Here we are. After reviewing our original landing page, and making a ton of changes and tweaking to best target our customers and create a winning call to action, it’s time to compare the before and after landing page results.

Conversion Rate of Old Page

Conversion Rate of New Page — on our first revision we took 1.73% increase in conversion.  Not bad !

Summary: With some redesign and sprucing up of ad copy, we lowered our cost per conversion $3.29 which resulted in a 25% reduction in lead cost!

I am pretty optimistic that we can take it even further.  Right now I am going to request the client secure a BBB rating and come up with a warranty guarantee seal that will deliver solid product backing in an effort to shoot the conversion rate even higher.  A seal of Made in the USA is also another good addition.

Lets go over your checklist for your redesign

1. Headline — are you conveying the right sales message in 5 seconds or less?
2. Supporting Bullet Points — support the headline
3. Call to Action — arrow or emphasis on the Big Button
4. BIG Button – Mini Call to Action on Button — SUBMIT – FREE ACCESS
5. Testimonials — always make sure above the fold
6. Supporting Body Copy — keep pushing the conversion moment
7. Product Shot — yes you are legit !
8. Trust Building – you can be trusted
9. Additional Body Copy – last chance to push your product
10. Secondary Call to Action — sometimes you can use this tactic to save the reader from scrolling back  up — remember avoid that IADD!

This post is part of a 4 day series of posts all about creating winning landing pages. This guest post series was written by Michael Salvaggio of SEO Brand.

Call To Action – there are a lot of features about this subsection that I liked.  For instance, the Red Arrows point down to the Name and E-mail fields are a great way to push the reader in the right direction.  Keep in mind, the readers WANT to be told what to do and pushing them with bold, red arrows seems to grasp this concept.  Use of the word FREE is always the best way to incentive the opt in and push the conversion rate higher.  The FREE instant access button circled in red is yet another way to ensure a high conversion rate.   A good trust bond is established by ensuring that the readers data will not be shared with anyone else — this can be shortened down and more effective — more on that below.

Now for the Bad : Font too small, call to action is too far down the page — there is a good chance with all of these pointed out obstacles, the reader never even made it to the bottom

Summary: Although this lander has good ad copy and images, our initial hypothesis is that is is flawed and missing conversion opportunities.  A redesign using our 5 point approach will rearrange the lander with a crisp new design and adcopy polish.

Market Research — we really needed to understand our core market.  Other than our historical data, we always tend to make sure we keep up to date on all of the latest market research reports based on the vertical we are redesigning.  Marketresearch.com is one of the most respected websites when it comes to understanding who your core audience is and we always recommend our clients purchase these reports for analysis and deep consumer behavior discovery.  We specifically purchased this report on behalf of our client and learned a lot about the skin care vertical in our targeted country, recent sales, consumer feedback and who was more likely to buy the product .  Marketer also has very detailed reports but the specific country we were looking for was outside of their current reporting.

Color — we thought that keeping the black to enhance the copy was a good idea but knew we needed to change the background to something lighter.  Since this offer was going to be presented to both a male and female audience, we needed to make sure we could select a color that was equally appealing.  Taking a blend of a mauve and light crimson to create a blended off set color of each was our final choice after 3 revisions.  This color tested well among a variety of a mixed male and female audience ages 25-35 in our designated target market.

Headline – We clipped part of the RED BOLD headline from the previous version and infused it into a lighter color — but kept the black background to enhance the copy.  This black headline really mends well with the Logo and Slogan.  Using this new approach the headline now blends in with the lighter background color while enhancing the brand image and headline message.   A win-win.

Headline Ad Copy:  Identifying the problems that they reader suffers from — a modified version of the original copy, clipped and edited.  Its important to note here that in order to avoid IADD is to get your message across in a potent  yet quick way.  Bullet Points usually serve that purpose but again these are all assumptions until put to the traffic test

Call to Action - we took the call to action from the bottom of the offer and repositioned it to the top – Above The Fold.  Above the Fold is the top portion of the viewable webpage before you actually have to scroll down to view.  This is very important and an easy concept to grasp and understand.  Make sure that the call to action and the point you are attempting to make is expressed “above the fold” — this way the reader can find exactly what they are looking for without having to scroll down.  Believe it or not, that extra 2 seconds kicks IADD into super high gear and the reader could lose interest and abandon the page.  This isn’t good news when you are paying $$ per click to get someone to opt into your page.   FIND OUT HOW and FREE Instant Access — were both tweaks to the ad copy to enhance conversion.  Keep in mind that FREE and INSTANT are very strong words in the direct response marketing world.  They are both very powerful.  TIP: Always make sure to keep your compliance in mind : )

A big button helps and there are studies out there that have shown a button in conjunction with its size and color can increase conversions upward of 30%!

Testimonials: An oldie but goodie — the before and after photos may be one of the oldest tricks in the book but aside from video, the most effective weapon in the direct marketers tool chest. We took the approach of infusing the before/after component directly into the call to action form box.  We had this luxury due to the fact that the call to action on this offer was an e-mail opt-in and less fields were required compared to your typical nutraceutical 3 page CPA offer.

Back to compliance, the disclaimer under the photos was necessary for the clients merchant bank.  This is an issue that you, if not already, will be sure to run into.  Nowadays are all about compliant offers — if your offers are not compliant to the new FTC regulations, you are risking a serious lawsuit from the US Government and believe me, no one wants that.  Sacrifice a bit on your conversion rate to protect your assets.  I cannot stress this enough.

Back to the testimonials — this in your face image really paints a powerful image.  Lets dip back into the mind of the reader and his/her problem and what they may be thinking (ASSUMPTION ALERT)  “my face has red blotchy marks on it and I am tired of going out like this in public. I want to date, meet people, network and eat at a restaurant without people staring at me”

Now that may sound extreme but this is the path to conversion.  Image a few scenarios, put together a theory, design and throw traffic at it.  You need to take a position — just like when writing a research paper in school.  Most of the time, your instructor pay much attention to whether or not your material was correct — only if you took a position and defended it.  This is exactly what we are doing when we paint the picture of conversion and test against it to prove our theory.  Now for this test or assignment I should say, its not like we are trying to figure out how to synthesize a metallic alkaloid.  If you are a chem major and can do this great but all we need to do is figure out what would make someones emotions influence a buying decision : )

This before an after image is above the fold and very descriptive showing that after proper use of this product, your redness will go away.

Body Copy – this is the section where you are supporting your product and explaining all of the wonderful things you get and how your product just simply rocks.  This is all part of the building process and if you have demonstrated your product correctly to what we call the “desired website flow” you are on your way to conversion.

For this we kept the copy but highlighted some of the text on each bullet point.  For instance, pushing the conversion moment even further.  Although we have assumed that we have made our case for the conversion moment, this is an extra effort and last minute to push the benefits again.  As you can see, text such as ENJOY PERFECT SKIN – HEALTHY AND VIBRANT SKIN — SKIN CARE are enhanced to further influence the purchase decision

For a trust factor, we normally place seals of guarantee or satisfaction guarantee on the webpage as well — almost always above the fold. In this case, we decided to use this for the 2nd revision as a booster.  We want to have some tools left in the shed should we decide to use them.

For a mini trust build, we enhanced the text 20 YEAR PROVEN TRACK RECORD.  Now I know not all of you would be able to use a claim such as this but we determined that this claim could be one of the more powerful pieces of text and copy we could use.  We also reserved this text as a possible relocation to push the conversion even higher

Incentive/Product Shot  : The only bullet point we did not keep in here from the original text was the last one which we repositioned next to a nice shot of the actual product line. This is also a trust factor showing there are some actual products involved.  You would be surprised on how many offers we come across that doesn’t show the actual image of the bottle or product.  Again,showing the actual product builds trust.  Just keep in mind that you want to make sure you don’t take up too much room on the page as this is probably the case here. I would have rather cropped the image down to just 1 or 2 bottles but when we tried it, it took away the full effect and didn’t look correct.  We are going to have a new product shot and we will use it in the 2nd revision after testing if needed.

I always stress the point of having a photographer take professional product shots of your product.  Since the image is one of the most important pieces of your offer, showing your product with the correct lighting and background can really give you an advantage over some thrown together image.

-  Contact Us — shows there is a viable business here.  Always have a physical location and a 24/7 customer service number for potential customers to call and ask about your company or product

-  Privacy Policy – another one that is routinely missed and can be one of the biggest trust and confidence builders available — plus its a quick add.  Online consumers now have many research tools available and they want to make sure their data is not being sold to a telemarketer or anyone else. Privacy is big for a consumer so you want to make sure you are informing your potential sale that you will NOT do anything with their information that you are not disclosing.

-  Terms of Use – another easy addition such as the privacy policy.  Define your terms and conditions and disclose everything!

- Stay Tuned… Part 4: Landing Page Results: Before and After, post will go live tomorrow!

This post is part of a 4 day series of posts all about creating winning landing pages. In tomorrows post we will compare before and after results. In this internet marketing game, it’s all about monetization and continually tweaking your ad copy and landing pages to squeeze out the best conversion possible. This guest post series was written by Michael Salvaggio of SEO Brand.

Testimonials - this is my favorite part and if presented correctly, the most powerful and best way to get your point across.  Lets go back to how we define the conversion moment — get into the fear at its basic point.  The fear is “my face looks like the BEFORE image” and the quelling of that fear which leads to the conversion moment is “wow I need to buy this product to make the red blotches go away so I can start dating, going to restaurants, taking a good profile pic on Facebook without having to Photoshop etc…..”

Plain and Simple: there is no better way to invoke the conversion moment other than a image or video testimonial (providing the script is strong — more on that later)

Now the disclaimer about Individual results will vary etc… — this is without a doubt hurting the conversion process.  Basically what you are saying is this “ you may or may not look like the after image and it make make your face WORSE” — Clearly the mistake in this approach is quite obvious — sending a mixed signal but for compliance purposes, it is something we are going to have to live with (more below)

BODY — again, strong ad copy — bullet points explaining the the “secrets” you will receive by entering in your e-mail address.  Keep in mind this should always be the guideline on how your product is different than everyone else’s.  Here you have the opportunity to reinforce the conversion moment or else we will suffer from conversion drift — meaning the readers conversion moment is not being reinforced but actually drifting away.  The more the conversion moment drifts, the less chance of a conversion.  This is certainly the danger zone that we do not want to approach so these bullet points must reinforce the buying decision.

The idea of highlighting AND FOR SUBSCRIBING WITH US BELOW TODAY – is a good approach, the wrong text is highlighted.

The issue with these bullet points is the font is too small and there is a bit TMI Here as well.

- Stay Tuned… Part 3: Call to Action, post will go live tomorrow!

This post is part of a 5 day series of posts all about creating winning landing pages. In tomorrows post we will cover the importance of using a great call to action on your landing pages. You only have a few seconds to make the user click, so it’s important to engage them immediately. This guest post series was written by Michael Salvaggio of SEO Brand.

I wanted to share some information with you about the importance and power of your conversion rate. As we may or may not know, your conversion rate is one of the metrics in your campaign that you can easily tweak and control and I consider it the most important.

SEO Brand has a unique methodology that takes a hybrid statistical-holistic approach to landing page concept creation and conversion optimization that we call Objective-Stastical Based or OSB.  This internal process was defined and refined over our 8 years of designing and optimizing some of the highest converting offers across many different verticals.

There are many companies and firms that claim they understand this space but do they have the proven work to back up these claims aside from examples of pages and general statements about “being the secret behind high converting offers”.  We do and would like to share a small business skin care offer before and after with you.

Case Study

We were contracted to redesign a popular skin cream offer.  The design was outdated and although the advertising copy was solid, it needed a polish and tweak so we went to work.

Our conversion strategy will be our own internal methodology which we call objective-statistical based and it breaks down like this: We will take each part of the website and break it down to point out the obvious and not so obvious components of each section.  I will then provide the solution that we implemented and the before and after results of the conversion rate.  Once we have the data, we can make our own inferences to the results of this campaign:

Here is the outdated design:

Lets break down each section and point out what we identified as weak points

LOGO – The logo in itself is fine although the print is difficult to read.  Its the color that we needed to change.

Black colors represent a hard offer — something more masculine.  Now, while I agree that the male skin product segment is the fastest growing in this vertical, this original design was intended to present an offer to women.

HEADLINE — Anytime I see a headline with WARNING I immediately think of 2 things: run away as fast as you can or ok, wait, let me take some time to read this.  Either way, you are taking one hell of a risk if you are paying for your own traffic or trying to convince an affiliate network that your offer converts.

HEADLINE AD COPY – Although this ad copy is solid, its a bit too much.  When combined with the above WARNING copy, we could be overloading the reader.  Lets consider this hypothetical :  the reader was sucked in by the WARNING headline and now is continuing to read the next small paragraph which starts to play into the fear of the original feeling the reader had when he landed on the page.  In order to define “fear” we must attempt to get into the reader’s mind to discover when their fear actually takes control and looks for an action to quell that fear for one moment.  This moment we consider to be the “conversion moment” — which is defined as the moment someone makes the decision to buy.  Its an instantaneous decision.  Think about it : the reader has a problem….bad skin.  Lets assume this reader is a male.  The male doesn’t want to go out in public with red blotches all over his skin for a variety of reasons : cant attract women, cant be taken seriously in business or just overall embarrassed.  Are these assumptions ?  You bet.  How can you make these assumptions seem real?  Put yourself  in the readers shoes.  Ask yourself Would you like red blotches all over your face?  I didn’t think so.

Back to the reader, the fear and the conversion moment: the reader has finally found the product that will eliminate his fear and decided to buy — BINGO — the conversion moment has been identified.  Now the million dollar question is “What can I do to invoke this conversion moment in 5 seconds or less ?”

Notice how I say “could be” or “this is an assumption”.  Again these are all assumptions that we are making at the beginning of our controlled test so these assumptions will be put to the test.  Did you sleep though your Consumer Behavior and Stat 101 class?  If so, no worries, you are about to get the crash course again and this time it will make you money on your offer — not bore you to death !

Bottom Line:  we though there was a little bit of TMI — too much information here.

AD COPY HEADLINE # 3 ??   — again this falls into the TMI category but there is something very powerful about this copy and the way its presented.  Try this for a mini controlled experiment:  Switch to another webpage for 30 seconds and then pull this one back up.  Where did your eyes go?

Think about it for a minute: Perhaps this headline was meant to shock me into making a decision?  How about just an attention grabber?  If you are like me, your eyes went to this RED BOLD headline that simply screams out “HEY CHECK ME OUT” — although this is the effect that you want to have on your landing page, being presented in RED and BOLD could also invoke another DANGER response and your mind could already make the decision that this product is hazardous.  Although this approach could be effective, the current presentation is not and more importantly, what about the other 2 paragraphs above?  Again, great copy but TMI.

Keep in mind that all internet browsers (myself included) suffer from IADD — something we refer to as Internet Attention Deficit Syndrome.  Now before you run to your primary care physician and start demanding a prescription, accept the face that you have IADD and thats not a bad thing!  An IADD diagnosis only means one thing: you better find what you are looking for in the next 5 seconds or you will click off and go somewhere else.  This headline certainly sucks us in but the approach is flawed.

- Stay Tuned… Part 2: Testimonials, post will go live tomorrow!

This post is part of a 3 day series of posts all about creating winning landing pages. In tomorrows post we will cover the importance of using testimonials in your landing pages. Everything from using the right images, to relating with the customer and using “fear” in your ad copy. This guest post series was written by Michael Salvaggio of SEO Brand.