What Converts? Building Landing Pages That Evoke Action by GenooMarketing

What Converts? Building Landing Pages that Evoke Action Watch the webinar video & see blog post Margaret:

Well hi everybody and welcome to What Converts: Building Landing Pages That Evoke Action. I'm Margaret Johnson and I will be your raconteur for our session today, along with Kim Albee, who is our presenter. If you are tweeting or sharing during the session, please use the #leadgen. With that, I think it's time to introduce Kim.

Kim:

Hey. Thanks Margaret. Welcome everybody. Thank you for being here. We are at capacity for the webinar so congratulate yourselves on making it in. Awesome to be hear. Let's jump right in. What do you say?

Margaret:

I say let's go for it. Let's talk about why we're doing this. Kim?

Why We Are Doing This… Kim:

Well we're doing this to help people identify the conversion blocks on your site you that you can increase the percentage of visitors who experience the “ah-‐ha moment” that converts visitors into leads. The big picture we're going to be talking about and here's what we're going to focus on today. What is necessary to promote conversion? How can you evaluate your web pages and identify the blocks to conversion? What is the best way to attack the problems you find and transform your pages into conversion machines? Sounds like fun right?

Margaret:

It sure does.

Kim:

All right. First of all, we're going to do our giveaway. We said we were going to do a $50 Amazon gift card within the first 3 minutes and we are doing that. The first person to type the answer in the question box will receive the first $50 Amazon gift card. It's a fill in the blank question and that question is, “increase the percentage of visitors who experience the ____ that converts visitors into leads.”

Margaret:

Kate. All right we have a winner folks. It's Katie but it's great to see all these people who are listening. Katie, you are our winner and our fabulous team at our office is writing down your name and we will be in contact with you after the session to arrange for you to get your gift card. I hope you have great plans.

Kim:

Congratulations and we have another giveaway, another $50 Amazon gift card, at the end. Now that you're getting the gist of what we could possibly ask because there's a

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

lot more content. That was quick, right? Now we have all this content so pay attention because ... Margaret:

The answer was ah-‐ha moment by the way.

Kim:

Ah, very good.

Margaret:

Ah-‐ha moment was the answer and it looks like about %80 of the people who answered got it right.

How Do You Get Visitors To Identify Themselves? Kim:

All right. Excellent. You gotta be quick draw on the typing. Here we go. How do you get visitors to identify themselves? Now, there is a discipline for this, and I'm sure some of you know this, it's called conversion rate optimization or CRO. When you see that as it relates to marketing things, you know what that means. It's often associated with lead generation or acquiring new registrations or downloads and customers.

You want to pay attention to this. Here's the other things it does. It helps you defend against the limited attention span of visitors and give them what they want before they get tired of looking for it. Right? The big picture is that you get all this traffic and it comes into one of your website pages and whatever people first land on, we're going to call that a landing page. It could be your home page, it could be a blog page, it could be an actual landing page with a lead capture form on it. Either they look around and they leave or those visitors find what they need and they convert, either into a lead or to a customer. Having more of them convert increases the investment you're making in your website and getting traffic to it. That investment that you're making, whether it's through SEO, whether it's through content marketing, ad, however you're doing it, you want it to be easy for your leads to convert. It's easier to convert the traffic you have than continuing to drive new traffic and having mediocre conversion results. That's one of the things we're going to be looking at. We want to improve that.

It’s Not Just About More Conversions…

It's not just about more conversions, by the way. It's about getting more of your perfect customers, more of the people you want that will grow your business. This focus right here. It's not just about conversions, it's about of your perfect customers is the key to success. You know what that means, right? People who have been on webinars before with us will probably know where we're going with this. I will take

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

this time to tell you that 38% of people on the webinar are brand new to Genoo and to ContentZAP. Here's what that means. You must have a very specific idea about who that is, who is your perfect customer. It's time for a poll question so get ready. Here's the quick poll. Margaret:

How well do you know your perfect customer? Pick one answer. We're getting some great, great responses. Oh, I'm kind of fascinated by this. You guys are gonna be really super interested. If you haven't answered the question yet, now is your time. I'm about to close it. Closing it in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Let me share. Check it out. Let's look at those poll results. Only 5% said, "Totally know them, no question", good percentage, really like seeing that, 38%, "I think we know them", 10%, "Not sure", and I'm so happy, so happy, aren't you Kim, to see that nice 0 on that bottom line?

Kim:

I am. I love it. I love it. That bodes well then. It bodes very well. You'll see exactly how when we get into this. OK.

Why Aren’t More Visitors Converting?

All right. On we go. Why aren't, then, more of your visitors converting? If you know your target audience really well then why are they coming to your pages and they aren't getting what they want? That, my friend, is the million-‐dollar question, right? We're going to provide you with a process that will help you get at the potential issues and ideas that will help you overcome that specific thing. The entire goal of optimizing your pages for conversion is figuring out why visitors aren't converting and fixing it so we're going to walk you right through that today. We're going to show you how that whole process can work. What you want to keep in mind is not only is the key to effective conversion to focus on finding your perfect customer, you also want to figure out why visitors aren't converting and fix it but you want to use analytics, right? True CRO is based upon analytics, not hunches or guesses. This means it's not about a pile of best practices and it's not about testing them for yourselves or on your audience ... or it is about, sorry, my bad, you testing them for yourself on your audience and learning what works best for you. You'll see this later on because it's critical that you test. It's critical that you understand what works and what doesn't and we have some surprising results for you that we'll be sharing that'll make the point.

If You Could Have Optimized Pages…

If you could have optimized pages, what would that provide for you? First of all, it capitalizes on traffic you're already getting. It's maximizing your traffic. Secondly, paid

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

advertising isn't getting any cheaper and you want to maximize your spend. You want to make sure that you're getting the most conversions for the dollars that you're spending. Right now, we even know that Facebook and social is all about advertising now for those eyeballs. It's not about having a great fan page anymore because nobody sees your posts. You want to make sure that you maximize your spend. Third but not least, if you've got great conversion when people land on your site, they're opting in for things and they're getting what they need and all of that, you not only have more trust and more regard and better a relationship with your leads, it lowers your customer acquisition cost because you're building trust, you're showing yourselves as a leader. Margaret:

I want to add to that you also know what your leads are interested in and the more you can know your leads, the more you can actually fine tune your knowledge of your perfect customer. Right Kim?

Kim:

That's right. Absolutely. We've said that on so many of our webinars. OK. The discipline is finding out what's not working and fixing it so that's what you want to do. Now, in this webinar we're going to be sharing some of what we've done and some of what is known out there in the world of conversation rate optimization because we want to give you ideas about what you could try and what you should keep in mind that will help you have better results in conversions for your efforts. Let's look at what you need. The first question, to get started ... This is why you can't just take a pile of best practices and apply them because everybody's business is different. I know there's people out there that want everyone to seem like it's the same and you should all have the same tactics in your marketing. We don't ascribe to that. What we know is that the goals for the business are the goals for your business. What is your goal for your website? What do you want to achieve? See, when you understand what you want, we can start to design, you can start to look at your pages. It gives you a purpose to say, "Well, are we driving towards that? Are we accomplishing that?"

Margaret:

Exactly and one of the things you want to think about, too, is are these realistic goals? I suspect that the majority of people who said more people filling out the contact us form probably haven't been on our webinar with us before. We'll talk more about that.

Kim:

Well yeah. I would say it like this too. One of the things to think about is what do you need to do to have more people contacting you and clicking on that contact us form? What do you need to do from a variety of ... how you provide information to them, how you fulfill their buying process, what's the content, so that by the time they're all the way down that funnel and they're ready to contact and talk to someone, they fill out your contact us form. That's what I would say. That's the way to look at this.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Margaret:

That is the way to look at it Kim but a question came in from one of our attendees that says, "What's the difference between wanting people filling out a contact us form and wanting more leads?"

Kim:

Ah, that's a great question! I love that question. Here it is. I will tell you it's like when you walk into a store. You walk into a store, you're going to go shopping ... Every time I go visit my mom we go to Nordstrom in San Diego. Right after she picks me up, that's where we're going and everybody knows it. It's kind of funny. Me and my mom go shopping. We get to Nordstrom, you walk in the store and what's the first thing that happens to you? A salesperson comes up and they say, "Can I help you?" What do you say? Oh, I can hear it through all the people on the webinar in your head right now. You're saying, "No thanks, I'm just looking." That's right. Excellent, right? That's what goes on.

The people who want to fill out a contact us form ... Why you get so few of those is they've gotta really want to talk to somebody and the only time I really want to talk to somebody in the store ... Well at Nordy's I love to buy shoes so when I find the shoe that I've gotta try on then I gotta go and find someone and say, "Hey, I want to try this shoe on." Until then, I don't want to talk to them. I just want to look, right? That's what people are doing at your site. They're looking. Why? They're not ready to buy. They're way high up in the buying process. They're at the top. What's the information that you could provide in exchange for a name and an email? That would be a no brainer for them, boom, to enter that information in, a name and an email, and now you have a lead. A lead that you can follow up with a lead that you can guide through their buying journey. Very different from a contact us submit. Is that clear?

Margaret:

Yeah and I want to add to that put yourself in your audience's shoes. When you fill out a contact us form, what do you 100% know is going to happen? Somebody is going to contact you. They're going to talk you into buying their stuff and you might not be ready to buy their stuff. Put yourself in your audience's shoes a little bit too. Hope that answered the question. Thanks so much for that. Kim, why don't we move on?

Getting Started – What You Need… Kim:

All right. The first thing, once you know your goal then let's look and see what are you doing right now towards that goal? Your conversation rate is what you want to look at. You want to say, "Well how are we doing today?" At a goal, if you said, "I want more leads" then I would say, "OK, good. Your conversion rate equals your total leads generated from your website", and we'll just say over a month. Take the most current 30 day period and divide that by the total visitors to your website. If it's about having

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

people complete your contact us form, then take the total people who have submitted the contact us form and divide that by the total visitors to your website and they'll see something that'll be very enlightening to you. That's where your starting point is. That's ground zero. Nowhere to go but up from there, all right? That helps you guide it in. We're trying to keep this easy, with actionable things that you can get.

Here's the thing, you can use Google Analytics to get your total visitors to your website. You've gotta then look at ... If you have Genoo, you can see totally the number of leads generated from your website, as well as the total of visitors to your website. You can get that number very easily from Genoo. Otherwise, you want to look and see where do your leads go, when your lead capture form is submitted, where do those go. You want to look at the period of time when those new leads came in versus the visitors to your site for that period, all right?

Margaret:

Just to clarify for those who haven't heard the term before, lead capture form is the form that you ask your visitors to fill out, whether it's a contact us, a request for quote, a download this paper, it's that form.

Look At Your Analytics… Kim:

Yep. OK. On we go. What I said is look at your analytics, right? I'm going to say everybody here probably knows about Google Analytics and is using them and if you're not, you should be. Look at your analytics to get the total visitors for your conversion rate calculation. Google Analytics won't have your leads so you'll have to go to another place, wherever your leads are going. In Genoo you can get to this really easily. Identify your bounce rate for the last month and I'm going to show you what that looks like but your analytics, Google Analytics, will tell you your bounce rate.

What is a bounce rate? I know Margaret was itching to ask me that question to make sure that we're clear. A bounce rate would say visitors come into your pages, right? They come into a page and they immediately leave the page. They don't go to any other page but that initial page they landed on when they came to your site. They don't look around, they don't do anything else, they leave. That is a bounce, OK? You want to know the bounce page then you want to identify your top entry pages and look at the bounce rate on those pages. If you have greater than a 50% overall bounce rate, your visitors are not finding what they want. OK? If you have a greater than 50% bounce rate on a page, then you want to explore than page further. That would be a problem page. I would just flag it as a potential and discover why, OK? That's a candidate for improvement.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Margaret:

Kim, I want to add to that too. When we say visitors aren't finding what they want, that's number 1. Number 2 is they're not finding what you want them to find. That's another critical point to think about there. You want people to do certain things. If they're not doing it, something's wrong.

Kim:

Right and that brings me up to a funny feel. One of the questions, and I might be jumping ahead and I'll come back ... Well no, I'll just wait so hold on. It's coming. Google Analytics can help. You'll see here this is just on a dashboard, right, from Google Analytics. There's the bounce rate. That's a great bounce rate by the way. Then session duration. Average session duration on this site is 15 minutes. The bounce rate is 21.75%. It looks like this with Google Analytics so when you log in, you're going to be looking at this in your dashboard. Those are the 2 numbers. That's your overall, OK? Session duration kind of gives you an idea of engagement, right? That's why I'm just circling session duration. We're not going to talk about that a lot but that's something that you can look at.

Margaret:

Actually we got a great question. I just want to bounce this in. Oh, no pun intended. How long do they need to stay on a page to have a good rate?

Kim:

They have to click.

Margaret:

They have to go to another page in order not to be a bounce.

Kim:

That's right. They could come in

Margaret:

They could be on that page for an hour and if they leave that page right away, that's a bounce.

Kim:

That's right. Google will penalize you if you have a super high bounce rate. I believe it's over 50%. You'll end up suffering in search results because, and it depends for what page they're pointing you to, but they track that really close now because what Google wants to do ... Now, I'm not going to dive into SEO but what Google wants to do is end search. The want to end the search for the visitor. They want to deliver them to a page so that a visitor doesn't bounce right back out and continue their search. At any rate, that's the thing you want to find.

Then you want to also, if you're out at Google Analytics and you go to behavior and then content and then you go to landing pages ... Now, the first page that visitors come to when they come to your site, they call that a landing page. Those are entry pages, also called, right? That's how Google relates to it and you want to look at them. I'm showing you a selection here from a site that's a brand new site that's just starting out but you can see the bounce rate, right? I'm just pointing at the column and you can see that the home page and the sign up page have huge bounce rates, right? Those are candidates for us. They'll put them on the list and start going

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

through and we're going to now identify the questions that you should be asking about any page that you've got. Now, this is any kind of page but this is how you can identify what pages may need help. What pages may you need to pay attention to? This is how you find out. Make a list. Anything that's really high, over 50%. In this case I've picked 2 that are the 88% and 79%, I mean good God, I've got a signup page that has an 88% bounce rate. Wow. Needs help, right? Obvious. That's how you identify what pages to focus on.

Identifying Potential Page Problems…

Now you want to go into identifying your potential page problem. For each one of those pages, you want to identify the possible barriers to conversion that exist on that page, right? Simple, yes? Then go do it, we're done. No, kidding. All right. Here's some initial questions to ask. Is your call to action clear? Do people know what it is you want them to do. Is it easy to find or do they have to hunt and peck and hunt and peck? Now, I'm going to just draw an example. How many of you, and just by raising your hand out in the chat and Margaret you can tell me if this even resonates with people, how many of you have ever been to GoDaddy and purchased anything out of there? Anybody? Raise your hand.

Margaret:

I see a lot of hands coming up.

Kim:

OK, right. When you go to check out whatever you're buying there, do you know how hard it is to find the no, just continue to the shopping cart that's at the bottom, it's in this tiny type, because what they want you to do is buy something else? How many people understand that? Well, here's the thing. They're making it hard for me to check out because what they want to make it easy for me to do is add on and tack on a whole bunch of stuff. It's like going to a supermarket or going to a store and you know the check out lanes? They aren't empty, each checkout lane is bordered by a whole bunch of things you could add into your cart, right?

Margaret:

Candy bars.

Kim:

Right. Candy bars and soda and at Micro Center it's all kinds of little gadgets for your computers and this and that. You have this and that's what GoDaddy is doing. Is your call to action clear? Well, there is clear but for most of us, we just want to figure out how do I get out of here, right? How do I get to my checkout and is it easy to find? For me, it's not easy to find on GoDaddy but I now know. Those are the questions. Is your call to action is what you want leads to do clear? Are your images and graphics well placed and are they relevant or are they distracting? That's another question. You can look at your pages and ask that question.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Now, here's the other cool part and I could sense Margaret's telepathic waves coming my way, which is to say, you want to look at this not from your invested position as the company and what you want people to do ... Yes, you do want to have that but you've gotta be two-‐headed. The other side of it is what do your visitors want.

Margaret:

Mm-‐hmm (affirmative).

Kim:

Are you in their head? What is giving them what they want. From their perspective, is your call to action clear? From their perspective, are your images and graphics well placed? Are they relevant to them? Are they helpful.

Margaret:

Yeah and Kim, we are getting some awesome questions. Usually we do questions at the end but these are so context relevant that I think we should address a couple of them real quick. Won't your contact us or sign up pages always have a high bounce rate? That's the last thing we usually do. Well, yes it is but your sign up or contact pages should automatically take your visitor to the next page, whether it's a thank you page, whether it's a here go download a new thing and fill out a different form.

Kim:

Yeah, if they're converting well then you don't have a high bounce rate on those pages. If they aren't converting well, you'll have a high bounce rate on those pages. People will go in, they see the form and they'll go, "Eh, nope, bye" but if they convert and go to the thank you page, well you're in good shape, right?

Margaret:

Mm-‐hmm (affirmative). Another question, I'm going to paraphrase here but this is a great one, people come to our site based on a single article that's in our blog so I'm guessing you're probably tweeting you blog, you're getting visitors to your blog, and you're wondering if Google allows higher bounce rates for blogs versus a product or service provider.

Kim:

No, they don't actually do that at all but here's the thing that's cool. Here are some ideas for that. If you have a long blog post, break it into multiple pages and have people go from page to page to page. That handles your bounce rate, right? Here's another one that I like even better.

Margaret:

I know you do!

Kim:

I know I do, right? It's put a call to action on your blog. If people are digging that blog, right, you're dragging all the traffic to your blog, well what do you want them to do? If people read that blog post or engage with that blog post, what is it that their next question is going to be? What is it that they're going to most want or wish they had? Create a download, create something that they can just go and get that, boom, now you've got a leadgen device that's right on your blog. You bring them in, they go to complete the form, they complete the form, they get the download, they go to the thank you page, bad-‐a-‐bing bad-‐a-‐boom, it's a great converting page. Awesome.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Margaret:

Keep in mind how many blog posts you read that link to other blog posts or that are go to next page or that have calls to action that are relevant to you. Think about it in terms of your audience, once again. Whether it's a call to action, whether it's an oh go read the back story on this at this blog post with another click, right, there's lots you can do there but you've gotta make it engaging. If it's a blog post that's black text on a white screen and when they're done reading, they're done reading, that's your bounce rate and that's not what you want.

Kim:

Right. Is there a lot of unnecessary text on your pages? Text that doesn't help, text that doesn't forward the action. I used to participate in some programs and it was like, if you were going to talk, if you were going to raise your hand and say anything, they wanted you to forward the action. It's like instead of going off to London or Paris, they used to say go on to Paris, right, because it's completely irrelevant, right? What you want to do is, is there a lot of unnecessary text or unnecessary content that doesn't forward the action, that doesn't contribute to what you most want people to do? That's another thing to sort of engage with and look at on your pages.

Then you also want to look at is your site getting your "perfect customer traffic." I can't tell you the number of people we talk to about their blogs because there's a certain large organization in our space and when you talk to them, what they tell almost everybody, and we've tested this, is you should blog. There's all kinds of people who have teeny, tiny little tiny markets that are blogging and they'd be better off emailing to their lists because it's a very small, targeted list that they could actually get and they could actually reach far more effectively, at least in the US, that way. I know in Canada there's some really strong can't spam laws but basically the whole question here is is your site getting perfect customer traffic? We talked to these people, and this is my story, we say, "How many blog subscribers do you have?" "Oh, we have 250 blog subscribers." "OK, great." What we want to do is we want to engage them and they get very quiet. I say, "Well what's going on?"

I'm not sure that our subscribers are actually our perfect customer. What do you mean? We've got to come up with blog posts on a regular basis. We blog about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with our space. We have a lot of people. I'm not sure how relevant our subscribers are for our product. I think, "Oh my God."

That's why we keep talking about, is your perfect customer targeted? Do you know who they are? Are you in service of that always? When you really look there's tons of stuff if you know who your target is that you could talk about. It's really unlimited when you really get into it. Would you agree Margaret?

Margaret:

I totally agree and I'm just in the process of answering a question; Is it important that all relevant information is above the fold on a landing page or do people scroll down? My answer is, people will scroll with the information that they're getting is valuable to them.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Kim:

Try these things, here's a couple of little tips about scrolling. If you position a picture so half the picture is above the fold and half the picture is below the fold so to speak, if it's an intriguing thing, that'll get people scrolling and once people are scrolling they tend to continue to scroll.

A body in motion tends to stay in motion. There are things you can play with and these are tactics and what you could call tricks to kind of play with, but I'm giving them to you so that you can kind of see for yourself, try it out for yourself, see if it improves.

Additional Considerations… Kim:

Here's some additional things that you want to keep in mind or you use to evaluate your pages. If you're in E-‐commerce; I did see people that say your goal is to get more orders and if you're E-‐commerce, you want to look at, is it easy to complete the checkout process? That's one thing, is it easy to do?

How many pages does it take to complete the key conversions that you're measuring. One of the things that you want to look at that's there is the basic flow. The big picture is you get traffic, the come into a page, they're going to look around. If you look at this, they come into a page and then they go to a call to action and then ... do you see what I'm saying? What's that pathway and how many pages does it take to get them to complete that action that you want them to complete. Count that out, look at that and then streamline that process.

Finally, is your site trustworthy? Is it credible? Do people need to feel secure to engage with you? Are you in the health services world? Are you in the E-‐commerce world? Are you in the world where people would be worried about participating with you, then you've got to make sure, especially sure your site is trustworthy and credible. There's different ways you can do that with testimonials. You can do that with trust factors for your certificates. This is a trustworthy site, it's a safe site ...

Margaret:

Badges.

Kim:

... your badges, exactly.

Here's the quote I was going to give you earlier that I said, "Just wait for it, it's coming." I love this thing and it's right from Flint McGlaughlin from MECLABS or Marketing Sherpa; "Does your site guide your visitors?" Or, "Does it allow for a lot of unsupervised thinking?" In other words, we had a customer that had really great content, really great content and they had sites that just said, "Here it all is." It was

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

out there, all these places you could click and everything else. People could go out there but nobody was going.

We took it all out of there and we started to guide visitors down pathways and they ended up generating about 2500 leads in about three months just from focusing and guiding and removing all that unsupervised thinking. You want to be the leader. You don't want to just open it up and have ... "Well, we're giving an open choice." No, you want to guide people. You want to remove unsupervised thinking. Unsupervised thinking leads to higher anxiety, it leads to higher friction. It leads to a lot of questioning. They may not do the action you really want them to take when you do things like that.

What Are The Factors That Influence Conversions? Kim:

What are the factors that influence conversions? I'm going to pull again from Marketing Sherpa's conversion formula, not to get you guys all wrapped around the knothole about, "Oh my God, there's math involved."

Margaret:

That's scary. Let's just say it.

Kim:

I know, right. Let's break it down ...

Margaret:

You're going to simplify it in a minute though.

Kim:

Exactly. Watch this.

C is the probability of conversion and that's determined by the motivation of the user, that's the M, 4M plus the clarity of the value proposition; 3V plus the incentive to take action, minus the friction elements that are present and then minus the anxiety elements that are present.

That's what your conversion formula is. They teach this in their landing page optimization class which is excellent, I've done it.

Think about it this way, take that formula, what I just said and think about it like this; Does your site appeal to your users enough that the aggravation they may experience is minimized? What you want them to do is clear and easy and their concerns about taking action are very low. That's the conversion formula said another way for normal humans. Does that work Margaret?

Margaret:

I think we have a lot of normal humans on the call today so I'm going to say that does work.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Kim:

That's a question, that's a great question that you want to engage yourself with.

Margaret:

Look at it through their eyes. Not your eyes, their eyes.

Your Perfect Customer… Kim:

"Their" meaning your perfect target audience.

Margaret:

Indeed.

Kim:

To answer that question well, which is my next bullet point, you must understand your perfect customer very well, very well. We did a webinar back in March with Adele Revella who is pretty much the queen of buyer persona stuff. She has a buyer persona institute, really great, amazingly smart woman. She says for all the stuff she's done and she's done it with big companies, all kinds of companies, she said, "Too often people think they have too many" and really they don't. When you're really looking at what motivates buying behavior, which is the whole purpose of it is to understand what motivates buying behavior so you can come up with an answer to those key questions and come up with that key content, you don't. That's the part where I would dis-‐spell that myth. It's cool, I love it.

Margaret:

Everybody who said, "We're guessing. We have too many", or We haven't done anything." Here’s your action item. Write this down. Go to (not right now, later) contentzap.com/blog and look for the blog on buyer personas and it's got the video embedded in it. You can actually listen to that webinar. I highly recommend you do that. You might find out that buyer personas are actually a little simpler than you think.

Kim:

And they rock by the way.

Margaret:

And they rock.

Kim:

It's amazing what you see. It's really amazing how much easier it becomes to produce campaigns and to come up with really good ideas that engage people.

Margaret:

Contentzap.com/blog or contentzap.com and just click the blog button at the top, right-‐hand side. I had a couple people asking me to repeat that.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

A Word On Friction/Aggravation Kim:

I want to keep moving because we have a lot to cover here. A word on friction and aggravation. The more you have friction and aggravation on your user population, the lower your conversions will be, or when thinking about your forms, the more you ask or require, the lower your conversions will be and the more bad data you get from those who do convert. Let's take a look.

On this, I know it might be hard to read it, it's the best I could do to squeeze that form. You want to get a white paper. You're very interested. Look at that form. I think they want your first-‐born and a couple other things. Basically they're asking all that information. Unbelievable right?

Which form would you most likely complete honestly? Let's call this white paper, form A and this other, form B. Just think about it for yourself. Which one would you most likely complete with honest information? I see a form like this you guys, I lie. I just lie. I pick all kinds of different values down here in these check boxes; it's none of their business. They don't know me, I don't know them. It's my first white paper from them for God's sakes.

Margaret:

Raise your hand if your phone number is 444-‐444-‐4444 when you're filling out thee forms.

Kim:

Or 612-‐555-‐1212 right. Then there's other people that put in ... I found out that people use the utility company phone numbers as their phone number.

Margaret:

... there's a phone number that always rings busy. I put that number in a lot.

Kim:

Anyway, interesting stuff. Think about the lead capture forms that you put up. Are you wanting all this stuff thinking that you're short cutting something and you'll be able to learn all this stuff about your leads? No, you end up with a host of bad data. People will put whatever they want in. They want to get the white paper but it's like going to a party, meeting somebody and you say, "Hey, I'm Kim." "I'm Margaret." Great, now I know their first name but I don't say, "Where do you live? What's your address? How many kids do you have? Are you married? Great, where'd you go to college?"

Margaret:

"What's your annual income? What's your budget for housing?"

Kim:

Right, you just don't go in and ask all that stuff. It's no different online, yet we still see stuff like this.

Enough said on that.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Margaret:

That's friction, that's aggravation.

Kim:

That's right. Let's look at two landing pages. This is right from what we did to have people register in this webinar and this is the highest registration we've ever had. In fact, we know that there's a lot of people that couldn't get on this webinar today. Let's look at two landing pages. Here's one and this is right from our events page. Let me just run through these questions.

Is our call to action on this clear? Is it easy to find?

Margaret:

I'm going to vote yes.

Kim:

Okay. You guys can chime in if you want through the chat or through your question panel, whatever. Are the images and graphics well placed? Are they relevant or are they distracting? Look at the page and write them down, jot them down on a piece of paper for yourself so you can kind of look at this. Is there a lot of unnecessary text? You'll notice on this one, I'm just going to say we don't have bullet points. Bullet points are supposed to be that golden thing right. We don't have them on this page and I wondered about that when we did it but we didn't, right.

How many pages does it take to complete the key conversion that I'm measuring which is right there on the page? It takes one and you go right to a thank you page from submitting this form which many of you did.

Is our site trustworthy? Is it credible? We have all the nav at the top, people can go look around if they want. They can come back here, they could find it. What would you say about our trustworthiness and our credibility? I'll leave that to you but that's our basic event landing page and registration form.

Ready to move on Margaret?

Margaret:

Yes I am.

Kim:

Here's another page. This is another landing page.

Margaret:

Some of you saw this ...

Kim:

Some of you saw this when ...

Margaret:

... when you registered.

Kim:

That's right. Genoo and ContentZap present ... there's no logo there or anything, it's called the, "Action clear claim my spot now." Is it easy to find? Where are the

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

buttons? Are the images and graphics well placed? Are they relevant? Are they distracting?

Is there a lot of unnecessary text on this page? Write down your answers and call this B. How many pages does it take to complete the key conversions that we're measuring? On this page, you click the claim-‐my-‐spot-‐now or the claim-‐my-‐spot-‐now at the bottom or the top and it goes to a little model pop-‐up form and then you complete the form.

It takes a click, you complete that, you click on that and then you're taken to your thank you page. It takes a couple ... it's a two-‐page deal, two stage.

Is your site trustworthy or credible? If you landed here ... whoever of you did and you converted from this page, you thought it was fine. You wanted the content. If you look at it, is it trustworthy and credible? That's another question. That's the other page.

Moving on, given page A or page B, which would you say had the better conversion rate. You vote now, put it in your question panel A or B. Enter A or B. Enter it in because we don't have a poll right now. We don't have a poll to do this. We should have maybe put it as a poll question but we didn't. Type it in, A or B, which do you think converted better.

Margaret:

I'm seeing ... I'm going to let this go for another couple of seconds here. They're coming in. I'm seeing a lot of weight on B.

Kim:

Okay.

Margaret:

A number of people think A but it seems that the majority of people think B.

Kim:

All right, cool. I'm going to reveal the conversion rate.

Margaret:

Should we have a drum roll?

Kim:

The total number of people who visited the page, divided into the number of people who actually signed up ... here you go. Can you believe that you guys? I would have voted with you on B. In fact, I was a big fan of B. This is what happened. That's the result. It's kind of weird isn't it? Everything I've heard, two factor form submit, all that stuff, etc. That to me is stunning.

Let's examine this even further. We did some heat map stuff and this is an early heat map. Basically people saw the stuff we wanted them to see. They didn't get hung up. Looks like they knew exactly where to go to click on either one and put their information in. That's the heat map and that's using Crazy Egg. There's a lot of heat

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

map providers that you can go use. Some charge and some are free. Crazy Egg charges and you can put this on any of your pages and kind of see, what is it that's getting people's attention. It can be really helpful right Margaret? Margaret:

It can be hugely helpful because these heat maps can really point out where your customers are landing, where their eyes are going, what they're thinking and if they're looking at what you want them to look at right?

Kim:

Right. It's really interesting to me.

Anyway, each one looks pretty good from a heat map perspective for sure. What elements could we test? What are elements we could test? Let's think about this.

Margaret:

Let me pause you for a second because we're getting some great comments here.

Kim:

Cool.

Margaret:

From what you've just shown, all I want to say is the people who are putting the comments in, keep going if you have more comments because we're going to address a number of these here in the next two to three minutes.

Kim, I think we can cruise through this one.

What Are Elements We Could Test? Kim:

What are elements we could test? Could we have more white space? Did the count-‐ down timer help or hurt? Did B have too many boxes?

We think we did start with a compelling headline. The headlines are the same across both pages. We did use bullet points on B to convey bits of information which is, "Best practice" for landing pages, but get this, we didn't do that on A and A fully out-‐ performed.

The font was the same across the page. The colors or the big grey box, was that distracting on B? The form is not on the page, that's a difference from A. We hear that was supposed to be better conversion.

Those are things we brainstormed about this. These are all little tips that you get. Sorry, I've got to go way back. What I want to tell you is beware of tactics. You can Google anything out there and say, "What are my best practices for conversion rate optimization." You can get a whole laundry list of stuff. You could just start implementing different conversion rate tactics like what we just said or you could

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

assemble a conversion rate optimization plan and actually go about it in an organized way.

If all you do is throw tactics out there and try different things, you might experience a lift in conversion but it's sort of hit or miss. You're acting off tips and tricks and you're not really acting off of or coming up with hypotheses and then really doing things from a place of knowledge and analysis.

Margaret:

Let me break in here. Let's bounce through some of these questions. First of all, someone said they didn't like the photos on B and I don't know how to take that. That was picture of me and a picture of Kim but that's okay.

We thought they were great photos but I get what you're saying, you didn't appreciate the photo. Someone actually shared that because of the image stuff in B, it didn't actually load within the firewalls and A was simple to load. Firewalls actually caused that landing page to be a problem.

Kim:

Interesting.

Beware Of Tactics... Margaret:

Here's the thing and this is why we say, "Beware of tactics". Here's the big difference between the two. The big difference is that the people who went to A are people who are already on our Genoo list. They know us, they trust us and based on the email, already decided that they were going to the event.

Kim:

That could have something to do with it. What I want to say is ... I'm going to stop you for a second because I think what you're going to say is going to fit into this. You want to develop a plan of attack. What we're saying is don't just start applying tactics but start figuring out what do the numbers mean before you start applying fixes? Challenge yourself to form a hypothesis which is what Margaret's doing right now based on your analysis which is ... you know, we sent everybody that we had on our list to our event page. We sent our partners that we're sending to have people come in, we sent to the landing page, the B page. They didn't really know us. That could be one hypothesis right?

Margaret:

By the way, that's a hypothesis that can't be measured with any tool.

Kim:

That's right.

Margaret:

You've got to apply some additional science above and beyond what any tool can give you to these things.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Kim:

Right. One of the things that we said was, "There we can test our hypothesis", why? Because we can take that same page and we could send our list, next webinar, we could send everybody to that page.

Margaret:

To the B page?

Kim:

Right, to the B page or a page like B, we could send them there instead of our main events page and see, do we get the same rates of conversion or not and with better pictures. We'll have to go ... maybe I'll put a cartoon up or something, I don't know if it was like the content of the picture, the quality of the picture.

Margaret:

I think it's the fact that there were pictures.

Kim:

But we had a picture on the other page but it didn't have to load.

Margaret:

Some people didn't like it too.

Develop A Plan Of Attack Kim:

Basically this is your plan of attack right? That's your plan. You take the knowledge and insights and funnel everything you find out from your test right back in the new hypotheses and new tests. You want to do it and you want to keep it going over time. You'll have a consistently improving site and you're going to learn a lot about your audience too.

Now it's time for our last giveaway. Are you ready? Pay attention, here we go, a $50.00 Amazon gift card to the first person who types in the answer to the question. Fill in the blank. Here we go, here it is. Are you ready?

Does your site appeal to your users enough that the ______ they may experience is minimized?

Margaret:

We have a winner. Keep going because I'm loving this. Who put "Ah-‐ha moment", come on.

Kim:

Haha moment?

Margaret:

Ah-‐ha moment. We do have a winner.

Kim:

Who is it?

Margaret:

Our winner is ... I've got to go back now because ... Jan.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Kim:

Jan ...

Margaret:

Jan or yan, I'm not sure which. The team back at the office has your name written down and we will be in contact with you. The answer to the question, there were two possible answers actually. Friction and aggravation.

Kim:

Right aggravation was the real perfect answer. We would take friction because when we were talking about it, it's kind of the same thing.

Does your site appeal to your users enough that the aggravation they may experience is minimized? Congratulations Jan.

Next Session: Headlines – Another KEY To Conversion! Kim:

Our next session ... here's the thing. One of the things that we know, hopefully ... raise your hand if this has been valuable for you. If you've gotten insights that you can apply. One of the things that we're going to do, we're going to send you all a link to a download that's going to summarize the key questions and it's going to give you a list of tactics to think about that you could brainstorm or use so that you could think about, "Once I get my hypothesis, here's some things I could do." Just to give you some ideas and some starters.

Our next session is all about headlines because that is another key to improving your conversion. How do evoke action? Headlines are amazingly important. We're going to cover how to construct headlines that grab attention and engagement. We haven't got a date for it yet because it is summer and summer in Minnesota, it is cabin time. For those of you who know the north woods and are up here, you'll get it. Other people, you might be like, "What does that have to do with anything?" We're working out when would be a great date. Watch for an email announcing that. We're going to continue this whole bent around conversion with that and really train you guys in how to construct headlines that can matter for you guys, that can really work and make a difference for a listing in action.

Margaret:

We've talked about this on a number of other webinars just briefly. We've said you agonize over creating a perfect email, having it land on the perfect page, having a page that's going to convert. Then you put on just any old headline.

Here's our latest newsletter. That's what we're going to really focus on.

Kim:

Right, you spend about two seconds coming up with your headline, yet your headline is one of the most critical aspects of starting the process of engagement. If you don't have really great headlines, you aren't going to have really great results. This matters

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

around not only your landing pages but it matters around your subject lines and your emails. It matters in both camps and we're going to really wrestle that one to the ground and give you guys some great insights and formulas for how you can really create headlines that are going to kick butt.

Thank You! Any Questions??? Kim:

Enough said. What questions do we have Margaret that we have time for? Probably a few. For those of you that have to leave right now because I think we're right almost on our hour. I thank you so much for attending and please watch for an email coming that'll take you to the next piece. I really hope that you found this valuable and gave you some nuggets that you can take away to really go after having pages that convert well for you based on your goals.

Margaret:

A really interesting question, I think we have time for one. Actually, I'm going to throw you two really fast. Don't answer the first one.

1) Do you think different ages have anything to do with the conversion rates?

2) Somebody is saying, "Why on earth would you send all of your people who converted at 92% to a page that converted at 33%? You're just going to give them more friction. They're already sold in your email." Which I think is kind of a good question because when you said that earlier.

Kim:

Here's why. I want to test the hypothesis that would say that the reason why we got such great conversion on our events page is because they knew us, because you guys knew us those of you who took it knew us. Would have done it in any case? That's what I want to test.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying but I'm now curious about that. That's the only reason I do it. The next ...

Margaret:

I want to add to that, what you guys don't see is that we actually send out three different invitations to our webinars.

Kim:

Some of them might have seen them.

Margaret:

Some of you might have seen all three. Some of you might have only seen the first one. What we'd be able to do is test the hypothesis on email one, see how the page converts and if it didn't convert at an appropriate rate for email two, we'd go back to the original page. That's agility in testing.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

Kim:

Right. We can play with it, but I'm curious now. It's like, "Huh, that would be an interesting deal."

What about age? Here's what I have to say about age, if you know your audience then you're going to be appropriate no matter what the age. If you're trying to speak to somebody between the ages of 15 and 65, you've got problems because that's too wide a band to actually communicate effectively with those people. You've go the millennials and they have a particular perspective and thinking and then you've got the people who are older and you've got all the people in the middle and quite frankly, you've got to really understand your audience so that you know that what you're doing addresses their concerns, their needs, their issues and their challenges. That is why you must know your audience. Otherwise, I don't think age is the thing that matters. I think it's how well you know your audience and then if age does matter, you have a really wide age band then yeah, you might want to break it up.

Margaret:

Another note I want to go back to the prior point, A, B testing can also be great for testing landing page A. You can due A, B testing on the landing pages. You can also do A, B testing in the emails and have the emails point to different landing pages. Thanks to the person who mentioned that as a reminder as well.

We are way out of time. I want to say thank you.

Kim:

Absolutely. Thank you guys so much and stay tuned because the next one is going to be really, really hands on around how you guys and create killer headlines.

Margaret:

Terrific. Yes, we did do A/B testing on this was the last question there.

Thank you all so much. You all have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll look forward to seeing you on the next one.

About ContentZAP ContentZAP! Is a professional services digital marketing agency. We understand marketing technology and how to leverage it to help grow your business. We work with companies of all sizes to develop and implement content strategies, plan nurturing and follow-‐up sequences, or to augment content development. We sponsor events and webinars that provide practical, very useful ideas and strategies that will help marketers be more effective quickly. Sometimes reverent. Sometimes irreverent. Always relevant. © 2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

www.genoo.com contentzap.com

contentzap.com

About Genoo Genoo is one of the most full-‐featured marketing automation solutions available, and targeted to the small and midsized business space. We love helping companies succeed with their marketing, and we are committed to building the best and most useful integrated digital marketing tools available! Inquire about a 30-‐Day initiative. www.genoo.com

Notes: