With the New Year in full swing, most online marketers have already resolved to increase conversion quality and quantity. In the spirit of helping you keep (and exceed) those resolutions, here are 8 tried and tested ways to increase your conversions in 2008. Cheers!
1. Shed that excess copy and content. Keep your landing experiences simple and streamlined. Use short, punchy headlines and easy-to-read copy. Respondents convert more when they have less to read.
2. Help your respondents find what they are looking for. Don't send them to your home page, or a deep link within your site, and expect them to do all the work. They were nice enough to click on your banner or search ad—return the favor with a landing experience that speaks directly to their interests and needs.
3. Make friends. Send your respondents to engaging, multi-step landing experiences with segmentation forks—not your corporate website or landing page. Segmenting respondents gives you the opportunity to address their unique needs and concerns, making them more likely to convert.
4. Test more. Thankfully, the best landing experience testing doesn't require late night study sessions or large quantities of caffeine—only smarter testing. Test what matters. Test to improve the outcome of campaigns. Keep testing landing experiences against each other, but also test at the traffic source level. And while you're at it, see how your respondents are converting by segment. In 2008, remember RTP: The Respondent | Traffic Source | Path Matrix. RTP Testing gives marketers tremendous power, insight and control over their post-click marketing efforts. Try it.
5. Kick the landing page habit. Single landing pages have single digit conversion rates. Create multi-page landing experiences and convert in the double digits.
6. Spend more time on things that matter—like testing different segmentation or messaging strategies—variables that powerfully alter the effectiveness of a campaign. Don't waste time on minutia, such as headline color or font size.
7. Keep your promises. Make sure to match the message of your ads with the message and tone of your post-click experiences. Your landing experiences should immediately, directly, and simply pay off the promise of the ad that got the user to click. If you don't, you've broken a promise and tarnished your brand.
8. Reduce your IT consumption. Eliminate the technology roadblocks that prevent marketers from taking full control of their post-click efforts. Spend less time working with IT and web developers, and more time creating and testing your landing experiences. Better yet, do it with LiveBall. LiveBall allows marketers to create, test, analyze, and adjust landing experiences in real time, without costly and time-consuming IT and web development resources.
Here's to a great 2008. Stick to these resolutions--you won't regret it.
-Megan Leap
