Certain people have a keen way of just saying what they mean and others insist on guiding you through a crafted journey that ultimately persuades the same conclusion. At Rise, we’re the latter. We thrive on the journey the user takes and we feed off our ability to provide well crafted ethical persuasions. At heart, we side with our form in the proverbial debate that is: content vs. form. On a long day of code munching and laffy taffy use, knowing that our well tailored path (or form) is the ultimate contributor in a successful conversion, truly makes the invasive sugary goo in the back of our mouths that much sweeter.

But how do we really do it?

We use a concept that, according to Web Design for ROI, has been around for some time; yet, its potential and influence often go overlooked. Landing pages organize a user’s path and in return provide a desired action. More often than not, landing pages miss the mark because they lack in being clear, obvious, and concise. Attempts at being subtle, mysterious, wordy, or even timid dreadfully drive potential clients to the competitor or away all together. It’s important to note that when a new user is searching out a solution, they’re on a quest and the most effective course of action is to provide, yes you’ve guessed it, clear, obvious, and concise answers.

As a designer, these 8 methods exist as my fundamental checklist for a landing page.

I |  Integrate Your Entire Sales Cycle
Landing pages should lend a particular air of confidence because they consciously examine the entire “sales cycle.” When formatting content, it’s important to take into account the types of users that will potentially find one’s service the slightest bit motivating. If the page proves convincing, it must reinforce interest, instill desire, and ultimately guide the user to take action.

II |  Simplify and Separate
When it comes to landing pages, some elect to keep the overall website design and others argue that one should simplify the landing page to focus on the offer. At Rise, we’re firm believers in a hybrid of both techniques. We consider an end user to be extremely experienced in what to ignore on the internet so having too much could easily make a user feel choked and too little may possibly lack in confidence and grant minimal to no success.

III |  Provide an Extension of Your Ad
It is no coincidence that running an ad can become an expensive and timely undertaking; hence the use of similar ad’s or those that don’t divert from the original. With a landing page, it is important to repeat the offer that instills the desire the brand has infused. The landing page must recall the extension from which it arrived and determine the persona that chose to click. Some come via Google Ad’s, others discover the site in print, or discovered through an organic search. All three distinct systems lend themselves useful for tracking purposes.

IV |  Offer Segmenting Option for Different Audiences
It’s sometime unclear how someone will arrive at your landing page, so it’s key to offer segmenting options to the minority. This can be prepared with mini-ads that correspond with each possible extension. The key is to make them visible and not hide them in a drop down or subsequent choice which the end user will need to make. Creating segmenting options cumbersome will provide unsuccessful results.

V |  Use Compelling Copy
Glossy facts and call to actions are important, but not individually compelling; so, it’s imperative to speak to visitors directly. Drowning visitors in code speak will hastily destroy any sort of connection. As you would in any semi-formal setting with a client, explaining things calmly and patiently delivers the best outcome.

VI | Engage Visitor by Relating
Knowing what your visitor cares about is more important for conversion than what you may “think” they care about. Studying your personas and targeting common concerns allow one to effectively determine how to structure comprehensive copy, graphical content, and even what sorts of media to utilize. Knowing and relating to the audience creates a reoccurring relationship.

VII | Clear Call to Action
Of all the nuances that make up an effective landing page, the one that should be understandable to a designer and most importantly to a visitor is the call to action. It is at the epicenter of a landing page and one should be lead there with no mysterious contest. All the elements on a landing page support the “actionable” words whether they read “Add Now” or “Sign Up”; they all guide the visitor to take action.

VIII | Have a safety valve
We can try to plan for every scenario, but it’s inevitable that one or two visitors may miss the boat on a clear path toward further exploration. Some are simply not ready to take the primary offer. Like any risk, one should always carry some form of security. Nothing is truer than when it comes to landing pages. Having a “safety valve” allows the visitor the ability to journey through other substantial yet simpler content. This secondary measure emphasizes the confidence a visitor should enjoy to eventually return to the principal offer.

Though there are over 30 ways to guide yourself with a landing page alone using just Web Design for ROI, these aforementioned methods are the select that stand proudly over the others that I reflect in my use.

What do you use?

As acclimated consumers of the information age, we’ve come a long way from understanding how the blips and lights of the modern personal computer work. We have migrated into an all-encompassing online social grid that seeks to craft the new manner by which we consume, experience, and react to web content. Knowing this about the web, however, is not enough to fill the minds and wallets of those organizations who seek profits today and tomorrow – it takes a larger leap of faith. The key to success for any organization, to sustain a promising future in this post-modern territory, is to manage their website for optimal ROI. How, you may be asking?

I. Know What You Want

As mention in my previous entry, The New Hope, it’s easy for organizations to loose focus, and growth, dedicating endless time to the atheistic woes their website may be facing. However, this isn’t entirely a bad thing to do; it’s just not the first avenue for optimal ROI. Before jumping into everyone’s opinion about the website’s design and usability, organizations need to first ask themselves:

“How can we use our site to achieve organizational objectives?”

“What opportunities are we missing because we have a poor or mediocre web site compared to our competition?”

Common responses:

• Increase Sales
• Generate Leads
• Reduce Support Costs
• Foster Loyalty among customers
• Streamline processes with partners

The list of answers grows continuously due to how we interface with the web. The web’s influential ongoing platform has resulted in the need for organizations to stay aware of their objectives; as a result, creating an effective start on securing opportunity. The framing of these questions highlights the real cost linked with settling for an average website:
the opportunity cost.

II. Know Your Audience

A significant, yet ignored expense by many organizations is the practice of anticipating the visitor’s needs and how to design a web site to address these needs. In a number of cases, decisions are based on vague assumptions in hopes that an average user will recognize the associations. Still, this plan of action fails to meet an organizations acknowledgement of the end user and should take the following into consideration:

• Why are people coming to our site?
• What are they expecting to find?
• How can we make our site easier for them to use?

These questions in turn involve thinking about the site from a visitor’s perspective, and do not rely on assumption. It is valuable because it reminds an organization that not everyone knows what they know.

Coincidently, a priceless tool in developing refined information about an end user and understanding their behavior, is user testing. Once thought of as a tool for the large corporate giants, has gradually made its mark for all size organization through the use of inexpensive software. Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus suggest TechSmith’s Morae. Our very own Justin Delbar has a list of goodies in his article, 5 Tips for Agile and Effective Usability Testing. User testing is relatively inexpensive, easy, and far more valuable due its immediate effect on conversion and ROI. We advise that everyone conduct some form of testing and preferably at different stages of production to supply optimal results.

III. Treat Your Website like a Business

Fundamentally, the business of any business is to stay in business. Initially, many may agree that the web has changed business; however, at its core, the web demands similar conventions as precedent business platforms. The utmost of these conventions is having a plan. Creating documentation about design guidelines, functional specifics, or security standards agreeably are substantial, however, the one that encompasses the ongoing list of documentation is a site strategy. It provides a guide for producing better user experiences and less about perfect design.
Having a precise goal and well designed strategy communicates a plan of action that helps an organization know what their doing, and better yet, how they’re doing.

VI. Create a Web Site Strategy

Web Design for ROI suggests that every site strategy should contain its individual components. Those components may vary, but there are eight that make a significant impact.

• Objectives – Should not confused with strategies. The difference –objectives are goals and strategies are the means by which to achieve one or more objectives. Objectives explain what we’re trying to accomplish and strategies explain how.

• Audiences – Create a List of all potential audiences and breaking them out into primary and secondary audiences. Primary being those that organizations expect to gain the greatest return and secondary everyone else.

• Primary audience profile – Create characteristic profiles for your target audience. An organization must investigate from the obvious to the most trivial to determine what is appealing to their audience and essentially what makes them act out. If you’ve heard the word personas turning the coroner at your cubical, don’t be alarmed. It simply indicates the result of an objective profile of a target end user.

• Audience Questions – Develop questions end users may ask when visiting the site. Using the perspective of the end user allow an organization to see a target audiences perspective. This provides a road map during the review period to provide significant flaws.

• Competitive Assessment – Focus on the competition to generate a strong foundation by which to test and reverse-engineer any possible grey areas. Pay good attention to those with fantastic sites and call to actions, which provide a glimpse into how competitors have dealt with previous optimization user experiences and how to decisively tackle their efforts.

• Traffic Sources – Take a moment to survey the source of your traffic. Charting a percentile of expected traffic reveals how you should market your website best. Examples: E-mail Campaign, Banner Ad Campaign, Organic Search, Paid Search.

• Strategies – Recall your objectives and list how you will specifically strategize to achieve set objective. Placing this step near the end allows for all previous steps t he time to be assessed.

• Metrics – Calculated the success of your objectives and strategies.

V. Measure the Right Metrics

Analytic tools become easy to rely on and lend as the source by which many company executives and site managers see their website. Web analytic tools are strong but not perfect because each measures differently and at times provide uncertain and unexplainable results; lacking “actionable intelligence.”

According to Web Design for ROI, there are metrics that matter and those that don’t.

Do Matter -

Business Metrics
Pulled from a Sales/ Leads management system used my a whole company.
(i.e Revenue, Transactions, Profit, Gross margin)

Site Metrics
Provide statistical on site usage. Usually from web analytic reporting tool.
(i.e Conversion Rate, Most Visited Pages, Time on site, Traffic)

User Metrics
Come from user feedback most commonly surveys, focus groups, and user testing – the most valuable user metric.

Do Not Matter (as much) –

Traffic
The most common metric yet not indicative of possible conversions. People can come to your site until they’re blue in the face, but not worth tracking if their is no conversion.

Time on site and average page views
If you’ve created a better system on a certain page allowing more effective conversions, thus creating less time spent on page, this metric becomes an invaluable indicator.

Hits
A hit indication refers to anything that is downloaded from a website and therefore a poor tool.

Surveys
Subjective and bias interpretation. Effective only if questionnaire has been screened to remove areas of contingency.

Focus Groups
Subject anwsers how he or she feels they should and less of how they truly feel. It’s best to pay attention to what subjects do and less to what they say.

Industry Average Conversion Rates
Website would need to be the same to render accurate results because no two sites have the same audience expectations, traffic quality, and or call to action.

VI. Prioritize Design Efforts Intelligently

For most organzations , their web site page hirerachy unfolds like such:

• Homepage
• Category Pages
• Detail Pages
• Forms/Checkouts
• Landing Pages (if they exist)

But if viewed from a potential ROI point of view, it should resemble:

• Forms/Checkout
• Landing Pages
• Detail Pages
• Category Pages
• Home Page

ROI analysis makes the case that it is in the best interest of organizations to prioritize their design efforts on pages were the end user has a pre-defined path because it’s easiest to track and yields trackable intelligence.

VII. Test, Learn, Repeat
Web sites are ongoing fractals of evolving substance that always need adjusting due to their competitive arena and experimental nature . Their existence has clearly changed the platform by which we do business, however not changed the fundamentals of business. The potential and longevity of this new platform lies in our constant assessment and devotion.

“if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”

Look to next week, where we break down our web site using the hierarchal ROI focused approach and at best gain a better understanding oh how visitors consume, experience, and react to our web site.

Now ain’t that something?

You’ve seen it before, the common day-to-day unfolding of most organizations. They start somewhere between a second serving of coffee and a verbal rehash of yesterday’s news. Between the foreseeable dehydration and irrelevant debate, few decisions are made about the state of their web presence. What is far more daunting is that when the website is considered a topic of discussion, nothing profound or progressive pushes the rhetoric further than the aesthetic of the website.

Granted, to those involved in filling a 9 to 5 block, it may seem like time well spent picking pretty colors and finding more reasons for the website to “Pop!”. Unfortunately, these sorts of discussions are not sufficient in understanding the impact of an organizations website. Those in charge of making big decisions must come to terms with the idea that their website is an investment and should be cared for with the same amount of discipline. To those in the know, such accusations may come off as unsound or irrelevant due to the adoption rate of the internet. However, the affects of the internet along with simply having a website do not guarantee results.

I challenge you to examine your next company meeting and see if John-Doe from marketing is determine to send out his polished mailers or Jane from sales is set on buying more leads. If the latter describes your organization’s current state of investment, loosely, then I invite you to read on. On the other hand, if you’re fortunate and your company’s adoption characteristic in conversions is what Geoffrey Moore describes as pre-chasm(early adopters and or visionaries) in his book “Crossing the Chasm”, then we commend you and invite you to read for leisure. For those of us in the early majority, let me focus on the opportunity of converting a return on investment through the explorations in Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus’ book “Web Design for ROI.”

According to Loveday and Niehaus, certain organizations are plagued never to maximize a return on investment because they insist on making adjustments for the web in a traditional quantitative approach. Slow adopting organizations have quickly found themselves spending quality time pointing the finger at one another resulting in adverse discourse and no real solutions. Loveday and Niehaus suggest that the circular blame pointing desperately needs to end. They insist that it starts with the leaders of set organizations believing in the adoption of a strategic approach to web site design. Their research suggests that a strategic approach supplies impressive gains. Such gains are ultimately controlled by a combined metric: enhancing usability, a profound understanding of ones audience, and conversion optimization.

You may be asking, so what does that mean? What sort of “impressive gains” will I be making if I enhance my usability, understand my audience, or invest in my conversion optimization?

Initially, we’re provide a spectrum of evidence, but encouraged not to think how a site redesign will double our sales. The goal is to encourage one to think about how the design can improve the user experience and therefore positively improve business metrics.

Initial Numbers & Charts for those of you who enjoy them:

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Loveday and Niehaus express that their experience falls around these same findings and they’ve seen gains of 30% to 1,000% as a result of of conversion optimization. However, the test of estimating your likely return will depend on many factors; including, ones industry, objectives, online strategies, your site’s quality, the target audience expectations, and the competitive environment.

If you haven’t noticed, the motif that is unfolding is an organization’s need for self reflection. Spending the time to explore this approach from the inside-out as well as from the outside-in, is crucial. Accordingly, Loveday and Niehaus draw parallels of this system to a sales funnel. In the business case of acquiring more sales there are two obvious choices: drive more traffic, which yields a proportional gain; or, adopt an active focus on one’s conversion rate to yield transcending gains. Using the sales funnel analogy one can determine that the conflict is whether to put more into the funnel only to produce slow and costly results or widening the bottom of the sales funnel and achieve a higher conversation rate at a lower cost. Using their simplified metric, we can see charted results that once were unimaginable. Note, Loveday and Niehaus mention that the numbers are rarely this clear and easy but used in the following example for clarity and encourage one to conduct a similar exercise adjusting as needed.

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Ultimately, conversion optimization is “the gift that keeps on giving” because it’s biggest asset is time. The beneficial element of increasing conversion is that it consists of a one-time cost with an ongoing benefit. Buying traffic is a one-time cost with a one time benefit that can become costly. An organization must spend the same amount to purchase traffic each month or else traffic diminishes.

So conversion optimization is the ideal method for succussful ROI. What next? Easy, managing your ROI, of course. In our next session we’ll discuss principles for successfully managing web sites for optimal ROI.

As you were.