Winning Landing Page Designs

Creating a strong landing page is essential in securing new customers through your website. A good quality website can collect information and move people further down your sales funnel.

There are several elements which make a top quality landing page. Check out this article to find out the important aspects of a landing page to achieve the best results.

 

What Is A Landing Page?

A landing page is a page on your website on which clients arrive from marketing avenues like social media, newsletters and from other pages on your website. The landing page’s main objective is to encourage visitors to perform a certain action. Most of the time businesses use a landing page to persuade visitors to sign up to a mailing list. However, landing pages can also be used for selling a specific product.

Landing pages have been around since websites began, yet their development continues. Some landing pages can be very successful whereas others achieve very little.

 

Why Use A Landing Page?

A landing page is necessary because generally your website on its own is a poor sales avenue. According to some researchers, 80% of traffic your site receives will never return unless you have them subscribe to something.

Therefore having a landing page will help you to generate a mailing list and lead them down your sales funnel.

Further to this, when you are mailing your list, you will want to send them to a landing page to take specific action, e.g. add a product to their basket. Therefore a landing page can increase your conversions and sales, with only the original effort of writing the landing pages.

In fact, several landing pages can be highly useful. Research has demonstrated that when businesses increase the number of their landing pages from 10 to 15, there is a significant increase in the conversion rate.

These are the key elements which make a strong landing page:

1. An Offer

A landing page must have a valuable offer on the page for the visitor, in return for their details or a purchase. This offer could be a free ebook, test product, whitepaper, a chance to win something or a discount.

Without a strong offer it may be hard to achieve the results you want.

2. A strong headline

A strong headline is a must for any landing page. The best headlines describe what the page is asking the customer to do; while also enticing the audience to continue reading. One of the major problems with headlines is that they are often not related to the original referring content. This oversight confuses customers who then won’t convert.

3. A supporting subtitle

The second part of a landing page is a supporting subtitle. This should describe the main point of thelanding page. It should also relate very carefully to your main headline, the page copy and the referring content. To encourage a positive emotional response, use strong customer action words which demonstrate the benefit for them (i.e. discover, find, realise).

4. Strong Copy

For the next part, you will want to provide your customers with strong reasons why they should subscribe to your mailing list or buy a product. Selling benefits over features, good grammar and keeping the length just right are all important issues for effective copy.

It is also a good idea to use three to four bullet points to highlight specific benefits. Bullet points are easier to digest by the customer, especially when they are skim reading.

5. A Strong ‘Call To Action’

A ‘Call to action’ is simply the text and button the user will click on to take action. Using the right call to action will convert more of your visitors to take the specific action you would like them to. For instance, Mozilla changed their Firefox download action from “Try Firefox 3” to “Download Now – Free”. The change resulted in a 3.6% increase in the visitor conversion.

Other sites have also seen increases in conversion of up to 200% after changing their call to action. Therefore, the correct call to action can have a significant effect on your business.

Another aspect to consider is how the call to action and the button for the visitor to click on look like online. Ideally they should stand out from the rest of the page and draw the attention of the visitor. A contrasting colour is all you might need for this.

6. Internal links

There is an ongoing debate whether or not menu links should be included on your landing pages. Some authors will state that customers should be allowed to visit any page on your site. Others feel that internal links are distractions which will allow visitors to move away from the page, lowering conversion.

You could go either way; so perhaps experiment to see which is more successful for your landing page.

7. The Use of Images and Pictures

Pictures are worth a thousand words – therefore include a strong photo demonstrating a benefit or feature of your service. A good picture will engage your audience much better, especially if there are happy smiling people in the image.

8. Keeping it above the fold

One of the most important elements of your landing page is to ensure that everything is above the fold. If the customer doesn’t have to scroll down the page to find your call to action or the benefits of the product you are offering, they are more likely to complete the action.

9. Always Continue to Test

An essential aspect of making sure you have a winning landing page is to continually test it. A great method for this is A / B testing where you have two identical landing pages apart from one detail. This detail can be either the call to action, the colour of the page or something else. You need to run tests, sending visitors equally to each page and monitor the results.

However it isn’t just the first conversion which matters, other long term considerations are also needed. Look at the conversion of the mailing list to paying customer or how many unsubscribe before they receive three emails as well as the landing page statistics. You might receive more on your mailing list with one version, but if they all unsubscribe quickly, you’ve gained nothing.

 

Conclusion

Landing pages are a vital feature of any website for gathering information and selling products. Ensure your landing pages are optimised and make it easy for customers to move through your sales funnel.

 

Action Steps:

  • Create a number of landing pages using the above design tips.
  • Test those landing pages using A/B testing to discover what is optimal for your website.

Understanding Lifetime Customer Value

The value of your customer over their purchasing lifetime is a very important aspect to consider.

It can help you determine how much to budget for your marketing and effectively what customer retaining offers you can afford over the longer period.

Learn more about understanding the lifetime customer value here.

 

What Is the Lifetime Customer Value?

The Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) is essentially the total amount of net profit which a customer will generate for a business. The lifetime of a customer can be anything from a few days to a period spread over many years.

The equation also considers costs, including the marketing costs, to acquire the customer (known as Customer Acquisition Cost or CAC).

For instance, if a product costs $20 to make and is sold for $50, then the profit for each one (excluding the customer acquisition cost) would be $30. So if a customer bought a product once from you and then never returned, their LCV would be $30. However, if they bought one every month for 2 years, their LCV would $720.

But the LCV isn’t about the value of just one customer. Instead, you should think of the value as a general view of all your customers, their average spend, costs and acquisition costs.

 

Calculating the Lifetime Customer Value

The LCV is quite simple to calculate: you take the amount of revenue generated, minus the costs (including marketing) and divide by the number of different customers you have. This might be particularly difficult if you cannot determine the number of customers you have buying products in your business but if you have customer references this can be fairly simple.

The number which you come to is the Lifetime Customer Value.

An example of this would be a company that has sales of $100,000 and costs of $20,000 for 500 customers. The LCV would be (100,000 – 20,000) / 500 = $160.

Because this value represents 500 customers it doesn’t specifically say what each one actually spent with the business, e.g. a small number could have spent over $1000 and a larger proportion under $10.

According to Pareto’s Law, around 80% of your income will come from about 20% of your customers. Therefore it is conceivable that $80,000 was generated by 100 customers. Yet this is not what the LCV is designed to test.

With the LCV it is important to consider the relationship over the longer period between you and the customer.

 

Why Do You Use the Lifetime Customer Value?

The LCV can be used to help determine your marketing budget. If you know how much it costs to sell and produce a product, you can determine how much you need to spend to acquire customers. This can be difficult, however. Not every individual you are going to interact with is going to purchase a product and therefore the cost for their interaction will have to be absorbed into profits from other customers.

The Customer Acquisition Cost is calculated by the total amount spent divided by the number of new customers generated. Therefore if you spend $10,000 on marketing and acquired 500 customers, your CAC would be $20.

This is great when considering new ways of marketing to determine whether or not they will be productive. For example, if you want to start a paid search marketing campaign where each click would cost $2, and you estimate that 2% of those who click through will become customers; you calculate the costs per customer generation.

2 / 0.02 = $100

This would be your CAC. In comparison to the previous example, this is rather high.

 

How do You Increase a Lifetime Customer Value?

The key to making a business successful is to increase the LCV. To do this there are three options:

1. Increase the revenue generated by each customer over their lifetime.

2. Decrease the cost of producing the product.

3. Decrease the Customer Acquisition Cost.

Option 2 is all about getting the most value out of your production. This includes buying your supplies for the best value and optimising your production so more is made in the same amount of time.

Option 3 is about streamlining and increasing the effectiveness of your sales and marketing. Part of this could include optimising your website so your call to actions are more effective and your copy is more compelling on paid search, email and social media campaigns. Another thing you can do is to ensure you are targeting the best keywords on your paid search and search engine marketing. In terms of the former, this can reduce your bid price. Review and optimise your sales process as well.

Option 1 is the really important factor when it comes to the LCV. Generally speaking it is less costly to continue to sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire a new customer. Therefore, having a customer purchase more from you is one way to increase the LCV.

This can be done through effective up-selling. You can do this either at the first chance you have (often at the transaction screen) or at a later date with email marketing or further communications with your customers.

Another method is to ensure that you are continuously delighting your customers with excellent products or customer service. Customers are more likely to return to your brand if you make them feel special and they know your product works well.

 

The Final Word

The Lifetime Customer Value is an important aspect to consider in your marketing. Working out the profit of each customer over a longer period can help you determine the marketing budget for your business. This can then help you create efficient marketing campaigns to draw in customers at the best prices.

The LCV can also support you in realising the value of each customer, even if they make small purchases regularly over a longer period.

 

Action Steps:

  • Work out the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC).
  • Work out the Lifetime Customer Value (LVC).
  • Work out how you can increase the amount of money your current customers spend.

How to Create Blogging Success

A blog is still one of the best formats in which you can generate traffic for your website and encourage your targeted audience to learn more about your brand.

Google and other search engines are increasing their focus on the content which blogs naturally provide, therefore integrating it into your online sales process is an important step.

So how do you ensure you achieve blogging success? Read on to find out more.

 

Topics and Themes

To ensure that your intended audience are discovering your website, you must first get inside the head of the reader. These days, people rarely search for a product on a search engine. It is much more common for them to search for an answer to a problem or a distraction. Therefore your main focus of topics and themes should be to offer useful content which can provide a solution to a problem or entertainment.

This isn’t as hard as some companies think. Every industry has a problem which their consumers face on a daily basis or there is something in popular culture which is of interest.

You can start by making a list of the common questions which are asked of you by your customers. Customers can be a great source of topic generation and it is likely if one customer is asking you a question, there are dozens asking it on the search engines.

 

Length and Frequency of Posting

The concentration span of the average person has dropped considerably in the past decade. It was once 12 minutes, it is now only five. Therefore you need to consider this when writing your blog posts. Too long a post and your audience won’t read to the end, but at the same time too short a piece and it might not provide enough useful information to be considered valuable to the visitor.

Informative, problem solving blogs should be between 500 and 1200 words, although some technical blogs can go higher. You could have a short blog post, but it has to contain all the important aspects of a post, e.g. a strong intro, informative content and then outcome. This can be challenging to achieve in a small post.

For the frequency of posting there is no hard set rule on the number of times. Some audiences will prefer once a week, others will prefer a more frequent arrangement. The only thing to consider is that your release of blog posts must be consistent. If your audience see you post every Friday they will expect it and missing out can hurt your reputation.

To solve this particular problem, it can be useful to write a few blog posts in advance. Having a bank of blog posts mean you are never rushing to complete one at the last minute and you’ll always have content to publish.

 

Keywords

Keywords have changed dramatically from the old days. Not so long ago businesses could keyword stuff their content and see a top spot on Google and other search engines. This is no longer the case. Google has taken steps to penalise companies which do this with a succession of updates to their algorithm. The search engine is aiming to provide its users with higher quality content rather than being keyword heavy.

But that isn’t the only reason why you shouldn’t concentrate on a single keyword. The searching habits of the consumer have evolved over the past few years. Previously consumers would ask a search engine to draw up a list of results based on 2 or 3 word phrases. Now the common search tactic is a six or seven word question.

Therefore you have a tough job to achieve. You’ve first got to get the question right in order to use it as your keyword and then you’ve got to use it just enough to get it recognised but not too much that it gets penalised.

The exact Google algorithm is not known, they keep it under wraps, but it is probably best to keep the ‘key phrase’ (as it should now really be known as) to being used two or three times at most in your piece.

 

Sharing

Promotion of your blog is important. You can’t rely just on the search engines to draw traffic to it. Therefore utilising a wide range of platforms is a good method of generating traffic. Social media and email are standard ways of drawing traffic to your blog. Many of the best brands who blog, send out announcements their blog has been updated through both formats, and it is an assured way of generating some traffic.

Twitter is specifically useful. Tweets have a short lifespan, only about 10 minutes for most posts; therefore you can mention your new post two or three times on the first day and re-post it periodically (but leave at least a week before you do so, preferably longer).

However, both methods do little to expand your reach as the majority of the traffic from social media and all the traffic from your email is going to be those already connected with your brand.

To reach new audiences you need to allow people to share your content in their social networks. Having a share button on your blog can be a good help.

Another thing to consider is by going onto forums or social media groups. Many of them won’t appreciate you just talking about your blog posts but if you are clever and interact on different topics you can often garner enough favour to post the occasional blog update.

For forums the best thing to do is to contribute to their conversations and include your latest blog post in your signature.

You can also leave relevant comments on other blog posts. Talk about the issues they’ve discussed and in the website box which many blogs offer commentators, leave the url to a relevant blog post of your own.

 

Other Items

There are other items to consider when blogging which can really allow you to achieve success, for instance the use of images. Good quality images can help you generate an emotional response in your audience and images are processed by the brain faster than text, therefore they can set the mood of your content.

Also consider the way you link to other content online. Try to avoid one word links, unless it is a brand name. It is also best to avoid ‘click here’ or ‘try this now’. It is better to use phrases which are connected to the content you are linking to such as ‘achieve blogging success with some easy to implement tips’ or ‘join the discussion on the latest online marketing techniques’. Alternative simply use a URL.

Finally consider using outside experts in your blog posts. Interviewing some can be a perfect way to get free publicity (they are likely to share content they’ve written) but you could also try finding quotes they have given other media outlets. Always remember to quote that source however.

 

Conclusion

There are many items to consider when wanting to make the most out of the marketing opportunity which blogging offers. Yet each step is also fairly easy to implement. If you ensure you tailor your useful content to the ideal length and consistent frequency, with the right keywords, you can start your journey to blogging success.

 

Action Steps:

  • Research blogging platforms and choose which is best for your business
  • Research which keywords your desired customers are using
  • List topics in which you can write about on your blog
  • Create a publishing scheduling so you know when you are going to publish content
  • Create content matching the keywords and topics together
  • Publish the content!

Business or Busy-ness?

Small businesses, by their very nature, are made up of just a few staff members. Each one of the team has a role to play in the company (or more often than not, various roles) and a series of tasks they do on a regular basis.

For example, John is an accountant, with a team of ten spread across two offices in different areas of the city. He has a secretary in each office (Jane and Jill), as well as several book-keepers, advisors and other staff members who work on client accounts for him. Great, right? Well, most of the time…

All too often John and his team will find themselves ‘fighting fires’. What I mean by that is that they will come up against a series of challenges every day, which they deal with as and when they arise. The exact method of dealing with each situation will vary from person to person, and generally be forgotten until it has to be addressed by a different member of staff at some point in the future. Bob solves a problem for Client A in his own way in January, and Bill solves the same problem in his own way in June for Client B.

What this essentially results in is inefficiency and frustration. Inefficiency, because each one of the team is working in isolation to resolve something that has probably been done multiple times in the past. And frustration, because when you are ‘fighting fires’, the forest simply cannot grow, much less allow you time to appreciate its beauty.

What’s sad is that this is the modus operandi of the large majority of small businesses everywhere. Their owners or directors have little time to see the bigger picture, as they are bogged down with the daily minutiae of business-as-usual, often working amazingly long hours just to keep up.

 

Sound uncomfortably familiar?

It certainly was how Aflua functioned in the early days of our business. We built websites and helped brand companies, each time using an approach which was different, depending on the designer or manager who lead the project.

Our invoicing, accounting and all the other ‘behind the scenes’ activity was largely ad hoc and problems were solved by whoever had the time, in the way they saw fit. Our bottom line seemed to remain unchanged by throwing increasingly long hours at the work to be done.

Then, early in 2011, I discovered a book that was to change all that, and take us to a different mindset altogether.

 

Work the System

Despite its rather dubious title, ‘Work the System’ by Sam Carpenter outlines, in exact steps, how to systematise your business tasks to avoid the “busy work” and delegate tasks to other team members or employees with complete confidence.

In the words of the book:

[blockquote author=””] “…Carpenter reveals a profound insight and the exact uncomplicated, mechanical steps he took to turn his business and life around without turning it inside out. Once you “get” this new vision, success and serenity will come easily for you, too.” [/blockquote]

Essentially what Sam proposes is a method for dissecting and documenting your business so that the proverbial ‘man off the street’ could follow them. He defines five steps for doing this:

  1. Make the various systems consciously visible.
  2. One at a time, bring them to the foreground for examination.
  3. Adjust them.
  4. Document them.
  5. Maintain them.

Apart from the obvious benefits associated with clearing up any ambiguity around your processes so that your team members can carry each one out effectively and efficiently, there are hidden benefits to undertaking this exercise too, as we have found at Aflua.

The mere act of systematically surfacing the different actions you take every day in your company and defining them as part of a larger system makes you aware of them, and able to analyse and improve on them over time.

And time is a key factor here: many reading this will be thinking, “how can I possibly give up the time to do all this documentation, I have work to do!” Reverse the idea in your head for just one minute – maybe you are so busy precisely because you lack the documentation to enable you to delegate the simpler tasks of your business out to others.

Do you work on your business, or are you just working in the busy-ness?

 

Action steps:

I highly recommend you take a look at the Work the System Academy, which will drive your success to a whole new level.

Also, you can get a free copy of the book over at www.workthesystem.com