7 Ways To Optimize Your Landing Page

The landing page is the first page a visitor sees when he clicks on your website link, your Google AdWord, or your banner ad. For people spending thousands of dollars on an email blast or through Google AdWords, you would think that they would make sure their landing pages are optimized. But in a lot of cases, you would be wrong.

A great marketer once told me that marketing is about testing, testing, and testing. Thomas Edison was not a great inventor because of his knowledge – Nikolai Tesla, Edison's Russian contemporary, once ridiculed his efforts not as science, but as brute force. Nonetheless, after testing thousands of possible light bulb filaments, Edison did eventually find ones that worked. And he is remembered as one of the greatest inventors of all time.

So creating effective marketing involves much of the same work that Edison performed at his Menlo Park workshop. Testing what works is essential, and the landing page in particular must be superb. So often, people think that by throwing up a form onto a website, they will start to get sales right away. But do they consider how much of their leads are being lost to a poor landing page? I am surprised how often I submit my information into a form, just to see it return an error message on the next page. Whether my order was processed notwithstanding, I certainly wouldn't trust a site that can't even gather leads from people who are interested.

So gathered here is my list of 7 ways to optimize your landing page (or email blast pitch, or direct mailing list). Please make further suggestions through the comments if you would like.

1. Pre-sell your audience if possible

This is not possible in all situations, but when it is, it will increase your sales by several-fold. The key word is trust. Doing business is not a matter of getting the cheapest deal or writing proposals with the biggest numbers. Doing business is a matter of building a relationship, of liking your customers/clients, and of having them like you. Now how does this relate to sales?

When you send out an email blast or a direct mailing, people will have generally one of two reactions. The first is, ah, another piece of junk mail / spam. The second is, oh, here is some personal correspondence from that nice person I got the service from last time. People will generally be inclined to read your pitch if they trust you and know you.

So keep in contact with your mailing list. Send them free things. Give out free knowledge and information. Once they trust you, then you can send them a pitch, and they will receive it with the same vein as if they were reading a newsletter with free information. It takes an average of 4-7 contacts from a company before a customer will commit to buy.

2. Make your pitch readable!

Everyone with a service to tell also has a story to tell. If you are a non-profit charity, then you want to tell why you believe a donation would have a net benefit for the world. By the donor forgoing some small percentage of their personal income, perhaps an entire village can have food and water for a lifetime.

The problem is that after you commit your story to words, people still have to read it. In my experience working with copywriters, they have always emphasized cutting out the excess, leaving only a simple but persuasive pitch. I studied English in University, and I can also testify that nothing drives an English teacher battier than unnecessary words. So keep the story short and simple.

Use a lot of bullet points, and use boxes to set apart some text, and use italics/bold/underline where necessary to emphasize your point. Don't overdue this though. Keep it clean and easy to read. However, this is often easier said than done, which brings me to my next point:

3. Use a Copywriter

Copywriters will put together a landing page for you for a few hundred dollars. Don't underestimate the value of a good copywriter. A great marketer once told me, a good copywriter is like gold. Their work is worth gold. Basically, the logic goes that if your landing page copy is done professionally and can increase conversions by 20%, then the strength of your marketing dollars will increase 20%. Ten thousand dollars will work as effectively as twelve thousand, easily returning the cost of your copywriter's service.

A good copywriter will ask you for all the information relevant to the sales page, and will also do external research to make sure they can optimize your sales. A good copywriter will take your selling points, and find others that you may not have though of. It is a good idea to find copywriters who have experience in your industry. A good copywriter most of all will make your copy readable, stringing the visitor along from sentence to sentence. Then at the end, the copywriter concludes with the call to action. This expertise is definitely worth the small fee it incurs.

Please contact me if you want referrals to some good copywriters.

4. Lower the submit effort for your forms

Forms these days are a mess. More often than not, they consist of an HTML form without any style or foresight. On an insecure website, the form may ask for a visitor's credit card information, personal information, and more. Bulkiness aside, you will probably lose an additional 15% of visitors appalled that you are trying to get their credit card information on an insecure page.

Make the form simple and easy to submit to. If gathering a phone number, name, and email will suffice, just get this. I have heard the story of one company that doubled its form submissions just by removing the need for address information. The fewer fields, the easier for the user to fill in and submit.

Also, try to use some CSS to spruce up the form. If the from is Web 2.0-esque, I find that it is much more comfortable for the user to submit. Look at Digg.com, and see how if you try to join, you will see some beautiful forms with beautiful shading, enticing the visitor to submit his personal information.
Contact the user later or use a separate page for payment. You don't need to get everything at once. This will just get rid of customers who don't want to give their credit card information on the first shot.

5. Use Paypal as a payment method

There is hardy discussion about whether Paypal is good to use on websites. Some people argue that not enough people use it, that the fees are high, and that credit card information is safer. Well maybe, but how does the customer feel?

With all the news about identity theft, with some companies losing millions of credit card records at once, people are right to be wary in giving out their information. Even though there is some protection, nobody wants to deal with the paperwork when their credit card enters the public domain. Paypal is a good in-between solution.

When visitors pay through Paypal, they only pay once, without chance of being charged later, unlike credit cards. If there is a dispute, Paypal will hold the funds sent until an agreement is made. In my case, I do a chargeback on my card to Paypal if there is a problem, giving me another way to dispute a charge. If your service is clean, there is no reason not to use Paypal, and the additional security it provides.

By the way, the fees for Paypal at about 2.2% to 2.9%, the same as all leading card processors.

6. Use testimonials to sell your product

The most effective sales pitch you can make is not the one that is made by you at all. It is the one that comes from what your customers say about you.

I always recommend putting a few testimonials from satisfied customers on your landing page (or email blast, or direct mailing). This gives a reference to the customer of another customer who had purchased your item, and gone away satisfied. This helps build the customer's trust in you.

What is even better is a video testimonial. I would recommend using a flash video, and putting it somewhere on the landing page. Flash video plays on about 98% of web browsers, and loads right in the browser. By clicking a play button, the user will start streaming a testimonial of a happy and satisfied customer, telling how happy he is with your product or service. I will probably put together something later about how to make a flash video.

7. Test, test, test.

If you are serious about optimizing your marketing, make sure you test everything, and find out what works best. Find out which colors work the best, which font styles, which appeal styles, which form layouts work best. Armed with the statistics and data, you can wring the most out of every cent of your marketing budget.

At the same time, this is not for everyone. If you want a shortcut for optimizing your landing page, please contact me, and I can direct you to some great web marketers. They will work with you and your product, and find out exactly what you need to maximize your sales through your landing page (and your entire web marketing campaign).
Conclusion

Landing pages are the heart of online sales. Your email blast links to it. You banners link to it. This page contains your story and your selling points, the soul of your website itself. Make sure you get the most out of it by finding out what works, and then doing more of it.

You can start with the points given above to see how strong your current landing page is. If you would like to post your landing page in the comments for feedback, please feel free to. If you feel like you need a lot of work on your landing page, I will gladly direct you to people I trust and can recommend working with.

Thanks much, and happy landings.