How to Mind Map: Beginner’s Guide. Landing Page Guideline #2: Captivating Readers with a Compelling Story. By Don Nicholas • 02/04/2005 Great products seldom stand on their own or sell themselves without someone creating a story. A great landing page is a sales letter that begins with a story that heightens desire for the product and prompts a purchase decision. The D in the AIDA acronym stands for desire. The final A in AIDA stands for action — what you direct the reader to do in order to respond to your offer. Gaining Rapport with the Reader Whether writing a newsletter, article, or advertisement, think of one person and write (speak) directly to him personally. For instance, suppose you write a landing page (product ad) for people who work in the food service industry. So, which lead for a specialty coffee ad is more pleasing to the targeted reader and creates better rapport?
“Food service industry workers like those of you who read this newsletter know good coffee.” That’s very impersonal, unfocused and lumps a whole group into one general category. Noteworthy Examples of Story and Content. 13 Landing Page Tricks that Increase Conversion. When it comes to business on the Web, conversion is truly king. Whether it’s email subscribers, new accounts or good ole-fashioned purchases, conversion makes or breaks businesses online. Thousands of articles, hundreds of papers and dozens of books have been written on the subject. In fact, a whole discipline, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), has been born out of the intense need to transform traffic into transactions. So without further ado, we throw our top 13 best tips to increase the conversion of your landing pages and improve your business. 13 Landing Page Tricks that Increase Conversion 1) Test, Test, Test – Start testing before you even start spending.
Run your design up the flagpole with fivesecondtest.com and learn what users think, remember and do with your design. 2) Epic headlines – Most people abandon your landing page within 8 seconds, so your headline is often your one and only shot at convincing them to stick around. 8)Try a Video – Need to do some product ‘splanin? From the Inbox to the Landing Page: Email Marketing Best Practices In Action. When it comes to doing email right, there’s a lot to consider. And, whenever we’re analyzing emails for our email inspiration blog series, we’re always looking for what aspects of email marketing a brand got right (and what parts could use a little work).
After reviewing dozens of emails, it’s time to sit back and reflect. Below you’ll find a roundup of email best practices in action—complete with plenty of examples! Is your “from name” recognizable and trustworthy to external audiences? Typically, you’ll find the names of companies, brands, or individuals here. In this example from Banana Republic, their brand name was shortened to “BR” in the from name, potentially causing confusion amongst their readers.
A successful from name will be recognizable and relevant to your audience, imparting trust and a desire to open. In the examples below, each company used a straightforward approach—minimizing potential confusion and leveraging earned influence by simply using their brand name. Driving Landing Page Conversions: SEO Tells You Where, But CRO Tells You How. A lot of marketing experts will tell you that SEO is the driving force behind conversions. I’m here to tell you it’s not. SEO can only do so much. You can spend a million dollars on your SEO campaign and rank at the top of Google’s search results for all of your keywords, but if people don’t convert, then your SEO efforts are ultimately worthless. You should, instead, start backwards and work on conversion rate optimization (CRO) before you even consider SEO. CRO is the process of optimizing your landing page to influence the most viewers to convert.
Think of it this way. If your landing page is failing to convert visitors to customers, you’ll want to take the steps to ensure that your site becomes a more relevant, emotional, and interactive experience. 1. People don’t have the time or desire to read the hundreds of webpages they see every day. You can familiarize yourself with your target audience by conducting surveys and interviews. 2.
Image Credit: Wikimedia 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 10 brilliant examples of landing page design. A well-designed landing page design can make the difference between a user buying into a product or losing interest. Here are 10 websites that get it right. There are plenty of rules and principles of great design but when it comes to a website's landing page, it is almost an exact science. It's about 'conversion-centred design', or using the design of the landing page to persuade a user towards a particular action.
The first, and arguably most important, task is to find a clear USP (unique selling point) for the product or service in question, and then use the landing page design to focus everything on one primary call to action (CTA). This might be getting the visitor to register their details, say, or make a purchase there and then. Clear, succinct headers and sub-headers and punchy, easily scanned bullet points are the order of the day. Read all our web design articles here 01. Bear CSS is a tool to help web designers generate CSS more quickly and easily based on their existing HTML. Basics of Creating Landing Pages That Convert. Six tips for landing page user optimization that will drive conversions. Published on Whether a given landing page explains demand for business’ services or acts as a search-friendly hub that lists your products and services, it’s crucial that it is optimized to its full potential – not only to show up and compete in search engine results pages but to also retain visitors and minimize your overall bounce rate.
So how do you optimize your landing pages? Some might think that satisfying Google’s technical SEO guidelines is the ultimate be-all and end-all of optimization. It’s important, but understanding who your readers are and catering to their needs is just as important as indulging Google’s spiders with proper metadata and inbound links. In fact, promoting user-friendly pages is a goal of all the leading search engines.
But let’s take an even further step back: The whole reason you want landing page visibility is because you want people to find these pages and do business with you. Why reader-friendly content promotes online visibility for landing pages 1. How To Collect Email Subscribers With Landing Pages That Convert At 50% Using a dedicated landing page for an email marketing list can lift conversion rates up to 50%. That’s an impressive figure! Better yet, a landing page per list, or per campaign, gives you the power to maximize the effectiveness of each individual funnel. This means you can play with all of the elements from the moment the customer hits your landing page to the moment they receive and react to your emails.
Perhaps best of all, dedicated email landing pages allow you to use all of the great conversion optimization techniques that usually apply to your landing pages, so you can use the same tactics in relation to email marketing. This post shares examples and provides guidance on how you can use dedicated landing pages to increase your subscriber conversions rates. The Rise Of The Dedicated Email Marketing Landing Page Take this example from Unbounce for its dedicated educational course on better landing pages: The three tips below will help you nail this strategy the first time around. 1. 2. The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Landing pages rule.
Blah. Homepages suck. Blah. Do some A/B testing. Blah. Base your optimization strategy on customer feedback. All of those statements are true. If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it's really easy. Be warned, however, that I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and charming anecdotal rhetoric. The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that "Shit. But first. The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of contents: First I'll give you the only rationale you'll ever need to explain why landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with diarrhea.
Challenge laid down. Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign traffic to your homepage The only important word in that sentence is ATTENTION. Genius Insight #1: attention ratio. Landing Page Best Practices: Remove Distractions, Be Bold & Tell a Story. TweetTweet Last Friday, Oli from Unbounce & Peep teamed up for the second episode of Page Fights where they tore apart contestants landing pages & give them actionable advice & best practices on how to make their landing pages better. The winner of Page Fights gets 1 free year of Unbounce’s Pro 99 account, a half hour private consultation with Peep & free early membership into the ConversionXL self study course. In this second episode, they reviewed 5 different landing pages with the page owners & went into more detail than Peep normally does in our regular website reviews, so hopefully you’ll find more value in it. In case you don’t have time to watch the full 39:00 minute video, I’ve included the main takeaways as well as included links to helpful landing page best practice content from here & around the web.
Finalist 1 – Paul Jarvis, Write & Sell Your Damn Book What’s interesting about this page is that it uses powerful copywriting to draw visitors into the page. Oli’s Feedback: Takeaways. How we made $1 million for Moz—with one landing page and a few emails. When we first published this case study, Moz was called SEOmoz. Even though the company has since rebranded, the techniques described below are still as relevant as ever. In this talk, Moz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, raves about the work we did, explaining how the money that we generated enabled Moz to develop from a membership site into a web app.
Overview Moz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools and resources for online marketing. The company was already highly successful, having a list of Fortune 500 clients as long as your arm. It had also conducted many split tests on its site. In fact, previous Moz split tests were the subject of 14 pages in an industry “best practices” guide for landing page optimization. Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for Moz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales. Within the first four months of work, we increased annual revenues by $1 million. Here are some of the methods we used to analyze Moz’s visitors: 1. 2.
5 Essential tools to attract a relevant audience to your blog. It is not difficult to drive traffic to your site but what’s the point if visitors don’t stay around and read your blog post, sign up to your email list or buy your product or service? We’re all familiar with the following saying: Well, maybe you’re not familiar with that saying because I just made it up. But it does make sense! Let’s look at five great social media tools to ensure you attract a to your blog posts.
The people that follow you on Twitter are some of the most likely targets for your blog post but you need to have a strategy for reaching them. One part of this is timing the delivery of your posts to try and get the attention of the majority of your followers. SocialBro is a social media management tool. At 8am only 31% of my followers are actively tweeting but over 77% are active at 3pm in the afternoon.
I’m based in Europe but focus on the US so it makes sense that more of my followers are online in my afternoon which is the morning in the US. 10 writing tips from renowned authors. Just because you're writing blogs or website content doesn't mean you can't learn a few things from the great writers of yesteryear. In looking at the tips below, you might be surprised at how relevant and timely their advice can be. Here are 10 ways to improve your writing, online or otherwise: 1. Write, write, write.
"Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you're doomed. " —Ray Bradbury You know what they say, "If you want to be a writer, write! " 2. "When you do a thing, do it with all your might. If there's one thing that separates good writers from great writers, it's passion. 3. "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass. " It's one of the oldest pieces of writing advice there is and for good reason. 4. "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print. " 5. "I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
" Here's a tip: If you're bored by your writing, your readers probably are, too. 6. 4 attention-grabbing ways to open a blog post. It doesn't matter how good your blog posts are. If their introductions don't grab your readers' attention, you wasted your time writing a post no one will likely read. Your opening statement should leap off the page and engage readers. It's the first thing readers see—other than your title—and should give them a clear idea of what to expect from the rest of the article. After all, what's the point of tweeting a post if no one gets past the first couple sentences?
To ensure people read your posts, here are a few tips to get that opener to work for you—not against you. 1. Ask questions. Have you ever found yourself completely caught up in an article? See what I just did there? Questions immediately engage readers and get them thinking. 2. "Ninety percent of all statistics on the Web are outdated," says Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Ill. This funny little "fact" works as a solid opener because it has a few things we look for in fact statements. 3. 4. Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof. The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Not all great content goes viral, but (with the exception of awesomely terrible videos) content that does go viral is great. No one can guarantee that any piece of content will take the web by storm, but we can make sure that a piece of content has what it takes.
Long-time citizens of the web can often tell from a first-reading or viewing that a piece is going to explode, but why? Opinions about what it takes to be viral are easy to come by, but let’s look at the facts with data to prove it. Write long, in-depth posts In a scientific, statistical look at what makes content most shareable online, two University of Pennsylvania professors looked at the New York Times’ most emailed list to see if they could determine what cause people to share article. You can download the entire PDF here. A causal relationship makes sense, though. Prove you care Known authors. Mailout Interactive Blog | Why aren't people reading my emails? Why creating beautiful, responsive emails is not a waste of time. Sometimes I have to explain why it’s important to spend the time and money on creating beautiful, robust, responsive HTML email templates—and this blows my mind.
To me, it seems obvious that well designed, well built emails should be what everyone is aiming for, all the time. To convince others, a graph is required. Blue Hornet’s latest study, Consumer Views of Email Marketing (PDF), was a study of 1,000 US citizens who were asked about various aspects of email marketing. The results are in! These are my personal favourites. 1. 2. 3. About Nicole Merlin I'm an HTML email designer and developer from Melbourne, Australia. 7 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Program May Fail. Mailout Interactive Blog | I Want Your Email! 30,000 Newsletter Subscribers in 12 Months (Startup Lessons Learned)
5 Ways to Reduce PDF File Size.