groups. Look around and see what others are talking about, then take those conversations and create some B2B marketing content for prospects and customers alike. Start with LinkedIn groups, LinkedIn Answers, Quora and other groups.

9.Take questions from prospects and customers – One of the best resources for content ideas is your own audience. By gathering the needs and concerns of prospects and customers, you can start building an idea bank for content that addresses their questions and widens your content library.

10. Analytics – Keeping track of your web analytics gives you more data than how much traffic you receive – it gives you content marketing ideas. Consider what keywords bring in the most traffic or what sites refer the most traffic to your site or even conversion rates of your landing pages. All of these stats are prime areas to start building content that attracts and educates prospects for increased lead generation

11. Poll your employees – Your sales and customer service employees are on the front lines and know what prospects and customers want. They may even have insight as to what content works and what doesn’t. Put together a poll with questions that ask how you can improve your B2B marketing with engaging content that speaks to your customer’s needs.

12. Forums – With free open discussions, forums can give you a multitude of ideas for some content marketing opportunities. Start by looking at forums that relate to your industry, including those on B2B marketing or other business-related topics.

There you have it, 12 places to find content marketing inspiration and ideas for 2012. Use them to improve your B2B marketing and start the year off with some great content that focuses on improving your bottom line.

How do you find inspiration for your content marketing concepts? Do you have a great idea that should be added to this list? Share it in the comments.

So dig in, and have fun!

1. Mobile landing pages.
When you’re launching a mobile campaign — from an in-app ad, to display, or anything in between — that’s a good time to make sure you are serving up a mobile-optimized page designed to work on common smart phones. Mobile traffic should get mobile pages.

Mobile-optimized landing pages created in LiveBall

2. Mobile detection & routing. 
Sure, it’s easy to create a mobile page to use for traffic you know for certain will be mobile — like an in-app ad or something. But what about all that traffic from your regular campaigns that might be coming from mobile devices (especially your email campaigns!)? For key campaigns, set up logic to sense when traffic is coming to your landing page from a mobile device and automatically route the visitor over to a mobile-optimized version of the page. 

3. Go global.
Build rapport and capitalize on international growth opportunities by publishing pages in your user’s native tongue.

DHL localizes pages for over 150 countries

4. Be social.
Most of your landing pages are probably designed to capture a lead or drive sales through your e-commerce engine. But what about times when you want to get more fans, followers and friends? Design content pages to entice visitors to engage with you socially, and track the social conversion as a success metric. 

Overland Storage’s social contest landing page

5. Think dynamic.
Why serve up the same page content for everyone when you can serve up dynamic content that is relevant? Different headlines for different ads. Different images for different audience segments. Mobile-optimized page for mobile traffic. You can create one basic page and then extend it with dynamic content to ensure it is relevant for the audience that lands there. For pay-per-click landing pages, try dynamic content substitution for keywords where marketers populate the users search query in their landing page content. Cool stuff and often a nice conversion booster!

6. Segment.
Segmentation experiences are designed to engage and quickly move visitors into the conversion funnel. Interior pages reconfirm the offer and give audience-targeted content and messaging. Test segmentation by audience, offer, need or stage in buying cycle. 

Our customers segment to engage visitors

7. Directional cues. 
Try testing directional cues that visually guide the eye towards the form — these can be explicit, such as an arrow, or a slightly more subtle “implicit” directional cue, such as body positioning or direction of a person’s gaze.

8. Progressive profiling. 
Use landing page forms to build lead profiles and qualification over time. Try asking a few multiple choice questions on the landing page each time a lead returns for nurture fulfillment – usually from email marketing. Over time, you’ll build up valuable profiles for your sales team to use for qualification. 

9. QR code landing pages.
With QR codes we now have a way to give someone an easy, immediate call to action from anything people come into contact with (print ad, direct mail, window sticker, product insert, etc), and drive them into a relevant, mobile-optimized landing experience. 

10. Multi-step lead forms.
Long form? Try dividing relevant questions into two steps or more. For example, for an insurance quote ask 1. zip code, 2. number of employees, 3. name, email & phone. With multi-step experiences, content can “pay off” the previous click and encourage visitors to continue moving through the conversion funnel.

11. Multi-step lead forms + progress bar. According to a survey from Pit Stop Media 52% of online retails use some sort of progress bar during their checkout process, and among those, 80% use some sort of sense of action or “moving forward” indicator through arrows or next page links. A/B Test your multi-step process ‘with’ and ‘without’ a progress bar to determine impact on conversion rate.

Anthem’s multi-step quoting experience with progress bar

12 & 13. Spiff up your business card or resume.My business card links to the landing page above
Most business cards and resumes list a company’s home page URL. Why not engage with your connections in a more fun, polite, and exciting way? They took the time to visit your page, so send them to an experience that describes your company from a personal point of view. In a personalized experience, you can include your job description, white papers, favorite links, or a contact form.

14. Romance pages.
Often called “jump” or “splash” pages, these interstitial pages are intended to romance the visitor into moving further into the conversion funnel — these types of pages work especially well for subscription services. 

15. “Gate” assets.
Have a library of valuable white papers and reports that are free for download by the general public? Consider creating an asset “gating” strategy designed to capture lead and increase online lead conversions from organic web traffic. Once registration is complete, don’t burden repeat visitors with having to register twice. Instead, allow those who have previously converted immediate access to assets. Not sure if gating is worth discouraging people to peruse your site? Test with and without gates to determine the cost/benefit.

16. Or dont!
Consider allowing promotional material (such as a brochure) to be downloaded without requiring personal information. Or, for high-value assets, test a “try before you buy” option, giving access to an abstract prior to displaying your lead form.

17. Have a kiosk? 
Rather than have a standalone demo or cycled presentation running at your booth, try an interactive landing “experience” that captures leads for contests, giveaways, newsletter subscriptions and interactive demos. 

18. Grassroots marketing.
Making a memorable, feel-good campaign means exciting the public and getting them involved. True story: while waiting in line at an event, a woman (working for Infinity) asked me to partake in a sweepstakes. Prizes were presented on the tablet she was carrying, along with a form for contest entry. I entered and immediately received a confirmation email.  

19 & 20. Up-sell and cross-sell.
As you all know, the hardest sale — whether it be a free white paper or a high-ticket item — to a customer is the first one. With the first sale, you deliver on your promise and once you deliver on your promise, you establish a mutually-beneficial relationship. The customer gets what he or she wants and you get what you want. Also, once you’ve received a “yes” commitment from a customer, its easier to continue the positive pattern of continued “yeses.” Up-selling refers to when you offer an additional item or an “upgrade.” A shoe salesperson offering weather protectant for your new boots? Batteries, nail files, candy bars and gum in the checkout line? Classic up-sells! After securing a free site registration, try promoting your trial subscription on the thank you page. Or, cross-sell your email newsletter (Sign up for special offers!) while the visitor is shopping.

21 & 22. Quizzes and surveys.
Quizzes, assessments and surveys are an interesting offer that can be tested in any type of lead generation campaign. Value can be added to this offer by bundling a related white paper, report or on-demand webinar along with the quiz. 

23. Online proposals.
If you sell a complex product or service, it would be especially advantageous to create individualized selling paths to send to prospects. Try creating a personalized selling experience that includes a proposal, specific content, or an important download, and then email that specific URL right away. What prospect wouldn’t be impressed with that?  

24. Go virtual.
Go beyond traditional landing pages by presenting your message in more personal and innovative way — video spokespeople can help introduce your product or service, spice up your FAQ, or act as a tutor or guide. 

25. Co-branding.
Co-branded landing experiences give your partners opportunities for increased market visibility. Create online case studies, press releases and co-authored white papers and articles using templates designed for plug & play co-branding.

26. DM landing pages.
In terms of bang for the buck, direct marketing can still be one of the most effective ways of reaching your potential customers. Rather than send offline traffic to a one size fits all website, bridge offline (mailers, flyers, radio/tv spots, etc.) to online with tightly message and design-matched landing experiences. Campaign or creative-specific pages allow you to easily deliver targeted messaging across different channels — and you can test and optimize based on results.

27. Onsite “ad” landing pages.
Create onsite pop-up or lightboxed “ads” offering relevant product promotions on home and top-level site pages. Offer creative should testable, trackable and managed in real-time!

“Layer” ad landing page on JWatch.org

28. Get local. 
Use geo-location to detect what country, region, city or zip code a visitor is arriving from and use that to dynamically serve up localized content. A pleasure traveler searching from the great white north in the winter? Serve up images of palm trees and sand. Offer a regional service? Serve up targeted content about local branches. 

29. Got chat?
If you offer customers live online support or “chat” on your website, try testing this feature on your landing pages as well. Use behavioral tracking to tag the “chat” action as a soft conversion or to measure the interest and effectiveness of the feature.

30. Conversion-focused microsites.
A website must be all things to all visitors. But a microsite can deliver a highly differentiated subset of information to a highly targeted audience. Test and optimize your microsite experiences for improved lead and transactional conversions.

31. Informational microsites.
Create multi-page, navigable user experiences to deliver rich, topic or campaign-specific content. Utilize SEO best practices to maximize your microsite’s reach. And, don’t forgot to include your contact form or lead generation offer, such as a relevant white paper or report.

The Centre’s conversion rates increased from 4% to as much as 19% by moving from single hand-coded page experiences to content-rich microsites in LiveBall.

32. Get personal.
Use subscriber information to populate landing pages from email traffic, or try substituting different forms based on conditions. For example, give returning, non-converting visitors a shorter form or pre-populating forms with known information.

33. & 34. Create and test tab landing pages in Facebook.
Did you know that testing in Facebook can be as easy and as straightforward as testing standing landing pages? Well, it can! Pulling in Facebook-sized pages via an iframe is becoming more popular as companies become increasingly “social” on the web. Maximize the impact of welcome, contest, informational and offer tabs by A/B and MVT testing within the apps.

35. A/B Testing. A/B Split testing in LiveBall
Have landing pages, but aren’t testing? Time to get started mining your diamonds! A/B testing requires less traffic, tests fewer variations and typically helps you find big winners and huge lifts.

Found your diamonds? Its time to polish them with multivariate testing (see #36). 

36. MVT Testing.
Start polishing your diamonds with multivariate — testing variations of fixed elements to find the best “combination” of elements like headline, content and imagery.

Code-free MVT testing

37. A/B & MVT.
If you have a lot of online traffic driving to your landing pages you may want to consider running a MVT test within your A/B test. So, how does this work? Decide on an A/B that is very “apples to oranges”. For example, testing a single landing page against a multi-page experience like a microsite or a conversion path. Within each of these tests run a high impact MVT test (think headline or imagery) to find winning elements within a page. Let your landing page platform do the heavy lifting so you can focus on what’s being testing rather than how its being tested.

38. Wizard (or “assistant”).
Create multi-step, interactive user experiences designed to deliver a customized response or recommendation, based on provided answers. We’ve seen this work best with online quotes or booking offers.

39. Improve quality.
Landing pages create leads. Hot leads, cold leads, luke-warm leads….all kinds of leads. Use qualifying questions to grade and score lead value. Make sure burning hot leads are delivered.

40. Track call conversions.
There will always be people who prefer to pick up the phone and talk to you directly; usually they are “hotter” and more likely to purchase. Make sure you have call tracking in place on your landing pages so conversions are accurately attributed. Test the visibility and placement of the phone number to maximize inbounds. 

41. e-Commerce “warming” landing page.
Many shopping cart experiences are sub-par and difficult to improve, however, warming pages can provide significant lift within e-commerce experiences. Pre-cart warming pages can help visitors see more value in the product and brand behind it. Try inserting a warming page between paid search ad and catalog/product pages to improve click-thorough and completed transactions. 

American Greetings decreased CPA by 20% with warming pages

42. Website testing via iframe.Website testing with LiveBall
Test entire web pages or sections of your pages within an iframe (a separate “inner” web page that can be pulled into your “outer” web page so the two appear to be one unified page) for ongoing optimization of your site content, forms, offers, etc. Real-time results gives you immediate visibility into what’s working and what’s not.

43. PURL landing pages.
Catch more conversions from your direct mail by using personalized urls (PURLs) and corresponding landing pages. Remember to pre-populate form and page content to increase relevancy and reduce workload for the visitor. Strong message-match and creative continuity is crucial.

44. Optimize for Google Instant Preview.
Review your landing pages for 5 key instant preview considerations: 1. relevancy to the searcher 2. brand visibility 3. important content above the fold 4. interesting design 5. scalability/perceived ease of use.

45. Social white papers.
You may or may not be familiar with the socialization of white papers, reports and best practice guides, but here at ion we have experimented with adding social and interactive features to documents that are typically pretty static. Social white papers allow you to measure reader engagement and connect with the reader beyond the initial conversation. In addition to being super cool, when linked to social landing pages allow for networking opportunities with other readers and the white paper author via a comments widget or “tweet this” functionality.

Social white paper and landing pages in LiveBall

46. Add (7) interactive WOW features (see 47-52)
Add rich, layered and interactive motion content to your pages to help you add the wow factor your competitors are lacking. Rather than spending exorbitant amounts of money on custom Flash or javascript, utilize a landing page platform that empowers you to make beautiful, sophisticated pages with lots of “wow” — no code or development resources needed.

47. Tabbed Content.
Try using tabbed content or an image rotator for showcasing product and service features.

48. Accordions.
Maximize space and and offer an interactive way to display and control large amounts of content (these are especially useful within mobile experiences).

49. Content rotators.
Feature testimonials and reviews using interactive rotator functionality.

50. Layered content.
Try layering content over images, without outsourcing to a designer.

51. Lightboxes.
Or, trigger forms, special offers, or additional information to be displayed in lightboxes.

52. Social widgets.
Last, but not least, add social widgets allowing visitors to ‘Like’ your page on Facebook, share on Google+ or tweet from their handle. 

53. Get feedback.
Use landing pages to gather customer feedback on your product or service. Feedback collected can be used to identify strengths and improve upon weaknesses. Ask permission to use feedback to create testimonials, case studies and social proof.

54. Capitalize on access-restricted pages.
Rather than deny a visitor access to premium content, use landing pages to increase sign-ups for member-only content. If premium content is a paid offering, consider testing pricing and offer testing on these “access” landing pages.

55. Reinvent the template.
Find ways to makeover your standard templates and find new and engaging templatized experiences for your whole team to leverage. 

The evolution of the template

Whew! So there you have it, 55 ideas to help reenergize your landing page testing and optimization. As we move into the 3rd week of the new year, we encourage you to stay creative, committed and inspired. Cheers to 2012!

Simply having a QR code though isn’t enough- it has to lead to a specific landing page and, more specifically, a good landing page.  To boost conversions by using QR codes, it’s important that your QR code landing page is providing visitors with a good user experience.  Let’s take a look at five ways to provide a better QR code landing page experience for your visitors:

Ways to master QR Code landing pages

• Mobile Optimized – Mobile web users are on the go and that means they don’t want to waste time resizing your page to fit their screen. To make your QR landing page more appealing, make sure that it automatically sends QR code scanners from mobile phones to a mobile landing page.  Visitors are going to lose interest as soon as they have to waste time pinching your screen to resize it. Test your mobile page on all sorts of devices and applications to make sure it provides everyone with a good experience.  

• Simple is best– Smart phones help users scan your code and seamlessly go to your QR code landing page, but if your content is long-winded and full of fluff, you’ll see less conversions and more abandoned sessions.  That said, simple doesn’t mean boring or unimpressive!  Your page should be exciting and interesting, but simple in the sense that it’s focused on one thing. Keep your copy short and sweet and use strong call to actions to capture the attention of busy users and gain higher conversion rates. 

• Conversion focused – Once someone has come to your QR code landing page, there should be a clear path to conversion.  Whether it’s a sale, a form, or watching a video, keep your page focused on getting visitors to that point.  Since most visitors are likely to be mobile users it’s even more important that you focus on asking your visitors for only one action. And please keep in mind how scary a ten field form can look on a phone- make it easy for your visitors to convert! 

• Message match – If your QR landing page shows different messaging from the scanned code, you’ve got a problem. Keeping your landing page messaging and imagery consistent with the QR code ad helps reassure visitors that they are in the right place and it builds trust. If you click on an ad about a discount, you want to land on a page that clearly explains how to get that discount. It’s post-click marketing 101 and a crucial piece of the QR code landing page recipe: message match matters!

• Test and test some more – Testing is a critical part of any marketing campaign and the same principal applies for QR code landing pages too. It’s the best way to learn what your visitors like and what helps to increase conversions. You won’t really know if a new call to action or imagery will make a difference in your conversion rate unless you try it.  Try testing: 
  • Messaging
  • Imagery
  • Segmentation
  • Call-to-actions

What are your QR code landing page tips? Any experiences that have helped you discovered new best practices for mobile landing pages? Leave a comment below and share!

This brings me to the subject of today’s post: 2012 landing page optimization resolutions for improved landing page conversion rates. It’s time to look at some old practices and how some belated New Year’s resolutions will improve upon them.

Landing page optimization mistakes to fix in 2012

1) Not testing – I see this often and it’s something that needs to stop in 2012! Testing is as critical to your landing pages as well-written copy and compelling imagery. If you don’t do it, you’ll never fully understand your landing page’s full potential.

Resolution for 2012 – As part of a fully integrated conversion optimization strategy, start thinking about testing, testing, testing.  Testing isn’t scary and with LiveBall landing page software you can run A/B and multivariate tests with code.

2) Running one landing page at a time – Speaking of testing your landing pages, it’s not ok to test sequentially. Sequential testing is testing A, turn it off and then turning on B and testing it. This pause and play approach is only going to delay your ability to identify your optimal landing page.

Resolution for 2012 – Stop sequential testing and start testing your pages at the same time. When you run them side-by-side, you’ll get a true measurement of which works best for your landing pages.

3) Impatience –Although some understand the importance of testing, many don’t wait for the data to come in.  Depending on the amount of traffic your landing pages receive and the number of things you are testing, it might take a little time to get results.

Resolution for 2012 – Wait for tests to reach statistical confidence. It can be very tempting to stop a test short, but waiting for statistical confidence will help you walk away with truly proven new best practices. 

4) Sending mixed messaging – Have you ever click on an ad for red widgets and you end up on a page that’s not even remotely about red widgets, in fact, it’s about blue widgets? Now imagine how perplexing and frustrating that is to your audience. Mixed messages do more than confuse, they turn away potential leads.

Resolution for 2012 – Make sure your ad messaging is the same as your landing page. Message match is a critical part of any effective conversion optimization strategy and it will keep your landing pages converting and your readers happy.

5) Distractions – Landing pages have one core purpose – converting prospects into leads. I’ve seen many pages that go off on tangents in their messaging or include distracting navigation, links or ads that make me want to leave before I fill out my information.

Resolution for 2012 – Conversion optimization 101: everything on your page should direct visitors to your conversion point. Remove any additional links; navigation, ads or messaging that distracts them from taking that next step. Do this and watch your conversion rates go up in 2012.

Landing page optimization is all about converting prospects into leads. What business doesn’t like that?! Start 2012 off right and set some resolutions that will increase the conversions of your landing pages.

What resolutions have you made for the New Year? Leave a comment below and share!

A – A/B (& MVT)

Any good conversation about landing pages won’t last long before someone mentions a test idea. There’s no way to know for sure what will work for your audience and your business unless you test it. A/B and multivariate testing are two great testing methods that will help you improve your landing page performance.

Landing pages from a LiveBall customer testing images.

B – Buttons 

Boring, painful landing page buttons might be hurting your conversion rates.  Instead of just labeling a button with “submit” try saying “get the free whitepaper” or something more enticing that reminds visitors why they are clicking.

C –Call tracking

There will always be those people who prefer to pick up the phone and talk to you directly and that’s okay – that is as long as you’re also tracking call conversion from your landing pages.  Check out this case study about how Paychex uses call tracking with LiveBall.

D – Directional cues 

Directional cues can help guide a visitor’s attention towards your form or whatever else you want your visitors to see.  Not all directional cues are as explicit as an arrow; they can be as subtle as images of people looking towards your form.

This is a great example of color being used as a directional cue. The calls to actions are brightly colored pods, whereas other areas are muted in duller colors.

E – Evaluate your metrics

Your page analytics and metrics will tell you where you can improve your page performance through testing.  For instance, a high bounce rate might be a sign that there is a mismatch between the message of the ads driving traffic to your page and the message of your page.

Just two of the many customizable gauges LiveBall provides to help you evaluate your metrics.

F – Forms

Capturing visitor data is a critical part of any successful landing page program.  Keep your forms short and make sure that the information you’re asking for is proportional to whatever you’re giving away.  For each field after name, company name, phone number and email ask whether the information is worth a lower conversion rate.

G – Goal oriented

Is your page goal-oriented, and does it guide visitors to a clear conversion point?  Whatever it is – a sale or a form completion – make sure your landing page clearly and logically leads someone to this point without distractions like links to other pages.

H – Headline

Does your headline make it clear why it’s beneficial for your visitors to spend more time on your landing page? You only have a few moments to convince visitors to stay on your page and learn more so make sure that your headline is top-notch.

I – Integrated

Your page should be ‘integrated’ in two ways: data collection and the visitor’s experience with whatever happens next. Make sure that you’re leveraging the information that you collect from your landing pages in your nurture program or whatever comes next.  It’s also important for the visitor’s experience with your company that there is a natural bridge between the landing page and the next step.  Whether it’s a phone call or email, it should reference whatever drove that your visitor to the landing page in the first place. 

J – JavaScript

Landing pages can become even more engaging and exciting by using JavaScript to add dynamic content. ion’s landing page management and optimization software LiveBall comes with accordions, image rotators, social media buttons and many more widgets that you can add to pages without ever touching the actual JavaScript code.

K – Keywords

For PPC landing pages, using your main keywords in your landing page copy will help visitors feel more trusting of your page.  Seeing the keyword they searched helps them know that they’re in the right spot.

L – Leverage tools like LiveBall

I just couldn’t resist! Leveraging the right tool – like LiveBall – can help you make landing pages in matter of hours instead of weeks. Check out this post about the different ways LiveBall customers are making their landing pages do cool things.

M – Mobile

A mobile landing page created with LiveBall and without code!More and more people are using their phones to go online.  Are you serving up mobile landing pages or are you losing out on visitors who are not interested in pinching at your page to resize it?

N – No code

You don’t need to know code or be an IT whiz to make the best landing pages, all you need is LiveBall. LiveBall’s WYSIWYG editors make it possible to add everything from bulleted text to images and conditional logic to your landing pages without ever actually needing code. 

O – Optimized

Optimizing your landing pages is really just the fancy way of saying that you’re always testing.  The only way to know if your page could be doing better or whether a new template might help is to try it out.  The best landing pages are always being tested and updated.

P – Progressive profiling

Put your forms to work and instead of just collecting the same information over and over again start building prospect profiles by asking a new question or two each time someone returns to one of your landing pages.  Nurture programs are a great place to use progressive profiling. 

Q – QR codes

Using landing pages with QR codes provides the unique opportunity to turn offline experiences into online ones.  You have complete creative freedom in shaping that online experience, plus you get the benefit of tracking exactly how well your offline ads really work.

R – Relevant

The best landing pages are relevant. They offer something that’s valuable and interesting to your target audience.  Whether it’s a guide, whitepaper or your actual product - your offer should fulfill some sort of need or desire.  Put your testimonials to work like eMusic!

S – Social proof 

It’s a lot easier to sign up for something or to a buy a product when we know that others have done so and are happy about their decisions – that’s why it can help to add a testimonial near a call to action.  Social proof like testimonials help build a visitor’s trust and, similarly, seeing your twitter feed or social media buttons help let people know that you’re real and reachable.

T – Targeted

The best landing pages are targeted and specific.  They are ad specific and traffic source specific so that they speak directly and precisely to the needs and expectations of their visitors. Even if your offer is the same, visitors from an email will have different expectations for your page than those from a PPC ad. Visitors from the email had a chance to read more about the offer and they are more likely looking to convert now, whereas someone from a PPC ad probably needs to be convinced a little more still. 

U – User experience

Providing a positive experience is one of the top goals of your landing page.  Make it easy for people to get want they want from your page.  Don’t frustrate them with a confusing layout or several competing call to actions. Make them feel welcomed and comfortable with good design.

V – Variations

How else could you write that headline?  Is there another layout that might work better or what about adding segmentation? There’s never just one way to do something and with landing pages you’ll quickly realize that the variations you could create are endless.  Explore and test those endless options – you never know which one might triple your conversions.

W – Widgets

Widgets are applications that can be added to a landing page to make it more dynamic - they are a great way to add “wow” to your landing page. For instance, you could add a social widget to your landing page that shows a live feed from your twitter account. 

X – XML

Okay, so x was hard… However, even if you don’t know what XML, is your landing page campaigns are benefiting from it!  All of that visitor data you’re collecting has to go somewhere, and XML is a standard data structure used by applications and sites to share data.

Y – You can do it!

Starting a landing page program is one of the best things you can do for your online marketing ROI.  Once you have the right tools and the right team in place, the best way to get started is to just try something out!  The beauty of online marketing is that you’ll know quickly whether your idea is working or if you should launch a challenger page.

Z  – Zero in on your target audience. 

Understanding your target audience and your landing page visitors is at the heart of all successful landing page strategies. Don’t create a landing page thinking only about what you want from your visitors. Think about what they want and need from your page.  Let their needs and preferences guide your decisions about what should and shouldn’t be on your landing page.  All of those data points in your analytics represent the reactions of real people to your page and to your offer- don’t get so caught up in the data and design that you forget the human element! 

Here are five tips to help you effectively plan and run landing page A/B tests:

1) Know your testing type

Just like how investors have varying degrees of risk tolerance, marketers and organizations tend to have predispositions or cultural norms that affect testing.  Do you just want results, or do you want to know exactly where those results are coming from?  The upside of testing two widely different landing pages is that you can find big winners, but you can also find big losers.  If the two pages are completely different however, you won’t know for sure why a page won or lost.   There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but deciding whether you want that knowledge or just the results will affect your testing plans.

2) Create a test plan  

The best results and insights come from tests that are carefully planned and hypothesized.  This doesn’t mean that you should spend forever planning out a test; it just means you should fully understand what you’re testing and, even more importantly, why you’re testing it.  Getting a plan in place that defines objectives, traffic, baseline results and your next steps will help keep your testing program on target even when results get crazy.

3) Statistical confidence

Run tests until they reach statistical confidence.  Even though you may have what looks like a clear winner right out of the gate, wait until a test reaches statistical confidence before declaring any victors. Landing page testing is typically tested to somewhere between 80-99% confidence, depending upon a variety of factors. With LiveBall, ion’s landing page management platform, you can choose your level of confidence and let LiveBall automatically declare a winner, or you can evaluate real-time testing gauges to declare winners yourself.    

4) Be bold

Beware of the never-ending A/B test! Alternatives that are too similar may not deliver a statistically significant result within a reasonable period of time, sending your testing into a state of paralysis. When you find yourself in a test wave that appears to be a statistical draw, call it as such and move on.  Every time you form new test idea, take a step back to look at the alternatives and ask yourself whether you are testing something of significance.

5) Innovation then iteration

A/B testing is a powerful method for increasing conversion rates, but you can get even better results if you plan a test with two phases: innovation then iteration. Start by testing bold, innovative landing pages with A/B testing and then refine the winning page with multivariate testing (MVT).  Think of A/B testing as a way to find diamonds, and MVT as a way to polish them.

Using these five tips, you’ll be ready to plan effective, valuable landing page tests. Happy testing! 

1. Landing pages, microsites, conversion paths, multi-step, interactive and mobile-ready experiences! With LiveBall, you have the flexibility to easily create so many different types of experiences, testing experiences should be at the top of your list.

2. Segmentation experiences are designed to engage visitors and quickly move visitors into the conversion funnel. Interior pages reconfirm the offer and give audience-targeted content and messaging. Test segmentation by audience, offer, need or stage in buying cycle. 

3. Improve message-match and relevancy with keyword-targeted headlines, content & imagery. Try using dynamic substitution of elements to target your message to specific audience segments, and change user experience (e.g. mobile-optimized pages for mobile users) for a more relevant presentation of your landing pages.

4. Does human imagery provide more relevance for visitors or do they prefer a product shot? A/B to find out what types of images influence conversion.

5. Buttons: size, color, shape, click cue, and of course, the all-mighty call-to-action. LiveBall’s code-free, script-free, in-page interface makes full-factorial MVT of these elements a breeze.

6. Try testing directional cues that visually guide the eye towards the form — these can be explicit, such as an arrow, or a slightly more subtle “implicit” directional cue, such as body positioning or direction of a person’s gaze.

7. Forms: single column, 2-column, form fields, multi-step; there are many opportunities to test and optimize your forms for higher conversions. Add highly effective logic to forms — without developer support — with LiveBall’s conditional rule sets.

8. For e-commerce, test product presentation and supporting information – feature vs. benefit-oriented copy, product or box shots versus human/lifestyle imagery, size and placement of pricing, etc.

9. Test size and placement of point-of-action assurances such as privacy policy, guarantees, promotional offers, etc.

10. Test reviews, testimonials and social elements (for example: Facebook ‘Like’) to gauge conversion influence.

As mentioned in my previous post, Marketing software & other digital strategies for 2012, 2012 is an opportunity for a new beginning. This means not only updating your marketing plan with effective ways to boost lead generation and sales, but aggressively tackling tactical landing page testing. 

Building on that, I thought it was time to build another word cloud and see how our focus has evolved over the past 3 years.

Here’s what came out of the Wordle for our current blog feed: 

What changed?

Looking at our Wordle from three years ago and the one from today, there seems to be a distinct difference – our focus words have changed. Our previous Wordle had a focus on words, including:

• Message
• Marketing
• Post-click
• Landing

From our new Wordle, here’s the top 3 that stand out to me:

• Landing page – Although our previous word cloud included landing and page, they didn’t really standout together. Now, they do stand together and I think it’s indicative of our laser focus of providing resources on helping you improve your landing page development.
  
  
• Testing – Another of the more prominent words is testing. With every landing page you create, you need to focus on making it the best at converting your audience into leads. This is why we provide valuable solutions and resources for A/B and multivariate testing.
  
  
• Conversion – It’s the goal end result of any landing page, so it stands to reason that conversion is a term we discuss in great depth on our blog. From outlining conversion optimization strategies to sharing landing page best practices, you can rest assured that we will continue to have a heavy focus on discussing all things conversion. 

In looking at how our word cloud has changed over the past three years, I’d say our blog (like our business) has successfully evolved to stay ahead of industry innovations and continue to provide the insight and resources you need to drive landing page conversions.

In the spirit of looking back, how has your landing page program changed over the past three years? Please share your thoughts below in the comments!

We’d like to share seven of 2011’s more interesting landing page requests and how they were implemented on LiveBall pages. Each of these requests have a common goal – improve the user experience and create a lift in conversions!

1) “We want to know what type of smart phones our mobile respondents use, and optimize for these audiences.”

No problem! LiveBall supports “server scriptlets”, which are portables snippets of custom javascript. We have a mobile-detection scriptlet that identifies a user browsing on a smart phone by their user-agent string. A page-level advanced rule (aka ‘no code’ logic that you can easily apply to a page) runs the scriptlet and, voila, the rest happens automatically. The mobile user is “tagged” with the type of smart phone they use and they are immediately directed to a mobile-optimized experience. In LiveBall, reporting and performance gauges can be used to see the type of smart phones your audience is using, and you can optimize further based on this valuable data!

2) “The lead must be 13 years or older. We need collect birthdate on our forms, and we don’t want to add another field to collect age too.”

Doable. A server scriptlet is used to calculate the lead’s age based on the birthday they input on the form. The scriptlet does the work, returning a true/false value that indicates if the lead is above thirteen. Based on the value returned, the lead can be included in an immediate data export to the customer’s back-end system and simultaneously driven into a confirmation page. If the respondent isn’t above thirteen years of age, advanced rules are used to exclude this respondent from being included in a data export and they’re driven into a “Sorry” page which explains they’re not eligible for the offer. Extra form field eliminated! Read the full real-life landing page story! 

Adding conditional logic to LiveBall landing pages is as easy as filling in the blanks!

3) “We need to look-up our Region ID based on the lead’s zip code.”

Sure, sounds good. You can upload a “look-up table” of relational data to your LiveBall console. The table is formatted so that a “key” maps to a relational value. In this instance, the key is the zip code and the relational value is the corresponding Region ID. A server scriptlet is used to “grab” the value from the look-up table when the respondent enters their zip code on the form. It happens in real-time, upon form submission, and the Region ID value becomes available to include in a data export, or to be used an advanced rule condition to distribute email notifications to the sales field. This gets the lead to the appropriate sales representative in near real-time. Pretty slick. Look-up tables can be used correlate any key to a piece of relational data. Read the full real-life landing page story! 

An example look-up table. Look-up tables are completely customizable and can be used to correlate any key data point to another relational data point.

4) ”We’re going to return a lot of content from our API, and need to display it on LiveBall pages in real-time.”

If the API returns content in an XML response, this is totally feasible. In this example, LiveBall pings the customer’s web service with a piece of data, like the respondent’s zip code, via an http POST. In turn, the web service provides applicable content within an XML response. LiveBall supports dynamic insertion, using what we call “@@substitution”, so the content returned can immediately be displayed on the landing experience simply by plugging @@ followed by the data name into a content editor. Targeted content managed by a third-party vendor can be displayed immediately, assuring the most current and relevant information is served-up to the respondent. LiveBall can integrate with almost any API that can receive data via an http POST and return content or error messages via an XML response.

5) “We want to pre-populate our forms with data that our vendor manages.”

Interesting! Based on the lead’s IP address, a third-party vendor our customer works may manage the respondent’s personal information in their database. This data can be used to pre-populate their LiveBall form, making the conversion funnel quicker and easier for the respondent to complete. LiveBall automatically collects the respondent’s IP address as a core field, and a page-level advanced rule runs a custom server scriptlet that calls the vendor’s “IP API” with it.  A second server scriptlet is used to save the data that the API returns into LiveBall data collection fields, which pre-populates the LiveBall form! We’re excited for this campaign to launch next week - can’t wait to see if this improves the customer’s conversion rate!

6) “We need our map application to find locations closest to the respondent, without asking them where they live.”

Can do! LiveBall knows the respondent’s location based on their internet service provider. With a certain degree of accuracy, the respondent’s country, region/state, city and postal code are available as soon as the page loads. This “core data” can be used for numerous cool things, like creating geo-targeted experiences, and definitely came in handy for this request. The customer’s map tool was pulled into LiveBall via an i-frame editor. LiveBall’s i-frame editors enable you to pull external applications into your landing pages simply by pasting the source URL into the editor. To control this particular map application, the customer was able to append the respondent’s state (@@GeoRegion) to the source URL of the application. This simple solution creates super-targeted pages that automatically serve-up locations close to the respondent! You can pull any external application into LiveBall via an i-frame editor and test the content around it for optimization.

A simple, one-step process for adding external applications to a LiveBall landing page.

7) “We need a (5) digit promocode that increases sequentially to dynamically display on our LiveBall pages.”

Alright, we can help. LiveBall generates a “Respondent ID” value when a respondent clicks on a traffic source URL, and this “core field” happens to be sequential. A custom snippet of javascript can append “x” amount of leading zeroes to the Respondent ID, depending on if the ID consists of 1-5 digits, and saves the returned value into a LiveBall data collection field. The javascript runs on page load, using a simple advanced-rule, and this makes the promocode value available for dynamic substitution right on the page. In this example, the conversion metric on the page is a phone call, and the page encourages the lead to have the promocode available when they call in. The promocode is used for analysis around the time between a respondent visiting a landing page and making the phone call. Valuable data! 

These are just a few examples that come to mind! The end-goal of each of these requests was to create and test targeted pages that potentially improve the user experience, thus improving conversion rate. Lots of customers did lots of cool things in LiveBall this year.

Have a story you’d like to share? Email us about it! We always love to hear how you’re using LiveBall to create amazing landing experiences for your respondents. We can’t wait to see what our customers have in store for 2012!

If your existing marketing mix consists of traditional strategies that fail to achieve optimal results, it’s time to make the most of the new year and add more digital marketing to your overall marketing plan.

This doesn’t mean you should completely replace what you have now, but do look at how to integrate digital strategies such as new marketing software or other tools into your current plan.

With this in mind, let’s see what digital strategies are in line for prime results going into 2012:

• Get more social – Many marketers already understand the benefits of integrating social into their marketing mix. In the new year, kick your social marketing efforts up a notch. Find new channels to interact with your customers and potential customers. For those who haven’t gone down the path, it’s a good time to add it in. Don’t just look at creating a profile on a social network and spam out messaging about your product – engage and listen to what prospects want, then work on using your marketing software to generate qualified leads.

• Think content – Today’s buyer is much more savvy, and thanks to the abundance of information available online, they’re much more informed as well. This means you need to develop and nurture relationships with prospects through relevant and educational content that keeps your audience’s attention and motivates them to come back for more. This includes content, such as:
  • White papers
  • Blog posts
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Special reports
  • Email campaigns
  • And more…When they’re ready to finally make their purchase, feed them content that brings them to your doorstep. 

• Test often – As you’re updating your marketing plan for the New Year, don’t forget to pencil in space for testing and possible change. Although we don’t look for negative results, we need to prepare for it. Test your marketing campaigns often with A/B and multivariate testing and leverage your marketing software to identify areas of opportunity. If you encounter elements of campaigns that don’t convert, change them until you find the right mix that drives more conversions.

• Stick with tactics that performed – With a new year just around the corner, be sure to keep successful marketing elements in your overall strategy. What worked in 2011 could help you in 2012 – in other words: don’t turn your back on tactics that produced in 2011. 

• Landing page solutions – With a new year and a new budget, it’s a good time to bring in some new tools, including new or improved landing page software. This doesn’t mean bring in the shiniest toy, but instead, research to identify proven landing page solutions that can increase productivity and leads, while decreasing costs and inefficiency.

Going into 2012, you have the opportunity for a new beginning. That means updating your marketing plan with effective ways to boost lead generation, while removing outdated and ineffective techniques. Spoiler alert: the digital age is here and it’s time to add some new elements of it to your marketing mix.

What digital marketing strategies are you looking to bring in with the New Year? Leave a comment below and share!

Based on what worked and what didn’t from this year, put down new goals and strategies for the upcoming year. Call it a fresh start!

To evaluate and determine the effectiveness of your new plans for the year, let’s take a look at some simple measurements to see if you’re on the right path to B2B marketing success:

Measuring B2B Marketing Strategy Effectiveness

Yearly Measurements:

Integration with B2B marketing goals – Measuring your total marketing effectiveness relies on how you add all elements into your marketing mix. Start with overall marketing goals, then create strategies around those goals to put you on the right path as you look toward the New Year.

Integrate with sales – More and more businesses have embrace sales and marketing alignment, and there’s good reason for that: It works.  As you prepare for a new year, it’s imperative that your B2B marketing strategy includes integration with your sales force.  By working more collaboratively with sales and funneling leads through the proper channels, your company will realize shorter sales cycles and drive additional revenues.

Content plan measurement – Content is a core requirement for effective B2B marketing and it’s never too early to get started on your strategy. Don’t forget to plan out content that ties into your overall marketing goals – this means it needs to help lead generation and build relationships with your target audience.

Competitor analysis – As you move from one year to another, don’t forget to keep an eye on your competition. Analyze the competitive landscape on an ongoing basis to identify strengths and weaknesses. Then use that information develop points of differentiation that can position your business as the industry leader.

Quarterly Measurements:

Now that you’ve put together some yearly measurements, let’s see what you need to monitor on a quarterly basis for your B2B marketing plan.

Web metrics – Based on your B2B marketing strategy, gathering web metrics for your website, such as conversion rates, visits, keyword referrals and referring site traffic, can be key to evolving your online efforts. These metrics can tell you many things, including:

• • The effectiveness of your content strategy
  • Your engagement with prospects and customers, alike
  • How receptive your audience is to your product messaging
  • Conversion ratios and if there’s a need for changes to your marketing strategy
  • Where do your prospects find you, including search engines, social networks and even offline events, like conferences

Email metrics – As part of an effective email marketing campaign, your bread and butter is understanding how to use the data to influence your future campaigns. Look at statistics like open rates, click-through rates, and other metrics. Also, look at how your email messaging works with your landing pages and content marketing efforts to determine if the visits from your email efforts are driving conversions.

Landing page conversions – Building landing pages is a crucial element to a successful marketing program, but if they don’t convert, there’s a real problem. As part of your quarterly audit (note: monitoring conversion rates must be done on an ongoing basis), take an in-depth look at the conversion rates on your landing pages. Are there commonalities in the landing pages that are performing throughout the quarter? What pages have an opportunity to convert more effectively?

Arriving at the end of a year is the time to evaluate your progress over the past 12 months and see what needs adjustment for the upcoming year. By breaking up what needs doing into goals, objectives and strategies, you’ll avoid feeling overwhelmed and increase the effectiveness of your B2B marketing mix.

What measurements do you cover at the end of the year? Leave a comment below and share!

Message Match, Message Match, and Message Match!! It’s one of the most important ways you can build trust with your landing page visitors and increase your conversion rate. Your landing page message and promise should match and answer the ad driving traffic to it. –Mary  

The best landing pages are relevant and specific. They are message-specific, device-specific, and audience-specific. –Susan  

Use landing page forms to build lead profiles and qualification over time. We’re using progressive profiling where we ask a few multiple choice questions on the landing page each time a lead returns for nurture fulfillment – usually from email marketing. Over time, we build up valuable profiles for our sales team to use for qualification. And prospects are willing to answer the three required questions! They convert at over 75%! –Justin

Coming in to 2012, I am most excited about bridging the gap between offline and online with QR codes. With QR codes we now have a way to give someone an easy, immediate call to action from anything they come into contact with (print ad, direct mail, window sticker, product insert, etc), and drive them into a relevant, mobile-optimized landing experience. I’m crazy about the marriage of QR codes and landing pages, because I think we’re going to see an explosion of usage in the next 12 months, and now it is easier than ever for marketers to create compelling mobile-optimized landing pages. –Anna

Be ready for both mobile and desktop visitors from QR code scans. Most people scan QR codes with smartphones, but people can use their iPads to scan too.  Plus, if someone saves the link for later they may come back on their desktop. –Alexandra

Use directional cues on your page to help drive your visitors attention towards conversion actions. - Shaun

Following up on directional cues, think about adding explicit (obvious) directional cues to your pages like arrows, finger pointing, etc. and implicit (subtle) ones too such as color, white space, directional “gaze” or positioning of subjects. –Jessica  

Make sure your landing page has a clearly, defined call to action that makes it easy for your visitors to convert. –Brian

Have a strong test plan and methodology and stick to it if you can. You’ll learn more with every test, and use that knowledge to influence your next test. When you do launch a test, commit to letting that test run its course until you have a statistically significant result. But, mostly importantly, NEVER QUIT TESTING! –Audrey 

Optimize landing pages for each traffic source.  Not all traffic sources behave the same way. Visitors from an email are going to expect different things from your landing page than someone who clicked on a display banner. –Asa

Think mobile – more and more people are using their phones to go online.  Don’t miss out on leads because they get frustrating pinching to resize your landing page! –Clement

Image Optimization! Optimizing images is important because it can significantly slow your page load time if not done mindfully. Make sure you find the right balance between the image quality and image file size. –Marcia

Use incentives with caution.  Sure, freebies and other incentives can bring in the lead volume, but they can hurt your lead quality. Choose your landing page offer carefully to ensure it is something that your prospect base would be interested in so you don’t end up with a database full of leads that aren’t sales-worthy.  Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity! –Erika

Work with a tool that makes your life easier and helps you scale with the speed you need to. Use landing page optimization technology that gives you the flexibility and agility to quickly create hundreds of pages so you can focus on testing, getting to know your audience and optimizing for it. That’s the only way you’ll take control of your ROI. –Karen

Leverage “thank you” pages to further engage respondents with your brand. Offer links to social sites, blogs or cross-sell! –Faith

Keep lead generation forms above the fold!  Don’t make people search for a way to convert; make it easy and obvious for them. –David

Keep your lead generation forms as short as possible.  Ask yourself if the new form field is worth a possibly lower conversion rate. –Sandy 

Test everything! You won’t know what is going to raise your conversion rate until you test it. –Erik

Apples to oranges tests are important. Try testing completely new layouts and then refine the winner with multivariate testing. –Debbie

And of course (we just always have LiveBall top of mind!), a few of our tips are specific to our landing page management platform, LiveBall:

Take advantage of LiveBall’s “Save creative-wide” feature! This option will save you so much time because it allows you to save edits creative-wide. It’s very helpful for landing experiences with multiple pages that need the same update like a new phone number or a footer change. –Jessica

My landing page tip of the New Year would be to utilize the MVT tool. It’s helped clients really zero in on what gets them the most conversions and then use that knowledge to create even better landing pages. –Shana

Makes pages that wow! I love Liveball’s ready-made widgets.  They make it possible for you to quickly and easily add accordions, tabbed content and slideshows to your pages for an instantaneous ‘wow’ factor. –Matthew

Take advantage of the rich text editor – it will make content editing so much easier! –Howell

Use LiveBall to make webinar and event registration pages.  You can easily integrate the data with other event management platforms and you’ll be able to make branded, customized and user-friendly registration pages! –Stephanie

Scan to learn about making QR code landing pages with LiveBall

With such an extended reach, businesses are eager to add these codes to their marketing mix, but many don’t understand how to get started. With those businesses in mind, I’ve put together five excellent ways businesses and organizations have put QR codes to use in their marketing mix. 

Here are 5 Excellent QR Code Uses to Inspire Marketing Opportunities:       

1) Give a discount – I believe it’s important to reward clients or a prospective client with special offers from time to time. Try putting QR codes in your print and online advertising for discounts on products or services.

Examples might include: Free consulting sessions, markdowns on professional services with a purchase of your product or even discounts if your prospect or customer shares the QR code with a friend.

2) Add an inside look at your offer – When you receive a product brochure or collateral piece, would a more detailed look at the product help inform your purchasing decisions? Sure, most would say yes.

This creates a perfect opportunity to incorporate QR codes in your marketing materials directing prospects to demos or instructional videos. For instance, look at how the Radisson Edwardian uses QR codes on their restaurant menus to help diners choose their selection.

3) Special incentive – Targeted content distribution is another inspiring way to use QR codes. For instance, if you have a free report or MP3 of information that is valuable to your ideal audience, embed the link to a mobile friendly site, where they can download the content.

4) Virtual tickets – With mobile technologies growing each year, more travelers rely on their mobile devices while away from the office. Many businesses and organizations understand this and have put QR codes to work for them.

For instance, many major airlines are using QR codes as boarding passes. Other businesses are using them as virtual tickets to events, such as conferences or seminars.

5) Evolve your resume – Another unique way to utilize QR codes involves bringing more attention to your own cause. If you like practicing what you preach, follow Victor Petit’s cue and make your resume stand out. 

Although still relatively new to the marketing world, QR codes have emerged as a technology with vast opportunities. It is up to us marketers to find the ways to apply QR codes to marketing programs and grow our customer reach.

Read on to discover how QR codes can help drive traffic to your landing pages. 

It’s always a good time to be thinking about your landing pages. But the new year is a particularly good time to reflect back on the successes, challenges and opportunities from 2011 and make some great plans for your 2012 landing pages.

To get you started, here are my favorite landing page trends for the new year:

1. Interactive. This year, we saw a lot of customers creating what I call “interactive content”. Incorporating in-page enhanced content elements like accordians, tabs, sliders, lightboxes and more. I am sure there is a better name for it, but basically it’s a way of creating a content-enriched experience while staying conversion focused. At ion, we took it up a notch by creating a no-code, no-tech way for marketers to deploy these kinds of elements on their LiveBall pages and I am super excited about how these sorts of interactive content modules improve the user experience while keeping the emphasis on conversion. 
2. Mobile ready. We had a surge of customers creating mobile landing experiences in 2011 and expect that trend to continue fast & furiously into the new year. Bottom line: mobile users expect mobile experiences. Don’t let them down. In LiveBall, we have two ways marketers can deploy mobile-optimized pages—either by using mobile page templates (super easy!), or by letting LiveBall automatically mobile-optimize any standard-browser page (even easier!). Pretty cool stuff. 
3. Social. Marketers are learning how to incorporate social elements into their conversion-focused landing pages. Allowing your visitors to like, follow and tweet your stuff is important. Some customers like to do it right on the landing page, others like to wait and introduce social content on the ‘thank you’ page. Either way, it’s a great way to extend the conversation and socialize with your visitors. 
4. Progressive. Forms continue to increase in complexity and we make sure LiveBall can keep pace. We see more and more ‘multi-step’ forms where a visitors steps through 2-4 short forms to complete the conversion—this format is highly effective and often beats a single-page form in a head-to-head test. We also see customers serving up different forms for different visitors. For instance, if a visitor provides basic contact information on their first visit, on their subsequent visit they are served up a form with profiling questions. Why keep asking the same person for the same information when you can build a profile over time by asking different questions along the way?
5. Local. If your marketing is any way, shape or form even a little bit local, you can capitalize on that by serving up localized pages to make the experience highly relevant. Localize your landing pages for browser language, region, country—really, anything that makes sense for your particular marketing. 
6. Dynamic. Why serve up the same page content for everyone when you can serve up dynamic content that is relevant? Different headlines for different ads. Different images for different audience segments. Mobile-optimized page for mobile traffic. You can create one basic page and then extend it with dynamic content to ensure it is relevant for the audience that lands there. The most popular form of dynamic content we see is dynamic content substitution for keywords where marketers populate the users search query in their landing page content. Cool stuff and often a nice conversion booster!
7. Relevant. Well, duh. Relevancy drives conversions. But being relevant means different things to different people. It starts with message match. But a visual and contextual match also matter. Craft your experiences to appeal to the visitor in the moment, taking into consideration what they clicked on and what they expect when they land. 
8. Integrated. Integrated means many things. Integrated across your company, so that landing pages are no longer a ‘skunk works’ project that gets done in your spare time. Get everyone involved from executive sponsorship to product marketing, it sometimes takes a village to launch an effective high-converting landing page strategy. Integrated also means getting all the parts to talk. Marketers have a burgeoning list of tools they are using to get their job done—from CRM, SFA, marketing automation, analytics, CMS and more—no point in fighting it, just make sure that everything works together seamlessly. 
9. Optimized. Oh yes, you know you have to test it. Whether you want to fly by the seat of your pants and test without a plan, or you want to follow a methodical landing page testing program, you need to be testing in order to lift conversion rates. Learn what works and what doesn’t with real-time A/B and multivariate testing. 
10. Disposable. This one might surprise you. It always hurts my heart when I see marketers over-invest time, resources and money into any one single landing page. A landing page should take an hour, or a day, or even a couple of days if you are re-inventing the wheel entirely. But it shouldn’t turn into a multi-week, expensive endeavor. Why? See #9. Because you might test it, and it might not work. And then you will be hesitant to throw it away because you invested so much in it. Find ways to bring your vision to work efficiently without breaking the landing page bank. A landing page platform live LiveBall can be a big help in this regard. And if you do need to make a big investment in a single page, plan in advance how you can slice, dice and re-use it in multiple ways should you need to change course when the testing results start rolling in. 
11. Data-mined. It still surprises me when an online marketer doesn’t know some basic stats about their landing pages—visitors, bounce rate, conversion rates, etc. This year it’s time to make sure you have a good handle on the basics and then dig deeper for insight into user behavior, traffic source segmentation and more. There’s conversion gold in the data, so work it!
12. QR landing pages. Obsessed wtih QR codes? Yes, I am. QR codes rock. They’re great for anything from a boat hull to a conference tote bag. While the 11 things above are about things you can do to your landing pages to make them better, our 12th trend is about marrying offline, mobile and online marketing in a big way. QR pages are the easiest way to connect with your audience on the go, and a landing page is perfectly poised to bridge the gap and help you make a big impact when people scan. 

Want more detail on the 12 landing page trends for 2012? Last week we hosted a webinar, “12 landing page tactics for 2012”. You can check out the full, recorded version here (no registration required—just grab a cup of coffee, kick back and hit the play button!).

I’ll be blogging on many of the above topics in the coming weeks, with more examples, screen shots and details. Stay tuned, and send me your questions & feedback when you get a chance.

As a marketer who lives and breathes landing page optimization, when I see a company that doesn’t follow landing page best practices, I have to wonder about that business’ conversion rates. I know I’m usually clicking away from that site, how many others are too?

To remedy this and help you build better pages, here’s a list of the top 5 landing page mistakes and how you can fix them.

Top 5 Landing Page Mistakes & Fixes:

 1) Distractions – Readers can get sidetracked away from your goal if there is too much happening or ignore it completely if it resembles every other page on your website. When trying to convert your visitor into a qualified lead, using the same old design you use for other pages only invites users to get lost.

Fix: To make things simple, cut down on the distractions – remove the usual sidebar, navigation and anything that takes your reader’s attention away from doing what you want them to do.

2) Sub-par headlines – With only a few seconds to draw someone to your landing page, your headline better be top-notch.

Fix: Just like your blog posts, press releases and email subject lines, if your headline doesn’t spark your visitors’ attention, you’ve already lost them

3) Missing the point – Remember that the reader is visiting your landing page for a reason: they have a need and you (may) have a solution. If your landing page can’t effectively help readers bridge that gap, then they will find another landing page that does.

Fix: Keep it simple and get to the point quickly or visitors will leave your page without converting.

4) Too many choices – Simply put, too many choices can hurt your conversion rates. 

Fix: Don’t confuse or drive away prospects with an overload of choices. Give one action option that will appeal to your most qualified leads.

5) Not testing – This is one I see many marketers miss, time and time again. Not one particular headline, design element or word is right for everyone.

Fix: For better conversion rates, implement A/B or multivariate testing to find out what landing page combinations convert more visitors into leads.

Remember, your landing page needs to convert. If it has any of these mistakes, you need to fix them – now. Follow landing page best practices and be ready to see an increase in your conversion rates.

Ready to put these landing page best practices to work? Learn how our LiveBall platform can elevate your landing page optimization efforts.

And so today we opened access for all of our recorded webinars. You can watch them all to your heart’s content—without having to fill out any forms. Grab your coffee and colleagues, gather round the conference table and hit those webinars.

With so many recorded webinars to choose from, you may be wondering where to start. Here are a couple of my personal favorites—I hope you will check them out and let me know what you think:

• 12 ways to improve your landing pages in 2012
• 10 landing page lessons from Howard Stern
• The art of landing page persuasion
• Beyond website optimization—landing page strategies for higher online conversions

Keep your eye out for new webinars coming in the new year, and let us know about the topics that interest you most. Thanks for tuning in!

Putting together product descriptions is probably one of the most mundane tasks on the web. And it shows.

When I read product descriptions on most websites, I’m reminded of several of the teachers I had in school that would teach us by reading directly out of the textbooks. They were lovely people. But, snore…. No wonder most of us don’t retain much of what we learned in school! 

Why do the same thing with boring product descriptions? Would you rather put your customers to sleep or persuade them to buy something? I bet you answered, “Buy something!”. 

See, you are an excellent student. I knew it! 

Now, let’s look at some ways we can liven those boring product descriptions up.

Humour

Do you have a fun and quirky brand? Why not inject a little humour into your product descriptions? It’s not for everyone, but it works really well when done right. When was the last time you had a raving fan base just waiting for you to put our your next product? 

Impossible? Look no further than woot.com and thinkgeek.com for ideas.

Woot

I’ll never forget the first time I really “got” woot.com. Before that, I always thought to myself, “Why in the world would people love the high stress situation of buying something in limited quantities that they may or may not need?”

Then, by chance I came upon an offer they had for a flashlight complete with a long narrative about using that flashlight to find the Murderer. Was it Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the kitchen or Mrs. White with the rope in the study? Or maybe it was another story altogether. The only thing that matters is that flashlight is going to help us figure it all out, by golly!

I found it endearing and finally, I understood. You can now add me to the list of loyal Woot customers.

ThinkGeek

ThinkGeek.com not only has wonderfully quirky products that are great gifts for friends or to yourself, but also have some witty one-liners. Just look at this line straight from one of the product descriptions, “We’re not sure if you know this, but Yoda has been known to carve his Thanksgiving turkey using his lightsaber.” 

Add that to your valuable mental database of tidbits!

Storytelling

One of the biggest drawbacks to selling online is that people can’t physically touch or see your products first-hand. So, the next best thing is to capture your reader’s attention by helping them visualize what it’s like to own your product with their own imagination. 

Let’s say your product is a women’s scarf. It’s quite lovely, high quality, and the pictures are doing it justice well-enough. But, it’s still not selling as well as it could. Maybe a little storytelling will strike your customer’s imagination! 

When was the last time you saw a product description like this:

“She stepped out of her front door on an especially chilly winter day. As she went down her front steps steps and strode down the sidewalk, she felt the crisp air brush her bare ankles. Brrr! Thank goodness she had her gorgeous 100% merino wool scarf to keep her cheeks toasty warm.”

Descriptive Words

I just know this violates one of the rules of copywriting. But, I’m going to say it anyway. We need more adjectives and descriptive words in our product descriptions. Not cheesy, filler ones, but real ones that people actually use.

And where’s the best place to get good words? Well, right from your customers’ mouths, of course 

When was the last time you read through product reviews to see what your customers are saying about your products? It’s funny, actually. Customers will use words to describe your product in ways you likely never even thought of.

Here are some adjectives I found from reviewers on Amazon.com for a popular Digital Camera that I’m considering buying: “fun, easy to use, crisp, clear, breeze, amateur, quickly, value, creative”.

None of these words are actually used in the product description itself. What do you think I’m more interested in? The descriptive words that help me imagine owning the purchase or basic specs that I don’t fully understand?

What do you think, is it worth a shot? You might just get some new raving fans who can’t wait for your next product or to share it with their friends. And you can always get the best of both worlds by including a fun description first and the specs afterward.

Got some other fun ideas for product descriptions? Let us know in the comments.

This is a guest post by Megan Leap, Online Marketing Manager at MarketingProfs. In her role at MarketingProfs, Megan Leap spearheads their conversion optimization efforts by creating and testing landing pages in LiveBall, our landing page platform.

After many years of testing B2B landing pages, I’ve discovered there’s a secret formula for success. And the secret is that it is much easier to be successful than you might think. In no particular order, here are my Top 10 Ways to Improve B2B Landing Pages.

1.    Focus on Benefits, not Features

If there is one thing I hope you take away from this blog post, it’s this: your landing page copy MUST focus on benefits. As a B2B marketer with a complex product or service, it can be all too easy to list all of the features of your product. But great landing page copy sells visitors on benefits, not features.

So, here’s a quick test for you to determine whether you need to add more benefits to your copy: count the number of times you mention your visitor vs. your company name or product name on your landing pages. Do you talk about your company more than your visitor? Well then, it’s time to switch it up.

2.    Write a Great Headline

David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

It’s critical that your headline 1) focuses on benefits 2) pays off the promise of your ad and 3) is simple and to the point.

In the many B2B landing page tests I’ve run, I’ve found that simply testing new headlines can increase conversions by at least 100%. Take, for example, these two landing pages I tested for an email drop. Both promote our SmartTools product, but the header on landing page A (left) focuses on benefits, while landing page B (right) focuses on the product. Can you guess which one won?

That’s right—landing page A won by a huge margin.

3.    Don’t Be Creative With Your Copy

I mean it; don’t try to get too creative with your copy. Keep it simple, to the point, and focused on your target audience. Your B2B landing page copy should follow the best practices of classic direct-response campaigns, so don’t bother trying to reinvent the wheel with cutesy headlines and concepts. If your copywriting skills could use some improvement, I highly recommend you read the book, “The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells.”

4.    Don’t Neglect Your Design

Just because you market to IT people or consider your product dry and boring, doesn’t mean your landing page design shouldn’t delight visitors.

Lucky for me, I get to work with two great designers to come up with design concepts for our landing pages, and they take care of the rest. To reduce our resources, I try to come up with a few successful landing page designs, and repurpose them for separate campaigns. That keeps our production costs low, and our conversion rates high.

Take, for example, this landing page we created for our Twitter Superfly Guide. While it’s simple and focused on conversion, it’s also delightful to look at (and it converts in the double digits as well!).

5.    Try Adding Video

It’s pretty safe to assume that people don’t read, right? At least that’s what my coworker Jo always says. So, video is a great way to demonstrate the benefits of your product or service, without making your visitors read paragraphs and paragraphs of copy. At MarketingProfs, we’ve tested adding video testimonials on our events and PRO membership to our landing pages. And time after time, they help drive more conversions than pages without. We like to think of our events as an “experienced good”—you won’t really understand how awesome they are until you experience it yourself. So adding testimonial videos to our pages is one way we overcome that. While you can add YouTube code to any LiveBall page, I recommend using a tool like Brightcove to host videos—it provides tons of analytics, plus, you can ensure that your visitors won’t navigate away and get distracted by the Catvertising video (my personal fav).

6.    Have a Strong, Obvious Call-to-Action

When generating leads, it’s important to keep your pages simple, streamlined, and focused, with a clear call-to-action. Use big, actionable words like “Sign Up”, “Access”, “Go,” and “Join”. If you make it is as obvious as possible what you want your visitors to do, they’ll be more likely to do it.

7.    Edit, Edit, and Edit some More

In B2B lead generation, less is always more. After you’ve edited your page, edit it again. Only include words that are critical and support conversion. Remove all superfluous copy. And then some.

8.    Reduce Required Form Fields

It’s simple—the less form fields you require on your landing pages, the higher your conversion rate will be. The great benefit of requiring only a few fields (example: first name, last name, email address) is that you can cast a wider net at the top of your funnel with more leads—because even your most qualified prospects may be leery of giving you all their information after only one or two clicks. However, once you start to nurture them and they begin to trust you, you can begin to ask them for more information and build a profile for them via progressive profiling.

9.    A/B Test Your Pages

While I love A/B testing as a way to optimize pages, I also use testing as a way to speed up the production process. As marketers, we have a tendency to want to make everything perfect. But in online marketing, it’s actually more important to be agile and quick than be perfect. So, I am a huge fan of using A/B testing as a way to end discussions about what people think a landing page should look like—and just take stuff live. It’s easy to go in circles and keep coming up with changes and ways to improve new pages, so when that starts to happen I usually recommend we just test the proposed changes, and really find out what works.

10.  Socialize Your Thank You Pages

Once you get leads to convert, I am a huge fan of integrating social media elements on the thank you page. You can add an option to allow people to retweet the landing page they just converted on, follow you on Twitter, or become a Fan on Facebook. The possibilities are endless, and I really love to include these options after the conversion, otherwise you can end up distracting your visitors from converting in the first place.  

This is a guest post by Naomi Niles. 

Conversion optimization is not extremely difficult to do. But, it does require a specific mindset. I believe most people don’t realize this. And that is why when they start optimizing their websites and landing pages, they test ideas that don’t make a lot of impact or fail and simply give up.

According to the Fireclick Index, global conversion rates still average under 3%. It’s been this way for the past ten years and doesn’t seem to be getting better, even with the increase in helpful information out there.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but I believe a main one is that organizations don’t always approach conversion optimization in a methodical manner and with the right mindset. 

Here are some tips on how to adopt the right mindset and make the most out of your optimization efforts.

Fail forward, fail fast

You must be willing to fail in your testing efforts in order to determine what’s working and what isn’t. Remember when you were a kid and you were willing to try something new just to see if it worked? Try to regain some of that same sense of playfulness and have some fun with it!

And why not? Even if your test idea fails, allocating traffic to different variations means that the actual risk is quite small. And when you know what doesn’t work, your next test idea will be even better!

Stay open minded

Especially when starting, you must keep an open mind. Sometimes when you are starting a new testing campaign, the most crazy and innovative ideas will later give you the best insights.

Don’t just consider what’s always worked. What’s the point of experimentation if you do that? Get help from the outside, talk to some of your employees who don’t usually handle marketing functions, and look to see what other businesses outside of your industry are doing. Put together an ideation group and come up with as many zany ideas as you can over a few hours time.

The trick here is to try to not become attached to any one idea. Remember, we’re experimenting!

Coming at the same problem from a totally different angle can often bring results that are as different as night and day.

Adopt a framework

Once you’ve tested some innovative solutions and gotten some amazing new results, then is the time to refine.

I really like Scott Brinker’s READY Framework to do this. A framework is really handy when you’re trying to come up with ideas, but don’t know where to start. It’s like having a checklist in hand so that you don’t forget what’s important to look at.

Keep trying

I often get asked, “What’s the best conversion rate?” or “What should our goals be?”. The truth is, there’s no good answer to that that applies to everyone. Every business is different and what a good conversion rate is for one business might not be great for another.

So, shoot for better. Actually, no. Shoot for the very best you can do and don’t settle for anything less.

99% of the time, you can always do better. There is no perfect and there is no “correct” score. Keep on testing and inching that needle up. If you don’t see big enough improvements with your testing efforts, go back and try a new innovative idea and see what happens. 

It can be done!

Let it go

This is the same mindset I’ve always adopted when it comes time to ship, especially when doing creative work and I think a lot of artists would agree with this.

When you’ve come up a testing idea and put a lot of energy and illusion into it, it starts to feel like your little baby. You’ve put love and care into it and want so badly for it to win.

But, once you’ve place it live, it’s no longer yours. It then belongs to the people, your visitors and customers. At that point, it’s up to them to decide if it’s good or not.

Failed tests can feel disappointing, but it’s all just part of the quest for greatness.

The QR code and our logoYou’ve probably seen square barcodes showing up everywhere lately. They’re QR codes, and they’re going to change the way your offline marketing interacts with your online marketing – it’s exciting stuff!  

It’s often hard to know how well an offline ad performed, because you can’t accurately track interaction with your ad. You can ask people who are interested in your ad to remember a website or phone number, but it’s so easy people to forget or to remember it incorrectly.  Offline marketing traditionally asks people to stop whatever they are already doing, to take a note or try to remember something, and then to carve out time later.  It asks a lot of your prospects.  This is why QR codes are becoming invaluable to marketers.  They help you continue the ad experience right then and there, they make it easy for you to provide ways for people to stay in touch, and you can track everything by sending your QR code traffic to a landing page.

Take for instance, our recent sponsorship at the Search Insider Summit.  If you were there last week then you had a chance to score a tote bag featuring our logo and a QR code.  The logo on the bag states “The best landing pages start here” on an arrow pointing towards ion, and then a scanned QR code takes visitors to a landing page where they can either get a landing page toolkit or find out about how LiveBall could help you make better landing pages.  By adding a QR code linked to landing page, our branding opportunity become a trackable lead generation opportunity too! This is just one of many ways we are looking forward to using QR codes and landing pages.

How are you using QR codes to make your offline marketing more interactive?

The QR code landing pageAre QR codes on your list for strategies to try in the New Year?  Then join us Wednesday, December 14th at 1pm EST for a free webinar in which we’ll discuss QR codes and all of the landing page trends for 2012. 

1. Improve Your Landing Pages!

No surprise here. As we all know, the best way to improve your AdWords conversion rate is to improve your landing pages. While I’ll dive deep into this topic in next week’s FREE webinar, 12 Ways to Improve Landing Pages in 2012, some of the easiest ways to do this are a) create benefit-driven copy b) reduce distractions on your page c) keep your design polished and simple.

2. Create Unique Landing Pages for Each Ad Group

Generally, our customers see the best results when they create individual landing pages at the Ad Group level–not the campaign level. For instance, let’s say you have a “landing page testing” Ad Group, and are bidding on terms like, “best landing page testing” and “easy landing page testing”. While many marketers would just assume to drop those folks on a page about our landing page testing and management platform, LiveBall, we recommend creating a page that specifically focuses on testing functionality. After all, that is what is of interest to users.

With Ad Group-specific landing pages, you can further increase relevancy by dynamically substituting keywords on your landing pages—just be careful and ensure that the potential combinations will make sense to your visitors.

3. Test Your Landing Pages in Google Instant Preview

Before users click on your ads, they can now see a preview of what your page looks like. This is a great opportunity to a) separate yourself from the competition with an attractive, focused experience b) qualify visitors before the click with a clear, relevant call-to-action. 

4. Create Separate Campaigns and Landing Pages for the Content Network

While Google makes it simple (just click a checkbox!) to extend your search network campaigns to the content network, it’s not nearly as simple create content network campaigns that convert. In fact, using the same settings on the content network is one of the easiest ways to blow your AdWords budget and not see any return on investment. Instead of just replicating your search network efforts for the content network, test unique ads, landing pages, and messages at the content network level. After all, the intent of the user is different, so you must take a separate approach.

5. Pull a Search Query Performance Report

Google’s Search Query Report is one of my favorite features of AdWords—it tells you exactly what queries trigger your ads, and which queries lead to conversions. With this data you can a) discover irrelevant search queries and add them as negative keywords b) add new, cheaper keywords to your current Ad Groups c) get inspiration for new Ad Groups you never thought of d) get insight into how users think about your product or service.

Now, let’s dive deeper into improving landing page performance—join me this Wednesday for the FREE webinar, 12 Ways to Improve Landing Pages in 2012.

In his post Well rounded (and the other), he writes:

Well rounded gives you plenty of opportunities to shore up mediocrity with multiple options. Sharp is more frightening, because it’s this or nothing.

Isn’t the same thing true for a landing page? When we attempt to make a ‘well-rounded’ landing page, what we are really trying to do is provide something for everyone. And ‘something for everyone’ is simply designing for the lowest common denominator. You know how it starts…

• “let’s add some navigation”
• “let’s add a link to get to the webinar, in case people don’t want the whitepaper”
• “let’s add our Twitter feed so people know we are social”

The less sharp our page, the more general it becomes. And a general page isn’t a relevant page. 

When people click your ads and messages, it’s an intentional act. It’s specific. A sharp page matches that same level of intention and specificity. Anything else is…well-rounded. Leave the well-rounded pages for your website. When you have people clicking ads, make sure their landing experience is sharp.

Thank you Seth for some sharp inspiration this morning. 

The clicks you control, versus the clicks you don’t control, January 2009

All online marketing is designed to get users to engage. And engagement is clicking—clicking your ads, your links, your content, your experiences. You want clicks—lots of them. When users are clicking, things are moving and shaking. But not all clicks are the same. There are those clicks you can control, and those you can’t really control….read more

Tappers and listeners=marketers and respondents, February 2009

This is the perfect metaphor for the problem of “message mismatch” in search marketing — when a Long Tail of thousands of keywords crashes into a Short Tail of just a few landing pages or deep links…read more

4 characteristics of the best landing pages, July 2009

The best landing pages are the ones that convert. I sometimes call them ‘high-performance’ landing pages. High performing landing pages have 4 characteristics. They are engaging, dynamic,disposable and agile….read more

3 steps to land a promotion with landing pages, January 2010

Many of our customers (marketing managers & specialists) who develop effective landing page programs within their organization are promoted to director-level (or higher!) marketing positions. And so can you. Here are 3 steps to land a better marketing position with landing pages….read more

5 common landing page testing mistakes to avoid, Februrary 2010

Since you’re here at the ion blog reading this post, I’m guessing you’re already testing, or seriously considering it.  That’s fantastic and means you aren’t a victim (or at least won’t be for much longer) of mistake numero uno. Committing any of the other four mistakes will hinder your ability to succeed, so without further ado, please avoid these conversion killers…read more

READY framework for conversion optimization, May 2010

It’s not that a framework is a guaranteed recipe for success, but a good framework helps you ask the right questions, see how they relate to each other, and stay focused on the important things. A good framework gives a team a common model around which to communicate and collaborate….read more

The spy who loved me, June 2011

ion runs a tangled web of marketing tools. We’ve used lead-gen to build a house list of over 50,000 that continues to grow by thousands each month. We nurture that list constantly and identify prospects that go to inside sales. We have metrics at every step, making our marketing inputs and sales outputs relatively predictable….read more

ion’s top-converting LiveBall customers average over 750+ active landing experiences at any one time. Where are they using landing pages? 

• Paid search campaigns. I alreaady hear you saying “duh”. For some marketers, a landing page per ad group is sufficient. For others, a landing page per ad is more appropriate. No matter the size of your PPC campaign, it’s likely you need at least 50 landing pages, if not 500, or more. 
• QR codes. When mobile users scan a QR code a mobile-optimized, relevant landing experience is an absolute must.
• Email marketing. Whether for third-party emails, or emails to your own house list, it makes sense to have people who click on your emails land on specific pages to drive them deeper into your funnel. 
• Mobile ads. Mobile users want (expect) mobile landing pages. Actually, if you have substantial mobile traffic, you may even want to consider mobile-optimized pages for any mobile traffic (not just mobile-specific campaigns). 
• Social marketing. Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn—it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Visitors who engage with you on social sites expect to continue the conversation as they click, fan and follow you. This helps you put your best social foot forward, and helps with tracking & optimization as well. Plus, you can integrate social engagement into your landing experiences—allowing visitors to like, + and fan you to their heart’s content.
• Display advertising. I know, I hear another “duh” out there. Ads should go to pages that match both visually and contextully. A banner ad is a specific promise, and a generic page just won’t do. If you run a variety of creative units across a variety of campaigns, hyper-matched landing pages help ensure you are taking advantage of every hard-earned banner click. 
• Direct mail, TV, Radio, etc. Yep, everything offline drives people online now. Bridge the gap for your audience by giving them landing experiences that extend your advertising and deepen visitor engagement through relevancy and distraction-free content. 

Whew…when you think about all the places you are engaging web traffic to click on your messages, it equals a lot of landing pages. Yet, ‘landing pages’ aren’t a huge part of the online marketing discussion. Why is that?