Filed under: form design, Landing Page design, usability basics, usability testing, visual design
If you’re not familiar with Marketing Experiments or Marketing Sherpa, you should check them out. They specialize in landing page optimization and A/B/multivariate testing, and share a lot of their findings. They just had a short webinar “Surprising Wins from 2009: Using insights from an uncertain economy to drive 302% growth.”
A few key takeaways:
- Even if you’re a design expert, you STILL should test. These folks know all the tips and tricks to optimize a page and get the highest clickthru possible, but even they admit that they can’t always predict the outcome, so you should always test (specifically, A/B or multivariate testing).
- When demand is soft, make your value rock solid. Figure out what it is that sets you apart from your competitors and communicate it. Communicate your value with statements that are instantly credible; use quantitative statements rather than qualitative ones.
- When you have fewer resources, have your page do more. Consider asking different questions to better be able to analyze the quality of the leads (thus letting you possibly pass fewer but more qualified leads to your sales force.
- When customers are overwhelmed, change your focus. One example used a popup overlay with name/email capture and “start your free xx” call-to-action, overlaid over the original homepage. This resulted in 64% conversion improvement.
- Measure what matters. Connect your results to the company’s bottom-line results — eg convert ‘# leads’ to ‘increased revenue’ or ‘increased profit’.
- Test radically different strategies. Don’t just test minor wording or layout differences – you may miss the bigger opportunity.
- Competitive analysis is vital. This will help ensure your PPC ads and value propositions stand out.
- It’s never too late to start gaining value from testing. Again – test, test, test
They also reiterated a few good design principles for eeking out the highest clickthru possible:
- use a dedicated landing page instead of sending people to a page on your site
- remove unsupervised thinking – make it clear what the main objective of the page is
- reduce friction and anxiety (long forms, confusing terms, asking for private data)
- place testimonials close to call-to-action (best way to alleviate any anxiety)
- clarify the value proposition and ensure continuity (carry the value proposition through from step to step, have a clear headline that reinforces whatever the offer was that led to the page
- have credible content and include credibility indicators where appropriate
- ensure a clear and compelling call-to-action action button (eg “get free access” instead of “click here” or, worse yet, “submit” ). And focus focus focus – don’t have 6 alternative calls-to-action — have one
- understand and use the typical eyepath (eg don’t put the call-to-action or primary information in the secondary right-hand area of the page)
Filed under: usability basics
Most of us at one point or another in our careers have been involved in team projects that used a brainstorming / affinity diagram / clustering approach to attack a problem. The typical process is to get everyone in a room, have everyone write their ideas on individual yellow post-it notes, then stick them on the wall and have the teammembers group and re-group the post-its until they end up in some mutually-agreed-upon set of groups. This is a great technique that can work very well.
But what if you can’t get your team all in the same room? My current team is spread out all over the world, and it’s a rare luxury to get us all physically together. Yet we still have the same type of projects that need a team to sort through lots of items and make sense out of it all. My solution: Online Card Sorting. While not a typical use for card sorting, it actually worked perfectly.
After the team did phone/webex brainstorming (capturing the issues in an Excel spreadsheet visible to everyone), we had over 200 ideas. I then imported these issues into the online (and free!) Websort , created a new sorting project using these items, and shared the “survey” with the team over webex. We moved each item individually into “piles” that made sense to the team, rearranged as needed, and then named the resulting piles. Voila! We had the equivalent of stacks of yellow post-its and team consensus without ever being in the same room (or Country, for that matter). Certainly a lot cheaper than flying everyone in for an “old-fashioned” face-to-face meeting…
Landing pages are destinations for marketing campaigns — the pages that your P4P ads link to. These pages may or may not be accessible from your core site, but they’re still critical opportunities to capture and keep your visitors.
One of the most important things a designer can do on a landing page is to ensure there’s a clear call-to-action. After all, if you’re spending money running P4P ads or sending customer emails to drive people to your site, why would you want to just dump them onto a page and let them try to figure out what to do next? It’s much better to know exactly what you want them to do, and make that clear and easy to do from that landing page. Including a clear call-to-action has been shown to dramatically improve the conversion rates of landing pages.
Seth Godin calls this clear call-to-action the “banana” – the un-missabile primary visual element on the page. This is the key action you want the visitors to take — download a demo, request a quote, view a document. Whatever the goal of the marketing campaign is should be reinforced with the design of this landing page.
In my busines, I often hear people wanting to run campaigns “just to raise awareness”. That’s fine, but even an awareness campaign still needs to have a clear action for the customer. If you merely drop them into the middle of your site with no direction, you’re losing an opportunity.
So next time you’re thinking about landing pages — or any page on your site, for that matter — make sure you provide the banana.
Filed under: usability basics
Nielsen/Norman Group and Gomez recently presented a webinar on “10 mistakes your website is making – and how to fix them”. While there’s nothing really new here, it’s a good refresher on the basics of usability. Here’s a quick summary:
#1: Not recognizing that users don’t read; they scan
– “F” pattern
– 1st Two are important (2 words, 2 sentences, 2 paragraphs, etc.)
#2: Not balancing your and your user’s priorities
– E.g. Registration or request for customer info that gets in the way or is not a value add to the customer
#3: Ignoring Standards
– Search box location
– Emerging standard of having mouse-over for “quick look” of more details w/o leaving current page
#4: Using wrong images
– Image must add to content, not just attempt to look good
– Image must be clear, right size
– “Approachable” image – real people, looking at camera
#5: Not speaking your user’s language
– Use meaningful names that distinguish items from customer perspective (not rely on descriptions to do this)
– Use of customer-provided product reviews can add ‘user language’ to the site
#6: Blocking Progress
– Don’t have extra steps that are not needed
– Don’t force users to leave a flow to get more information (or make them worry what will happen to the process if they need to leave the flow to get more information)
#7: Saying too much or too little (at one time)
– Don’t use terms that are not clearly standard (“large”, “fast”, etc)
– Suggest using ‘layers’ of information to keep from overwhelming user
#8: Not taking a walk in your user’s shoes
– Watch for issues that exist for users that happen outside your firewall (ISP issues, using images or page elements from different servers and not accounting for this)
#9: Not checking your work twice
– Check how site performs in different web browsers
#10: Not preparing for success
– Ensure highest possible user loading is considered so a spike in load does not crash performance levels
– Highest traffic often happens at most critical times for site to be up and running.
All About Website Usability Blog - Holly Phillips 