A well designed landing page can make the difference between a raging success and an abysmal failure for your lead nurturing program. The people at Pardot, just released this really powerful Infographic on the anatomy of a well designed landing page. Their point is well taken: because you typically lose over half your visitors right from the getgo and have to really work hard to convert those who stay on the page.
Know and share your value
Some of the elements that really stand out to me as a relationship marketer are the need for strong call to action and a well crafted value statement. Answering the age old question “WIIFM?” (What’s in it for me?) is essential to producing strong results. This to me is the deciding factor in a landing page, or any other marketing piece.
Our own work has shown us that the form length, specifically the number of fields in the form, is less important when strong value is being provided. This view is confirmed by a study by Eloqua that measures landing page conversion rates by number of fields. The chart below, courtesy of Eloqua, show that even forms with 15+ fields can have strong conversion rates. But you must clearly communicate and provide value to your customers.
According to Eloqua, 61.4% of landing pages have between 5 and 10 fields and convert 40% of unique visitors
Be relevant or be gone
It is interesting to note the three components that make up the value you provide: relevant, valuable and timely. So if relevance is so important to campaign success, perhaps there is an opportunity to “personalize” the offer and the landing page to better reflect the prospective customer’s industry, function, and role.
You could set up multiple versions of your landing page and draft a different value statement for each version, focusing on the needs of different industries. If you’re offering a whitepaper download, perhaps you could version the document by industry to make it more interesting and relevant. Providing information that’s “just for you” is far more valuable and compelling than one-size-fits-all.
Test-test-test
Perhaps the most valuable piece of advice is the very last point on measuring, analyzing and improving. We would add “contantly” improving. How do you do this? Through systematic split-run testing of landing pages in order to find the right balance between design, data and user experience.
There are more and more tools out there that enable testing, including Google Web Optimizer, so there’s really no excuse not to test. “Test – Learn – Implement” should become the mantra of any relationship marketer. The landscape is constantly changing, so you need to continually be on the lookout for shifts in behavior that can change your results.
The Complete Guide to Successful Landing Pages – An infographic by the team at Pardot Marketing Automation