Roy H. Williams, benefactor of the enigmatic business school The Wizard Academy has a simple formula that you should study:
“Salience” is that magical moment when your message enters your prospects’ long-term memory. It means your message will not be swept from the short-term memory that most marketing messages float in.
Relevance is simply how important your message is to a prospect’s current problems. Messages gain relevance when they are helpful, educational, titillating or entertaining.
Frequency is the number of times someone is exposed to your message.
The enemies of Relevance, then are messages exclusively about your promotions, your company or your products, or messages sent to infrequently.
The enemies of frequency are lack of repetition and invisibility. Social media messages have very short lifespans. Thus, for most people, they are invisible. The ubiquitous Leo Laporte complains that, when his posts suddenly stopped appearing on Google Buzz and Twitter, that no one noticed. He didn’t even notice for two weeks.
Email for Salience
Email is highly visible. It is the biggest social network on the planet. Most business professionals spend their day in email. It is how they managing their work.
If email is not working for you, it is probably because of low frequency. Email is a personal medium, and we all are afraid of being seen as spammers by sending too much email.
In The Instant Curated E-Newsletter That Your Prospects Will Love I describe how to automatically create a relevant, frequent email from the industry articles that you are reading every day. You are curating the content, but other talented writers are doing the work.
I believe so strongly in the power of targeted, focused landing pages, that I’m going to prepare you for the inevitable battles that will ensue. It is inevitable that forces of darkness will swoop down on you as you prepare a page designed for high conversion rates.
They are not cunning enemies, and this is why they are dangerous. You must get good at playing their game.
Here are some tactics for beating gatekeepers at their own game.
1. Data is only useful to confuse and disorient
You must come to terms with the fact that data will not sway your enemies. It can be used as a weapon.
I recommend printing out random graphs and hanging them around your office. Anyone who comes in to say that the company logo on the page is too small will be instantly dazzled.
When your enemy is trying to get you to add the corporate site navigation bar to your landing page, you can point to one of the graphs at random and simply shake your head.
2. Bureaucracy is Your Friend
Take a lesson from your IT department when it is suggested that the page needs some stock photography on it. Say, “That is a great idea. We’ll add that to the testing schedule right away!”
If they go over your head, you should invoke the “No changes without a test plan!” rule even if such a rule is not written anywhere.
I know it is despicable to use a valuable tool like testing as a delaying tactic. It is actually supposed to do the opposite. But, this is war.
3. Use the Competition to Counter Old Habits
If you’re competition is enlightened, they may be implementing things like landing pages and doing it well.
Not likely. However, you should do some searches for the keywords that are important to your business and see if you can find a competitor doing things right.
Then, when IT delivers a form with the standard “Submit” button, you can point to your competition and say, “They’re going to take our prospects if we don’t do it my way!”
4. Invent Your Own Budget
When you encounter pushback to creating unique landing pages for each channel and ad, invoke an imaginary budget.
“We’re taking the extra cost from the Incremental Revenue Budget,” or “We’ll cover it with the Conversion Premium Budget.”
While these budgets don’t actually exist, we all know that higher conversion rates should result in more leads, more sales and more revenue. We’re just borrowing from the increased future value of our conversion genius.
5. Resist the Dark Side
It is important that you not become your enemy. There are “lies, damn lies and then there are analytics,” to paraphrase Mark Twain.
We know we can draw just about any conclusion we want from analytics to support any position we want, but we can’t do bad science.
For example, if our manager was adding corporate-speak to our crafted persuasive copy, it would be ingenuous to point out the bounce rates for the pages she’d edited in the past. It may not be her copy that did the damage.
Instead, invoke the “Great copy. We’ll add that to the test schedule right away!”
Fight hard, my friends, but don’t compromise the science.
It’s out there: the article with the answer to your online marketing question. All you have to do is find it.
As it turns out, I’m looking for answers to a lot of questions. It’s my job as the Conversion Scientist.
When I find a good checklist, best practice or how-to, I save it to my personal library. When my clients hit me with a question, this library offers a treasure trove of answers written by some of the smartest people in the business.
“But why wait for a call?” I thought. “Why not share this with my clients every week?”
Thus is born “For Further Study,” a scannable, quickly digested weekly email created exclusively for my clients.
I promise:
Quality sources
Conversion-enhancing content
Scannable emails with a short commentary by me to help you decide if you should read an article.
Here’s a sample of what to expect each week.
Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
Jul 21, 2011 09:39 am
This is an incredibly comprehensive yet accessible guide to social media best practices.
Tags: social media blog twitter facebook search engine watch
read more
Seth’s Blog: Articulating your preferred use case (what’s it for?)
Jul 17, 2011 03:36 am
What Seth calls a “Use Case” we call Personas in the world of conversion. Otherwise the benefits are the same: understanding your most important visitors, ending bad relationships with poor customers, and getting everyone on the same page.
I’ve written about being the “Cheerios Guy” of your organization; that is, running around talking up what you’ve learned as you’ve tested things on your Web site. Yes, it’s can be irritating, but it is VERY necessary.
The real question is, how do you equip your CMO to be the Cheerios Guy? You can’t show him or her the charts, spreadsheets and test results. When they get button-holed by the water cooler or broad-sided in the board room, they need a little swagger. You need to tell the story that lies in the data.
You need to give them a Book of Swagger.
Rose Holston takes us through the Book of Swagger, a device invented by digital communications guru Korye Logan in The Agile Marketer and the Book of Swagger.
The aim of the “Book of Swagger” is to be simple:
A prologue. A short narrative that sets the stage for the story. Statistics and web analytics define a baseline from whence we came (the past) and where we are today (the present).
Conflict and resolution. Talk about the drama of “wins” and “revelations” as the team completes scrum after scrum.
The future. Your communications toolkit becomes the basis for looking to the future. This is where your “Book of Swagger” illustrates the wins and losses that feed our mid-management and C-suite folks with information that helps to set the agenda.
The Junta 42 has published their annual (and last) list of 42 top content marketing blogs. The Conversion Scientist is #24, and honored to be among some great sites.
We have been following most of Junta42’s top 10 including Convince and Convert (#1), Top Rank (#2), Brian Solis (#3), Marketing Experiments (#5), Copyblogger (#6), Social Media Examiner (#7), Heidi Cohen (#10), and Duct Tape Marketing (#14).
We are actively exploring the others, and you should too.
It’s happening in every industry as we speak. Decision makers are looking at information that tells them how the Internet is impacting their business and their industry.
It may be happening in your office.
A decision is going to be made:
a) To continue with business as usual
b) To commit to the Internet as a crucial part of the future of the business
Those businesses that choose a) may not be here in 24 months. Those that choose b) may not either, but if they are they will be the leader in their space.
In my Search Engine Land column 5 Ways to Jump Ahead in Your Industry, I outline the characteristics of a testing company, like Zappos or Amazon. These are the characteristics that can result in astonishing growth and amazing profitability. They include:
Accept The Internet As A Lever
Develop A Testing Culture
Invest Where It Counts
Know Your Numbers
Take A Non-Commodity Approach
It is no small feat to accomplish these, but those that do will enjoy a lead in their industry that will be hard to usurp by competitors.
I was on the hot seat at the Austin Content Marketing Meetup.
This isn’t your “play nice and listen while the guy reads his slides” sort of presentation. In the hot seat, the room is actively trying to destroy you, lobbing lit questions from across the room and questioning your every word.
Yes, it even got a little ugly. I think I held up OK.
You’re invited to sit back and enjoy the occasionally heated conversation on how to make your content convert visitors into sales.
The common wisdom among social media marketers is “put links to your social media everywhere.” The idea is that you should build as big a social media “tribe” as possible. As it turns out, this isn’t always a good plan.
If you’re paying for traffic to your Web site – and what traffic doesn’t require some cash, blood, sweat or tears to earn – then why would you send it off to Facebook or YouTube or LinkedIn to disappear forever?
You wouldn’t. But you might be.
In my Search Engine Land article How Mark Zuckerberg Stole Your Search Traffic & What To Do About It, I show you how your social media advertisements may be costing you conversions.
I also show you how to use social media in a conversion-safe way. Read the entire article
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
We have a little fun with Copywriters in my newest Content Marketing Institute post, How to Find the Right Copywriter for your Landing Pages. If you could only hire one professional that would increase the number of people who buy or become a lead on your site, it would be a copywriter.
They can paint more detailed pictures than a photographer.
They can use more colorful language than a designer.
Communicate with humans and search engines.
If you’re going to dominate your competition online, it is because they write their copy themselves. I suggest you find a good direct response copywriter and let them do their work.
To help you get familiar with the kinds of copywriters you might meet in a dark alley, I’ve described five that I’ve run into on a regular basis.
The Styrofoam Sandwich Writer
The SEO Substituter
The Frustrated Novelist
The Soviet-era Propagandist
The Persuader
Most copywriters you meet will be a combination of some of these.
Tell me about your favorite copywriter in the comments. Let us know what combination of the above he or she exhibits.
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Landing Page Basics: Don’t let your content go out without a strategy to draw readers back to your site and a landing page to get them to convert – even if that conversion is to get your next content offering.
In this article I’ll show you an example of how content can drive a reader to action. I also talk about landing page basics like these five important landing page strategies:
Pitch the offer, not your company
Remove distractions
Let the visitor know where they are in the process
Make forms the right length
Only ask for information you will use
Content marketers sometimes focus on the content and forget about the marketing.
Yes, we want to inform.
Yes, we want to educate.
Yes, we want to be seen as the thought leader in our space.
But, we also want more traffic to our website, more leads and more sales.
One of the easiest yet most often overlooked marketing tactics is the call to action. I recently gave you ideas on how to include calls to action in your content marketing, but where should you send people and what do you say?
Landing pages: Where visitors like to land
A landing page is a page on your site dedicated to delivering on promises made by the offers in your content. The goal is to get a consumer of your content to take another step toward becoming a customer.
Your home page is not a good landing page. Instead, you want to send your prospects to a page where they are asked to do something specific and logical.
So what makes a good landing page? Reader Sarah Mitchell responded to my last call for samples with a web page that illustrates how to integrate content marketing and landing pages.
She wrote the product page for ezytire.com. I like this example because businesses tend to use this space to talk about themselves and their products. They forget about the visitor.
A visit to your product page is a “buy sign,” making it a great place for calls to action. Mitchell does a good job of keeping the copy focused on the prospects, their businesses and their customers. She is also not shy about giving the prospect opportunities to take action.
ezytire about page with markup.
Landing Page Basics: Calls to action
In 12 Ways to Get Readers to Take Action, I implore content marketers to put calls to action, also called Conversion Beacons, in their content marketing. Mitchell’s ezytire page is the poster child for in-content and ad-based calls to action.
Notice that there are not one, not two, but five calls to action on this page to start a free trial. In addition, she has secondary offers to start a chat, “register your interest,” and watch a how-to video.
The bottom line is this: You never know when a prospect finally gets enough information to feel comfortable taking action, so you must always be offering ways for them to do so.
Is this a bait and switch? It isn’t, and we should never attempt to mislead our prospects. The page offers details on the product. Contact information has been moved to a dedicated “Contact” page.
Mitchell’s links go to a landing page that starts the trial enrollment process right away. It should be obvious that sending visitors to the home page here would have been disastrous for ezytire.
ezytire landing page trial.
We know this page is working. The bounce rate is very low, with only 14 percent of visitors leaving the page immediately. That means the page isn’t scaring people away despite having a total of eight primary and secondary calls to action.
Fully half of the visitors are starting a free trial, and 15 percent of them will purchase the service when their trial is over.
That’s a beautiful bottom-line conversion rate of about 6.45 percent. Many businesses are proud of a two percent or three percent conversion rate from landing pages.
Landing page basics
Here are five things this page does well, things that you should consider when you develop your landing pages.
Pitch the offer, not your company
The page is all about the trial, not about Ezytire.
No distractions
All of the content on this page is designed to help the reader get through the trial process. Ezytire should consider removing the top navigation as well to keep from distracting visitors.
The visitor knows where they are in the process
If it’s a pretty long conversion process, it’s considered a best practice to always let the visitor know where they are. You can see the “Step 1,” “Step 2,” etc. on the page that will provide the visitor with this feedback.
Forms are the right length
Long forms can be more daunting to visitors than multiple steps. For a “soft” offer like a trial, I recommend shorter forms and more steps. You should try different approaches with your audience.
Only ask for information you will use
The first step is pretty efficient: Name, email address, password. Ezytire could ask some qualifying questions, and may be tempted to ask for a phone number. Additional fields will, in general, decrease your conversion rates, so don’t ask if you won’t’ use the information.
The ezytire page Sarah Mitchell inherited only generated nine conversions in three months before Sarah reworked it. If you’re not thinking, “I need someone like Sarah to look at my pages,” you’re not really a business person, or your pages would have bottom-line conversion rates above 7 percent.
In my next post, I’ll share some ideas on how to find a great landing page copywriter.
Email Frequency and Relevance: The Instant E-Newsletter
Conversion Marketing StrategyRoy H. Williams, benefactor of the enigmatic business school The Wizard Academy has a simple formula that you should study:
“Salience” is that magical moment when your message enters your prospects’ long-term memory. It means your message will not be swept from the short-term memory that most marketing messages float in.
Relevance is simply how important your message is to a prospect’s current problems. Messages gain relevance when they are helpful, educational, titillating or entertaining.
Frequency is the number of times someone is exposed to your message.
The enemies of Relevance, then are messages exclusively about your promotions, your company or your products, or messages sent to infrequently.
The enemies of frequency are lack of repetition and invisibility. Social media messages have very short lifespans. Thus, for most people, they are invisible. The ubiquitous Leo Laporte complains that, when his posts suddenly stopped appearing on Google Buzz and Twitter, that no one noticed. He didn’t even notice for two weeks.
Email for Salience
Email is highly visible. It is the biggest social network on the planet. Most business professionals spend their day in email. It is how they managing their work.
If email is not working for you, it is probably because of low frequency. Email is a personal medium, and we all are afraid of being seen as spammers by sending too much email.
In The Instant Curated E-Newsletter That Your Prospects Will Love I describe how to automatically create a relevant, frequent email from the industry articles that you are reading every day. You are curating the content, but other talented writers are doing the work.
All you have to do is bookmark relevant articles.
Read the article
5 Ways to Prepare for the Battle of the Landing Page
Landing Page OptimizationThey are not cunning enemies, and this is why they are dangerous. You must get good at playing their game.
Here are some tactics for beating gatekeepers at their own game.
1. Data is only useful to confuse and disorient
You must come to terms with the fact that data will not sway your enemies. It can be used as a weapon.
I recommend printing out random graphs and hanging them around your office. Anyone who comes in to say that the company logo on the page is too small will be instantly dazzled.
When your enemy is trying to get you to add the corporate site navigation bar to your landing page, you can point to one of the graphs at random and simply shake your head.
2. Bureaucracy is Your Friend
Take a lesson from your IT department when it is suggested that the page needs some stock photography on it. Say, “That is a great idea. We’ll add that to the testing schedule right away!”
If they go over your head, you should invoke the “No changes without a test plan!” rule even if such a rule is not written anywhere.
I know it is despicable to use a valuable tool like testing as a delaying tactic. It is actually supposed to do the opposite. But, this is war.
3. Use the Competition to Counter Old Habits
If you’re competition is enlightened, they may be implementing things like landing pages and doing it well.
Not likely. However, you should do some searches for the keywords that are important to your business and see if you can find a competitor doing things right.
Then, when IT delivers a form with the standard “Submit” button, you can point to your competition and say, “They’re going to take our prospects if we don’t do it my way!”
4. Invent Your Own Budget
When you encounter pushback to creating unique landing pages for each channel and ad, invoke an imaginary budget.
“We’re taking the extra cost from the Incremental Revenue Budget,” or “We’ll cover it with the Conversion Premium Budget.”
While these budgets don’t actually exist, we all know that higher conversion rates should result in more leads, more sales and more revenue. We’re just borrowing from the increased future value of our conversion genius.
5. Resist the Dark Side
It is important that you not become your enemy. There are “lies, damn lies and then there are analytics,” to paraphrase Mark Twain.
We know we can draw just about any conclusion we want from analytics to support any position we want, but we can’t do bad science.
For example, if our manager was adding corporate-speak to our crafted persuasive copy, it would be ingenuous to point out the bounce rates for the pages she’d edited in the past. It may not be her copy that did the damage.
Instead, invoke the “Great copy. We’ll add that to the test schedule right away!”
Fight hard, my friends, but don’t compromise the science.
Read the Articles that The Conversion Scientist is Reading: For Further Study
Conversion OptimizationWhen I find a good checklist, best practice or how-to, I save it to my personal library. When my clients hit me with a question, this library offers a treasure trove of answers written by some of the smartest people in the business.
“But why wait for a call?” I thought. “Why not share this with my clients every week?”
Thus is born “For Further Study,” a scannable, quickly digested weekly email created exclusively for my clients.
I promise:
Here’s a sample of what to expect each week.
Blog SMO Guide: How to Apply Social Media Optimization to Your Blog in 33 Steps – Search Engine Watch (#SEW)
Jul 21, 2011 09:39 am
This is an incredibly comprehensive yet accessible guide to social media best practices.
Tags: social media blog twitter facebook search engine watch
read more
Seth’s Blog: Articulating your preferred use case (what’s it for?)
Jul 17, 2011 03:36 am
What Seth calls a “Use Case” we call Personas in the world of conversion. Otherwise the benefits are the same: understanding your most important visitors, ending bad relationships with poor customers, and getting everyone on the same page.
Tags: seth personas use case
read more
How Does the C-Suite Understand Conversion? The Book of Swagger
Conversion Marketing StrategyThe real question is, how do you equip your CMO to be the Cheerios Guy? You can’t show him or her the charts, spreadsheets and test results. When they get button-holed by the water cooler or broad-sided in the board room, they need a little swagger. You need to tell the story that lies in the data.
You need to give them a Book of Swagger.
Rose Holston takes us through the Book of Swagger, a device invented by digital communications guru Korye Logan in The Agile Marketer and the Book of Swagger.
Read the entire article
Photo courtesy bizior.
41 Other Blogs You May Enjoy
Conversion OptimizationThe Junta 42 has published their annual (and last) list of 42 top content marketing blogs. The Conversion Scientist is #24, and honored to be among some great sites.
We have been following most of Junta42’s top 10 including Convince and Convert (#1), Top Rank (#2), Brian Solis (#3), Marketing Experiments (#5), Copyblogger (#6), Social Media Examiner (#7), Heidi Cohen (#10), and Duct Tape Marketing (#14).
We are actively exploring the others, and you should too.
How a Testing Culture will make you the Zappos of Your Industry
CRO Tests | Multivariate | AB TestingIt may be happening in your office.
A decision is going to be made:
a) To continue with business as usual
b) To commit to the Internet as a crucial part of the future of the business
Those businesses that choose a) may not be here in 24 months. Those that choose b) may not either, but if they are they will be the leader in their space.
In my Search Engine Land column 5 Ways to Jump Ahead in Your Industry, I outline the characteristics of a testing company, like Zappos or Amazon. These are the characteristics that can result in astonishing growth and amazing profitability. They include:
Accept The Internet As A Lever
Develop A Testing Culture
Invest Where It Counts
Know Your Numbers
Take A Non-Commodity Approach
It is no small feat to accomplish these, but those that do will enjoy a lead in their industry that will be hard to usurp by competitors.
Thanks to Extra Space Management for sharing their results with us at the Phone Smart Unconference Hawaii.
Hot Seat Video: Content Marketing and Conversion
Conversion OptimizationI was on the hot seat at the Austin Content Marketing Meetup.
This isn’t your “play nice and listen while the guy reads his slides” sort of presentation. In the hot seat, the room is actively trying to destroy you, lobbing lit questions from across the room and questioning your every word.
Yes, it even got a little ugly. I think I held up OK.
You’re invited to sit back and enjoy the occasionally heated conversation on how to make your content convert visitors into sales.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Are You Sending Your Store-bought Traffic Off to Mark Zuckerberg?
Conversion Marketing StrategyThe common wisdom among social media marketers is “put links to your social media everywhere.” The idea is that you should build as big a social media “tribe” as possible.
As it turns out, this isn’t always a good plan.
If you’re paying for traffic to your Web site – and what traffic doesn’t require some cash, blood, sweat or tears to earn – then why would you send it off to Facebook or YouTube or LinkedIn to disappear forever?
You wouldn’t. But you might be.
In my Search Engine Land article How Mark Zuckerberg Stole Your Search Traffic & What To Do About It, I show you how your social media advertisements may be costing you conversions.
I also show you how to use social media in a conversion-safe way.
Read the entire article
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Five Copywriters That Can Make or Break Your Conversion Rate
Persuasion ScienceWe have a little fun with Copywriters in my newest Content Marketing Institute post, How to Find the Right Copywriter for your Landing Pages.
If you could only hire one professional that would increase the number of people who buy or become a lead on your site, it would be a copywriter.
They can paint more detailed pictures than a photographer.
They can use more colorful language than a designer.
Communicate with humans and search engines.
If you’re going to dominate your competition online, it is because they write their copy themselves. I suggest you find a good direct response copywriter and let them do their work.
To help you get familiar with the kinds of copywriters you might meet in a dark alley, I’ve described five that I’ve run into on a regular basis.
The Styrofoam Sandwich Writer
The SEO Substituter
The Frustrated Novelist
The Soviet-era Propagandist
The Persuader
Most copywriters you meet will be a combination of some of these.
Tell me about your favorite copywriter in the comments. Let us know what combination of the above he or she exhibits.
Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist teaches businesses of all sizes how to get more leads and sales from the traffic coming to their Web site.
Photo courtesy nkzs.
Landing Page Basics: 5 Strategies to Make Your Content Convert
Landing Page OptimizationIn this article I’ll show you an example of how content can drive a reader to action. I also talk about landing page basics like these five important landing page strategies:
Content marketers sometimes focus on the content and forget about the marketing.
Yes, we want to inform.
Yes, we want to educate.
Yes, we want to be seen as the thought leader in our space.
But, we also want more traffic to our website, more leads and more sales.
One of the easiest yet most often overlooked marketing tactics is the call to action. I recently gave you ideas on how to include calls to action in your content marketing, but where should you send people and what do you say?
Landing pages: Where visitors like to land
A landing page is a page on your site dedicated to delivering on promises made by the offers in your content. The goal is to get a consumer of your content to take another step toward becoming a customer.
Your home page is not a good landing page. Instead, you want to send your prospects to a page where they are asked to do something specific and logical.
So what makes a good landing page? Reader Sarah Mitchell responded to my last call for samples with a web page that illustrates how to integrate content marketing and landing pages.
She wrote the product page for ezytire.com. I like this example because businesses tend to use this space to talk about themselves and their products. They forget about the visitor.
A visit to your product page is a “buy sign,” making it a great place for calls to action. Mitchell does a good job of keeping the copy focused on the prospects, their businesses and their customers. She is also not shy about giving the prospect opportunities to take action.
ezytire about page with markup.
Landing Page Basics: Calls to action
In 12 Ways to Get Readers to Take Action, I implore content marketers to put calls to action, also called Conversion Beacons, in their content marketing. Mitchell’s ezytire page is the poster child for in-content and ad-based calls to action.
Notice that there are not one, not two, but five calls to action on this page to start a free trial. In addition, she has secondary offers to start a chat, “register your interest,” and watch a how-to video.
The bottom line is this: You never know when a prospect finally gets enough information to feel comfortable taking action, so you must always be offering ways for them to do so.
Is this a bait and switch? It isn’t, and we should never attempt to mislead our prospects. The page offers details on the product. Contact information has been moved to a dedicated “Contact” page.
Mitchell’s links go to a landing page that starts the trial enrollment process right away. It should be obvious that sending visitors to the home page here would have been disastrous for ezytire.
ezytire landing page trial.
We know this page is working. The bounce rate is very low, with only 14 percent of visitors leaving the page immediately. That means the page isn’t scaring people away despite having a total of eight primary and secondary calls to action.
Fully half of the visitors are starting a free trial, and 15 percent of them will purchase the service when their trial is over.
That’s a beautiful bottom-line conversion rate of about 6.45 percent. Many businesses are proud of a two percent or three percent conversion rate from landing pages.
Landing page basics
Here are five things this page does well, things that you should consider when you develop your landing pages.
Pitch the offer, not your company
The page is all about the trial, not about Ezytire.
No distractions
All of the content on this page is designed to help the reader get through the trial process. Ezytire should consider removing the top navigation as well to keep from distracting visitors.
The visitor knows where they are in the process
If it’s a pretty long conversion process, it’s considered a best practice to always let the visitor know where they are. You can see the “Step 1,” “Step 2,” etc. on the page that will provide the visitor with this feedback.
Forms are the right length
Long forms can be more daunting to visitors than multiple steps. For a “soft” offer like a trial, I recommend shorter forms and more steps. You should try different approaches with your audience.
Only ask for information you will use
The first step is pretty efficient: Name, email address, password. Ezytire could ask some qualifying questions, and may be tempted to ask for a phone number. Additional fields will, in general, decrease your conversion rates, so don’t ask if you won’t’ use the information.
The ezytire page Sarah Mitchell inherited only generated nine conversions in three months before Sarah reworked it. If you’re not thinking, “I need someone like Sarah to look at my pages,” you’re not really a business person, or your pages would have bottom-line conversion rates above 7 percent.
In my next post, I’ll share some ideas on how to find a great landing page copywriter.
Originally published article I wrote for the Content Marketing Institute