The 4 elements of a great landing page

Before you start creating your landing pages, be sure to integrate the following elements in your design:

1. Communication elements

• your logo

• your tagline describing your brand or your brand values

• A headline
  Your headline should only have one purpose: get the visitors attention.

• Identification of your target group.
  This landing page is certainly the first page (potential) customers see on your website. They might not know who they are dealing with and might be incertain. So, it’s important to let them know that they have come to the right spot. his can be accomplished by a representative image of your audience, a welcome message or it can be inserted in the text.

• Your offer (short version)
  You’ve only got a couple of seconds to pass the message to your audience. Make your offer clear, concise and compelling. Reduce your marketing offer to one phrase

• Your offer (long version)
  This is where you go into the details of your offer.

• Copyright, privacy policy and legal notices

• Technical specifications

2. Persuasion elements

• Summarize the “what’s in it for me” arguments
  Bullet points do a great job in summing up the advantages for every visitor. But don’t overdo it. Limit the advantages to 3, maximum 4. Give visitors a chance to find some more of themselves. It will make them feel good.

• Testimonials
  By using testimonials (reviews and comments from your existing customers) on your landing page, you can turn your sales pitch into a credible, unbiased recommendation for your product. Depending on the product or service you are trying to sell, you can use video, text or images to support these testimonials.

3. Trust elements

• Security signs
  Verisign, TRUSTe, … icons are a great way to establish trust on your landing page.

• Guarantees
  Do everything in your power to reduce uncertainty and overcome buyer skepticism. Offering a guarantee (backed up by an official looking label or ribbon style visual) will reduce the possible doubt visitors might have towards your brand or the product / services you are selling.

• References to meaningful sources or more information
  “Seen on TV” is still one of my favorites

• Contact details
  Showing your contact details upfront on your landing page is a way to show that you are a legitimate business and you are willing to respond to your potential customers.

4. Action elements

• A strong “call to conversion”
  Officially, a call to action is a design element or a piece of content, that compels a visitor to take some specific action that you can measure to determine whether your landing page is working or not.

• A way out
  Be sure to offer those people that (for some reason) don’t act right away a gentle way out. And be sure to ask for their details when leaving. Newsletter registrations and competitions are a great way to get hold of their contact details.

• A sense of urgency
  a deadline or a simple “now” or “limited offer” will increase the conversion rate of your landing page.

You can use this list as a guideline before you start creating your campaign (or worst case scenario before you go live) or you can use this list as a starting point for online marketing tests to optimize your landing page. Each and every element listed can be an element for landing page testing.

Tools to track social media marketing campaigns – Part 1: Bit.ly

bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links. Using these shortened URLs in your social media campaigns makes sharing easier and makes sure they are tracked.

What information does Bit.ly provide?

• Real Time tracking of your links

• Referrers:
  where did your visitors click on your Bit.ly link
• Location:
  from which countries do your visitors come
• Conversation:
  What was going on around your message – how many people retweeted your message and was it mentionned on Friendfeed or did people comment on your message?

Bit.ly links can easily be combined with your Google Analytics by using a custom built Bit.ly + Google Analytics Campaign Builder Tool.

What are the PROs of Bit.ly

• It’s free
• It’s a widely used and accepted tool
• It’s very user friendly

What are the CONs of Bit.ly

• The information provided is quite limited – I would like to know what the total reach of the message was on Twitter , for example. But hey, since it is a free tool, I gladly forgive them.

Optimizing your Conversion Rate – Where to Start

Last summer, E-marketer and E-consultancy polled European e-marketeers and online marketing agencies to find out what they considered to be the most valuable tools to improve their websites conversion rate.

This is the response of the e-marketeers:

Unsurprisingly, different results appeared when E-marketer asked the same question to online marketing agencies:

Frankly, it doesn’t come as a surprise that there is in fact a difference between the value of optimization tools between e-marketeers and agencies. Agencies tend to overestimate the value of expert usability reviews in comparison to their clients… Well, everybody has got to make some money, right

But this research did not answer the question what companies actually use to optimize their online marketing. To fix this, please fill out our poll (take a look at the right column).

Thanks in advance