Landing Page Case Study Series: Start to Finish

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  The design was outdated and although the advertising copy was solid, it needed a polish and tweak so we went to work.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Here is the outdated design: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.