Get More Online Sales with the Elements of Conversion
One of my most requested and highest rated presentations for online sales is The Chemistry of the Landing Page. It’s part of our Conversion Course.
The elements combine to make an effective landing page. Here’s the equation for a successful landing page:
This formula tells us that an effective landing page takes a Web Page (Wp), adds an Offer (Of), a Form (Fm), an Image (I) of the product plus Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) to get the visitor to take action. You may ask, “Where did these elements come from?”
We have a palette of things to work with that help us when we’re developing marketing campaigns that deliver sales, leads and subscribers. For us, it’s like a game.
This chart provides a vocabulary and methodology to work through ideas for higher and higher converting online properties. You’ll find it in our Landing Page ROI Checklist, which you can download for free.
Now you can play.
Download the Elements of Conversion Optimization PDF, cut out the elements, and start having some fun.
We want to create a reaction with our visitors. See what I did there? When optimizing for conversions, we don’t want visitors to interact, we want them to react.
Start with the Basic Elements
If we cut out Motion (M) and Image (I) to create a powerful kind of content.
Video (V) is found in the table under Content. Not all video is created equal.
Fun with Content
The set of elements in the Content section are powerful resources for getting visitors to take action.
The bottom row of Content is interactive. It engages the visitor in unique ways.
If we combine all of the basic elements plus a very special kind of content called Music (Mu), we get the recipe for an explainer video for our business. Explainer videos include the features and benefits of our product or service.
Pick a Container or Two
Where does this explainer video live? We can place it onto a web page or a Social Network (Sn) like YouTube.
We can load our video onto YouTube, which is a social network.
We’ve generated some precious attention as well as two kinds of User Generated Content, Comments and Likes. User-generated Comments (Cm) amplify the amount of Attention (Att) your business gets from a social posting.
This doesn’t get us much in the way of conversion. We may get some social content and some awareness, some Attention. For the sake of conversion, we need visits to our website. We need Traffic.
Dealing with the Precious Metals
Our main goal when combining elements is a bit of alchemy. We want to generate precious metals, Sales ($) and Leads (Pb). Those of you familiar with the periodic table of elements should get why I chose “Pb” for Leads.
The precious metals represent some sort of conversion: a suspect to a prospect, a prospect to a lead, a lead to a sale. We’ll be doing more with the precious metals in future articles.
The Offer Leads the Conversion
The content that invites visitors to take action is an Offer of some kind. We can add the offer to the video or to the page. In a social network like YouTube, we don’t have much control over how offers are displayed on the page. Adding the offer to the video is considered a best practice in all situations.
The offer magically turns attention into traffic.
I told you this was going to be fun. However, when we start asking visitors to do something, we introduce some contamination into our reaction.
The Traffic has to have someplace to go. So we can use our handy equation, shown above, to create a landing page.
When playing the conversion game, we want Leads and online Sales as our reward. Qualified traffic plus an efficient landing page can deliver that for us.
The Inert Gases Get in the Way
If our video is longer than it is entertaining, we may generate a contaminant called Bordom (Bo). If we spend more time talking about our business and products than solutions for our viewers, we are generating Melium (Me). If we go on and on, we’re generating Hot Air (He).
All of these can generate the most disappointing contaminants, called Abandon (Ar). We give it the same symbol as the element Argon (Ar), because when someone abandons your content, they “Are gone.”
We can see these contaminants in our analytics. Here’s the attention graph for one of our explainer videos. This graph tells us what percentage of visitors are watching at any given time (blue line). The red line indicates replays of portions of the video.
At the beginning, we lose those viewers who are just in the wrong place, though viewers abandon the video throughout. There’s a place where we spend too much time drawing because we like to draw. This is producing Hot Air (He). Toward the end of this four-minute video we see evidence of Bordom (Bo). We should shorten things up.
Then, at the end, when we make the Offer (Of), we see some abandonment due to Melium (Me). We’re talking about ourselves at this point.
Adding Some Catalysts
Catalysts don’t actually react with anything, they help the other elements react faster, hotter or more efficiently. You shouldn’t buy our product just because others have, but social proof is a key motivator in many reactions. It’s a catalyst in our message. Search Engine Optimization (Seo) is invisible to the reader for the most part, but it can catalyze a page to create more Traffic (Tf).
Videos are great for Storytelling (St), so this might be a great catalyst for our explainer video. We know from our landing page formula above that Proof (Pr) and Trust (Tr) are important and should be included in our landing pages.
On our blog, we’ve used Gamification (Gm). Using a badges as a reward, we encourage visitors to come back and read more. This addition that has accelerated the growth of our subscriber list and traffic.
Our Explainer Video
We chose to put our explainer video on a landing page with an offer and a form. There is also an offer in the video. We transcribed the soundtrack to provide text for the page.
The formula is this:
The traffic comes from this page and our weekly educational email, which you should subscribe to.
A Checklist for Effective Online Sales
These equations are your checklist for producing effective marketing. It also allows you to have some fun mixing and matching elements that may not seem to go together.
Download the PDF, cut out the elements, and get creative about how you make your online properties more profitable.
- Confirmation Bias: What It Is and How It’s Hurting Your Website Conversions - August 20, 2024
- The Conversion Optimization Process for High Converting Websites - August 20, 2024
- Two Guys on Your Website: The Surprising Link Between CRO and SEO - June 27, 2024
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
[…] case study examining Booking.com reminded me a lot of my presentation on the Chemistry of the Landing Page where I talk about the different elements that make a landing page a success and also our post on […]
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!