GROWTH MARKETING MINIDEGREE / CXL — REVIEW 7

In my previous articles about my growth marketing studies with the CXL Institute, we covered the excel and Google Sheets features last week. Today, I am going to talk about a sensitive touchpoint of the conversion path: landing page optimization. with the seventh part of CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree.

You can go to the CXL website from here.

A landing page is the first page a user sees after clicking on an ad source. It works independently from the rest of its website and clearly aims at shortening the path to conversion.

Let’s say you click an ad banner claiming that you can double your conversions within a month with a revolutionary SaaS. You will then land on a page that should clearly tell you about the offer (what does that SaaS do, how does it work, what is the pricing, and so on…) and let you buy a subscription or start a free trial. This article is going to talk about some of the strategies you should know to optimize that page.

Always keep in mind that the landing page MUST do three things: answer questions, reinforce motivations, and address barriers.

You can’t optimize your landing page without understanding the whole funnel

The first thing you need to know is that if you do not have a clear understanding of the landing page funnel, you cannot optimize your landing page properly.

Above is an example of a landing page path. You can optimize your landing page as long as you want, if the checkout step 2 page of your path has a bug and does not redirect you to the next step, your conversion rate will just be 0%.

One thing I would start with, in order to have a global overview of the funnel, is to do a step-drop analysis. The idea is to go into your analytics tool, note down how many people are visiting each URL of the landing page path, and see where the big drop-offs are. Not only will it help you know what page you should prioritize in your optimization (and it might not be the landing page), but it will help you identify potential bugs. Does what you see make sense? If not, investigate. If you see a 100% drop-off between the checkout step 2 page and the checkout step 3 page, it is most likely a technical bug.

Another thing you need to carefully check is the source where visitors of the landing page are coming from and what was the copy of that source. In this example, the source is an email. If your email claims that you can double your conversions within a month with that revolutionary SaaS we talked about and the landing page tells you about how to improve your copywriting, well, yes, it has some link with conversion rate optimization, but that is not what was promised in the email. Your offer might be great but that is not what people came for, and the conversion rate will not be optimal. That is why you can’t just isolate the landing page and start optimizing it on its own.

The research process for landing page optimization

Once you have an overview of the landing page funnel and you know that you should now optimize your landing page, you can use the full-on approach optimization strategy suggested by Michael Aagaard, the teacher of the CXL Institute landing page optimization course. Below is a complete overview of this process.

The CXL Institute landing page optimization course fully covers steps 1 to 4 of this process. Step 5 will usually be processed by developers, while you can get more information on A/B testing in my week 4 article.

Quantitative and qualitative research for landing page optimization has a lot in common with the global conversion rate optimization process that the researchXL method and the user-centric marketing approach use, such as a heuristic walkthrough, digital analytics, mouse tracking analysis, the 5-second test, interviews with sales and customer service people, user interviews… You can check my two articles on conversion optimization (links at the beginning of this article) for more details.

Design and copywriting work in pair

The last thing I want to talk about is design and copywriting, as they are two central elements. However, they totally work in pairs. You can’t just ask your designer to create a design for your landing page and then ask your copywriter to fit text wherever he can because, after all, the design looks cool so it will be a good landing page. Design is influenced by the copy. There are 5 main elements that are common to design and copywriting, plus one which is exclusive to design. Let’s get an overview of those.

• Headline: it should match the message of the ad source so that people know that they landed at the right place. It should also catch the user’s attention and clearly communicate the value of your offer. The headline is totally a part of the design. If you want your headline to stand out (and that should be an objective), you can use a good color contrast or leave enough space around for example.
• Features/benefits: it emphasizes the value of your offer and answers important questions. You have different design possibilities to implement them: body copy, bulleted list, headline, paragraphs…
• Credibility: you can make your landing page look more legit through different means: relevant facts and figures, social proofs, relevant FAQs… The design can play a big role here. For example, displaying a picture of the author of a testimonial will show the visitor that it is a real person talking.
• Expectation managers: Make sure that the visitor clearly knows what to expect from this landing page. They should be able to answer the questions “who”, “what”, “where”, “when”, “how much”.
• Call-to-action: this is the climax of your landing page. Your objective is to make visitors click on the call-to-action to convert. It has to be very high in the visual hierarchy so the visitor does not miss it. For instance, using an orange button on a blue background will make it pop to the eye of the visitor. You should also think about some other design elements, such as where in the landing page you will place it. Placing your call-to-action at the bottom of a very long landing page with no other call-to-action might not be a good idea, for instance.
• Images/videos: that is the only element that is not common to both design and copywriting. This one is part of the design. Images or videos should serve a clear purpose. Do not use an image just because it looks cool. You should use one that illustrates a feature of your product for example.

Next week, I will talk about product messaging and so on.

Thank you.

Mert Kolay