More and more businesses are realizing that to stay ahead of the competition they need to pay attention to, and devote resources to strategies and tactics for “website optimization.” The goal of website optimization is to ultimately drive more traffic to your website. However, I learned of some recent research which indicates that certain techniques of website optimization can also influence click through rates, conversion rates, and campaign response rates.
On October 5th and 6th, I attended MarketingSherpa’s Annual B2B Marketing “Summit,” a gathering of some of the best and brightest minds in the marketing industry. One of the speakers, Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of a company called Marketing Experiments, was a particularly engaging speaker. I found his presentation entitled “More Revenue for Less Money-The Top Five Ways To Increase the Performance of Your Lead Generation Program” very informative, so wanted to share some highlights.
MarketingExperiments is described as a “research laboratory dedicated to discovering what really works in internet marketing.” During his presentation Dr. McGlaughlin reviewed some of his research utilizing case studies and with the help of the audience we reviewed and critiqued actual web pages submitted by attendees at the Marketing Summit.
Through this workshop we learned that certain simple design and layout elements on home pages, registration pages, and landing pages can make a big difference in click through rates, conversion rates, campaign response rates, and can drive more traffic to your website.
What Dr. McGlaughlin found through his research was that there were often mistakes, or as he called them “impediments” made when designing these pages that adversely affect the effectiveness of these in generating leads.
Dr. McGlaughlin described the top four impediments to lead conversion on a landing page as:
1. Lack of clarity about what visitors can do on your page and why they should do it.
2. An “undisciplined eye path” on the web page, usually caused by clutter, poor design and/or bad color choices.
3. An insufficient explanation to your web visitors about the benefits of your offer, or “value proposition.”
4. Psychological “friction” caused by a subscription form that is poorly designed, asking for too much information, too soon.
Dr. McGlaughlin suggests that you take steps to design your web pages with your visitor in mind, and make sure you answer 3 main questions for the visitor to your website:
· Where am I at?
· What can I do here? and
· Why should I do it.
The big “take-aways” for me in this presentation are that we can prevent these impediments by taking the time to properly design websites with your visitor in mind; have content on your site that is relevant to their interest, make your site easy to view and navigate, and have a clear and compelling call to action. I tried this approach myself with two sites that I recently designed, celialaw.com, and ebcorpevents.com and have seen increased traffic and click through rates. The research is clearly indicating that by making utilizing this approach you can improve conversion rates, increase campaign response rates, and drive more traffic to your website.
Wayne Kessler waynekessler.com
What about testing? How much testing did you do on your new site to get better conversion rates? Did you share your testing results on A/B Tests ( http://www.abtests.com/ ) by chance?
At Performable ( http://www.performable.com/ ) one of our objectives is to help people like you make quality landing page's.
Posted by: Rex Dixon | January 28, 2010 at 12:48 PM