Drive fast all the time and you’ll end up getting tickets.  Eat a lot of fatty foods and it catches up to you eventually.  Burn enough bridges and you’ll find yourself on an island.  Launch marketing campaigns without an effective way to measure results or a strong focus on driving ROI, and you’ll eventually drive your career into a ditch.

Have you ever received a ticket on the marketing interstate?  Your marketing budget isn’t unlimited so having accountability riding shotgun is a surefire way to keep you from becoming a statistic.

For those who just received their license, landing pages allow marketers to easily calculate the response and the number of conversions they receive from each marketing effort.  Landing pages present an opportunity for a company to offer something of value in exchange for a prospect’s information or to make the cash register sing.

By creating a unique landing page & URL for each campaign, and also for each marketing medium, your site analytics can tell you how many people responded to your campaigns and what percentage converted on each.  Calculating the ROI and judging whether the approach makes sense to repeat for future efforts also becomes an easy task.

Optimizing Landing Pages – Make Sure Your Car Is Finely Tuned, BEFORE The Long Road Trip

If you were going to drive across the country, it would make sense to make sure your car is running good before leaving town.  If you’re engine blows up before you reach your destination, it’s nice to know that you did everything you could to prevent that from happening.

If you decide to build a landing page and you invest time and money to get people to visit it, it makes sense to optimize that page to increase the chances of good results.  Since we keep the lights on with conversions, you can look at optimization like your chance to practice driving stick before you go pick up your hot date.

Several Response Capture employees have gone through the Marketing Experiments Landing Page Optimization training program (here is a code that you can use to get a $50 discount on their courses: CAPTURE50) and we highly endorse their methodology. A principle that they teach in their courses to judge your landing page is to start by answering three simple questions:  

1. Where am I?

2. What can I do here?

3. Why should I do it?

The page should not be cluttered and the main goal for the visitor should be clear.  There are many best practices for optimizing a landing page but one important principle is to not include the navigation to the rest of your website – thus, focusing your visitor on the goal you have set out for the page.  – I would go with value proposition or strong offer here versus navigation.  Some landing pages have navigation.  Like our home page.

Response Capture subscribes to the belief that you should “always be testing.”  Before doing an advertising drop, consider taking a segment of your data and testing different landing page designs and offers.  Not testing before your big rollout means you run the risk of your campaign not going as well as it could have.

In a recent project with a Fortune 1000 high tech company, Response Capture utilized some principles learned in the Marketing Experiments program and the results kept our driving record clean.

• Our landing page before the Marketing Experiments course had a catchy headline, a paragraph of copy about the whitepaper offer and a “submit” button that provided the user no text on the button that supported the benefit for clicking.
• Post course, our treatment page had a headline that focused on the value proposition of the whitepaper offer, a bulleted list of benefit oriented copy, and rather than using a “submit” button, the text on the button drove the visitor to “access the free offer now.”

The Test landing page outperformed the Control page by 36.4%.  Happy with the initial test, we made additional enhancements to improve conversion rates. As the checkered flag was waved, our Treatment landing page outperformed the original control page by 258%.

Next time you think about driving too fast through the accountable marketing zone, remember that a landing page is one way to help keep your record clean.