I was excited for this panel, which promised some great information on how to perk up your landing pages.  The speaker was:

• Olivier Chaine, CEO & Founder, magnify360.

Bullet Point Review!

• Software-as-a-service delivers different landing pages to different visitors.
• Personal based development is growing.
• One experience, “the best” experience doesn’t work for everyone.
• Why do people abandon?
  • Intent mismatch: their intent when finding your site doesn’t match what your site delivers (i.e. their intent is research and you have buy links but no reviews, or their intent is to buy and you have reviews but no purchase links).
  • Personality mismatch: they just don’t jive with your site.
  • Visual design/ease of use: pretty isn’t always the best, you want it to be functional and branded first and foremost.
  • Product/Pricing perception: you must understand shopper personality types to sell to the different types of consumers.
• Reinforce Banner/Ad Message.
  • Support ad copy; must have direct correlation.
  • Image copy can match too.
• Have a strong call-to-action.
  • Optimize header & call to action copy.
  • Don’t forget the button copy.
• Variation in page flow.
  • Form/copy split up.
  • Can generate 30-50% lift by splitting form questions into multiple pages.
• Mobile.
  • People on their phones have a different intent; may not be ready to buy over the mobile net.
  • If they do want to make the purchase they are fast and very transaction oriented.
• Target Behaviorally.
  • Look at the profile performance.
  • Check weekend performance vs. weekday performance.
  • Check branded landing pages vs. non-branded pages.
• Target multiple personalities.
  • Look at buying process, purchase attitudes, industry knowledge, learning style, purchase criteria, buyer readiness.
• Design for the customer.
  • Why are they here TODAY?
  • How do they THINK?
  • How do they BUY/STICK?
  • What kind of DIALOG is best to have with them?
• TEST, TEST, TEST!
  • Use manual testing & improvement.
  • AB & Multivariate testing.
  • Behavioral targeting & optimization.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Start page variation by removing elements or large ad copy chunks & seeing what happens.
• Try completely different designs entirely.
• Making changes to landing pages allows you to buy more traffic & still be profitable.
• 25% conversion rate increase can mean a 75% volume increase, which means more buying power.
• Start small with behavioral targeting.
• Test often, measure always.
• Work with your sales and customer service departments to optimize.
• Find the right technology partners.
• Have fun & remember that this is about engaging with people.
• What to ask an agency before hiring them?
  • Do they optimize manually or automatically?
  • Do they focus on small elements or full pages?
  • Do they do behavioral targeting?
  • What kind of reports & analytics do they have?
  • Are they a full service agency?
  • Do they have any performance guarantees?

I really learned a lot from this session since I’m not entirely familar with landing pages.  This really got me jazzed to apply what I’ve learned the next time I need to assist on a landing page design or even if I have to make one myself!  I might even try to do a landing page for something to excercise this new knowledge.

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Landing Page:

• The specific webpage a visitor reaches after clicking on a search engine listing, pay-per-click ad, or banner ad.

Many successful PPC affiliates utilize landing pages to help direct visitors to convert to sales.  With a landing page, the affiliate does not have to rely solely on the merchant’s website to convert but can give the visitors a nudge into the conversion path with added details or stronger calls to action.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

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As most marketing professionals have experienced, we all get these lofty, grand ideas about ways to draw in customers, enhance our user interfaces, sell the products, you name it. But often, when we present these rough ideas to the IT or tech departments at our company, we’re met with resistance.

Talk back people, I know I’m not the only one!

Sometimes it’s a matter of not having enough resources to bring one of our bright ideas to life. Other times it’s a matter of something being extremely difficult to create, technically speaking. An sometimes the technology required is just too dang expensive for the company to agree.

We had a similar problem with landing pages recently. Not enough IT or design resources to create, code, and launch the many different landing pages we wanted to create to promote things. Without more IT people or more designers, we were faced with sticking a lot of ideas in drawers.

Until now. We came across Marketo, online B2B marketing software that offers landing page creative tools, Salesforce.com integration, Google AdWords integration in their PPC product, and soon to come will be lead management tools. A short-tech-staffed marketer’s dream come true.

From the Marketo About Us Page…

Marketo provides affordable, easy-to-use marketing automation software that helps B2B marketing professionals drive more revenue and improve marketing accountability. Our solutions automate lead generation and lead nurturing processes over multiple channels, beginning with pay-per-click search marketing and landing page optimization. Our analytics bring accountability and respect to the CMO by providing forecasts and metrics that matter to CEOs and CFOs, and help turn marketing from a cost center into a revenue-generating part of the company.

Sounds great to me! This gives us exactly the vehicle we want, for not that much money at all, to launch numerous landing pages presenting whitepaper downloads and other product or project specific information. One of the best features of Marketo’s landing page optimization is that you can sent the pages to appear under your company’s URL. They’re a great invisible partner, with pretty thorough reporting tools available.

I highly encourage anyone remotely interested to use their Test Drive feature to play around with a dummy account or to go ahead and sign up for the free 14 day trial. Once you see how easy it is (seriously… practically everything is drag & drop) you’ll be intrigued to learn more about how it can help you.

Added 1/13/08 – Marketo agrees!

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