Over the past year, a third generation of landing pages has emerged—let’s call it Landing Pages 3.0—that incorporates ideas from content marketing, social media marketing, HTML5 interfaces, marketing automation, and the explosion of mobile marketing.

Scott Brinker, ion’s President and CTO, explains what’s defining the wave of new innovations in landing pages and the must-have elements for your pages.

Landing page optimization is not an easy topic to discuss, especially with reluctant colleagues. You can explain custom landing pages, A/B tests and increased conversion rates, and many will reply with a stifled yawn.

Anna Talerico, ion interactive Executive Vice President, and two other optimization experts share seven tactics for building support for your landing page testing programs. 

…While many people include social sharing buttons on their pages, few of them track their usage. But to optimize something, you need to measure it.

Scott Brinker, ion’s President and CTO, explains how to track social conversions step by step. 

Your online traffic is like a mixed fruit basket, similar in many ways, but also very different.

Marketing to a mixed basket is difficult—how can you possibly know the right image, message, tone and offer that will appeal to anyone & everyone? This task becomes much more manageable when you group similar people together into segments.

Anna Talerico offers advice on how segmenting visitors can increase your conversion rates. 

In part one of this article, which appeared in the August 5 editon of eM+C Weekly, I dicussed how optimizing your landing pages for conversions through testing and analysis can skyrocket your marketing return on investment, and offered five tips to help you get the budget you need for these tasks from upper management.

This week in part two, I discuss five key conversion optimization players in your organization who — when working together — will help your conversion rates soar, as well as best practices around conversion optimization testing.

Anna Talerico provides helpful advice on how to put together a conversion optimization team.

A 2009 Omniture Conversion Survey showed that 78.5 percent of companies don’t offer personalized content even though eight out of 10 sites collect the kind of visitor data that could be used for creating personalized experiences. Hyper-targeted messages can skyrocket content relevancy and increase conversions, so it’s a shame more companies aren’t taking advantage of it.

There is a simple, effective way to start offering a more personalized content experience, without a lot of bells and whistles. Offer segmented pages for your campaign traffic. While offering personalized messaging for organic traffic is virtually impossible, when it comes to campaign traffic it is not only possible, it should be priority.

Turning e-mail clicks into conversions isn’t difficult; you just need to tightly match your e-mail and your landing page experiences.

A landing page is the first page a visitor views after clicking an ad or e-mail link. In order to turn e-mail readers into paying customers, make your landing pages a direct reflection of your e-mail. A landing page is a continuation of the e-mail; think of the e-mail itself as step 1 and the landing page as step 2.

Old strategies should be tossed out the window like failed resolutions, and the focus should shift to creating a solid plan for moving users past the initial click toward conversion.

You built your website and are driving traffic to it. You wrote compelling copy and set up an analytics program to monitor traffic trends. Now it’s time to sit back and reap the rewards of all your hard work, right?

Wrong.

Now it’s time to analyze all those charts and graphs within your analytics program, and optimize your site for lifting conversion rates.

For purchases of any significance, a number of people will weigh in on the decision, often from several departments. Internally, there can be a mix of collaboration and competition in this process - everyone wants the business to succeed, but everyone wants to look good in their particular job too.

B2B marketers must strive to subtly shape the composition of these groups and make sure that the interests of each participant - as well as the overall interests of the group - are well served.

Business-to-business marketing may be one of the least understood disciplines in business.

It’s ironic, because consumer-centric marketing has been widely popularized - just check out the marketing section at any bookstore or peruse the curriculum of most MBA marketing programs. But while a number of consumer marketing concepts have analogs in marketing to businesses, it’s not a simple translation from targeting “Joe” to targeting “Joe’s Discount Auto Parts” with 28 stores in five states.

Applications are usually optimized for general appeal—you want them to work well for everyone. You’re looking for the common denominators of your entire customer population. They also tend to be deeper in the conversion funnel, so you want them to be compatible with a wide range of messages earlier in a user’s experience.

From blogs and landing pages, to official outlets on social media sites, marketers now manage a large extended web that thrives beyond the borders of the traditional web site. Great conversion optimization must leverage the dynamics of each layer—and coordinate the interaction between them.

Conversion optimization extends beyond a single page. SEO usually avoids breaking up content into multiple steps. However, you may find that multi-step landing pages convert better, because they engage respondents in a mutually productive dialogue and facilitate segmentation (they’re also called “conversion paths” for a reason).

SEO has been and will continue to be important, but there’s a new, big player on the field vying for your attention: conversion optimization. What is the ultimate goal for new this player? To take the traffic that’s coming to your landing page, and move users beyond the initial click. Scott Brinker’s Search Engine Land article, “Conversion Optimization is the New SEO” explains the similarities and differences between SEO and conversion optimization, and shows you why both are important.