Convert Website Visitors to Buyers With Landing Pages

A customer walks into your office. You give your sales pitch. The customer listens intently. She looks around at the photos on the wall and the condition of the office. She evaluates the benefits you are providing. She then makes a decision in her head to either accept your message, or not.

If she buys, it’s a conversion.

Now imagine 1,000 customers walk into your office over a year’s time, and 10 percent of those customers end up buying from you. You just converted 100 customers at a 10 percent conversion rate! That’s a good thing!

Those customers obviously appreciated your sales message, how your office looks and your overall presentation, which is why they bought from you. Now imagine if you could increase that 10 percent conversion rate to 11 percent, or 15 percent, or even 20 percent?

Wow! How much more money would you be making every year with those numbers? So you would do your best to make sure that your office was professional and clean, and your sales pitch was practiced, right?

If you’re doing it offline in sales meetings and with your printed materials, why wouldn’t you take the same care and preparation online with your website, your blog and your landing pages?

For your small business, the same sales process that happens in your office is happening online, but you may not give it as much attention as you need to.

You may be trying to sell your product or service, or get more email newsletter signups, or get more downloads of your new ebook or white paper. But if you’re not doing it the right way with high-quality landing pages, you’ll never get the conversions you need to see your conversion rate increase.

So what is a landing page? A landing page is a single Web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

• A landing page is not your website.
• A landing page should not have website navigation.
• A landing page should not try to offer more than one main focus.

Effective landing pages work because they focus the potential customer on the direct benefits of one specific offer. This allows the customer to decide to take an action, or to not take an action. Either way, you win. It’s when a potential customer gets distracted that you lose, because they haven’t been forced to decide either way. Indecision is the enemy of a great sales pitch.

So How Do I Create High-Quality Landing Pages?

Here are some resources that can help you create effective landing pages.

Premise is a plugin that works with WordPress. It allows you to create landing pages off of your website or blog. You can download a set of free landing page templates for Premise to get an easy jump start on landing page creation.

Unbounce offers a set of Web-based landing page tools that you can use to build your landing pages online quickly and easily.

Invesp offers a white paper entitled “30 Principles of Landing Page Design” where you can pick up even more tips on great landing page design and implementation.

The bottom line is that until you seriously focus your online efforts with good landing page design, you’ll never be able to reach the pinnacle of high conversion rates that can explode your company’s bottom line.

About the Author

Jim Kukral is a professional speaker, blogger and Web business consultant who has helped small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst & Young and Progressive Auto Insurance understand how find success on the Web. His latest book is "Internet Marketing for Business Answers."

 

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Put Audio Content on Your Website

It's no secret that one of the most effective ways to engage customers and prospects online is through compelling content on your website. When working on making your site better, don't overlook audio, which can be created simply, using online tools. The content itself can come from your own employees and clients: a recording of an executive at work, a phone interview with a customer for a case study, a training session or discussion among colleagues. Here are a few more ideas to get you started:
1. Showcase your experts. Identify individuals with a unique perspective on an industry topic and record them discussing the company's value proposition.
2. Call on customers. Conduct recorded phone interviews with customers for use as testimonials on your website or in other marketing materials. Nothing convinces prospects about the value of your products and services more than a case study they can relate to.
3. Open the discussion. Create an online community that supports your company or industry. Design a live call-in webcast and Internet radio station, hosted on your website, to provide a forum for conversation. Listeners can call in and ask questions, and content can stream live and be archived.
4. Train your team. Consider adding an audio component to your training programs to keep learning fresh and drive participation. From internal meetings to sales calls, training opportunities can be recorded in real time and made immediately available to your teams.
5. Meet online. Create an online event series to supplement your offline events and meetings. By live-streaming or providing downloadable files of keynote speeches, roundtable discussions, or one-on-one interviews, you can help those who were unable to attend still feel like active participants.
Dan Kashman
President
Cinchcast
New York
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Use Your Website to Grow Your Business

Your website is one of the most powerful marketing tools you have. By itself it may not produce the results you're looking for, but when combined with your other marketing initiatives it can be a vital source for your lead generation campaign while helping you increase sales, reduce advertising costs, and produce a higher return on investment. The key is including your website in all your marketing pieces. Whether you engage in online, print, TV, radio, or affiliate marketing, all roads must lead back to your website in order to maximize your return on investment. To do so, the following five steps must be implemented.
1. Make sure your website is a reflection of who you are as a company. Your design is worth a million words, so make it count by ensuring it is specifically geared and tailored to your target market. A good design should capture visitors' attention the moment they arrive on your site.
2. Engage visitors with a compelling marketing message that has instant impact. Once you have captured visitors' attention with your design, your marketing message is the key to getting them to stay on and learn more about your company and what you have to offer. Keep it short and include a problem statement and your solution. Solidify your credibility with testimonials, case studies, press mentions, or sample work.
3. Ensure your website has a call to action. Whatever action you want visitors to take once they arrive on your website should be clearly stated and highlighted. Say it once and say it again, not just on your home page but throughout your website and at every opportunity you get to increase your chances of converting your website visitors into leads.
4. Use ethical bribes to boost lead generation. You will maximize your return on investment and reduce advertising cost if you are able to convert more of your Web visitors into leads, which will in turn allow you to establish credibility and build a relationship. The best way to accomplish this goal is to use ethical bribes that are irresistible in exchange for their contact information. Try things like "free trials," "free reports," or "free consultations."
5. Nurture leads easily and effortlessly with website marketing automation. Integrate your website forms with a marketing automation tool that saves you time and money. You can easily schedule a series of follow up e-mails or phone calls to stay in touch with prospects and move them further along in the pipeline and into a sale.
Nicole McCullum
Founder
Captivate Designs
New York
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Pay More Attention to Your Website Users

When it comes to customer engagement, many big-name brands do just enough to stay one step ahead of their competition, and because of their past momentum they are able to maintain a lead for some time. However, smaller and more nimble organizations focused on creative uses of technology are starting to overtake them. Think Etsy vs. eBay, or Yodlee vs. Mint.
There are plenty of articles out there focused on how small businesses should approach building a Web presence, but they tend to focus on topics such as search engine optimization and how to leverage social media. I have found this is the wrong focus. We need to bring it back to simple user experience. Here are five tips on what to think about as you build or redesign your site:
1. Take off your marketing hat. This may be counterintuitive, but the tendency when focusing on marketing is that websites often become self-indulgent. Instead, focus on user experiences your customers need, want, and enjoy. Help them get things done.
2. Consider your business goals. What do you want to accomplish with the application and how will it provide value for your customers? Consider this before you think about how you are going to build the site or have it built.
3. Focus on gathering data and feedback from users. Sit down with as many customers as you can and watch them interact with your site. Have them give you feedback about where you can improve the interaction. If for some reason you can't do this quickly, use a simple survey tool such as Survey Monkey.
4. Focus on what you do. If you're a business-to-business company, you don't need to build a game. If you are selling handmade kids' clothing, you should not build a social network. Stick with the primary purpose of your business. Consumers know one thing for sure: If you build an application that does not have direct utility related to your business, it is probably an application designed just to market to them, and they will probably let it fail.
5. Plan for frequent updates. Most successful websites have an avid audience because they created a great user experience first, and followed with great updates and improvements. You'll build fans and evangelists by showing responsiveness to customer feedback once the application is launched.
Anthony Franco
Co-Founder and President
EffectiveUI
Denver
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