MarketingSherpa Blog

Every fall to promote MarketingSherpa’s Lead Generation Summits, we post a landing page to generate leads.

Last year we offered a PDF, ‘Top 10 B-to-B Lead Generation Marketing Mistakes.’ (Link below.) The campaign landing page got roughly a 60%+ conversion rate; in other words 60% of page visitors filled out their name and email for a copy of the Mistakes report.

This is vastly above average, so I was psyched.

However — embarrassing but true — later in the year research for our Landing Page Handbook revealed we’d made four mistakes on the Mistakes offer landing page:

Mistake #1. Image not clickable

Web surfers frequently click on stuff that’s not actually clickable in hopes that it will be. In particular, research shows people click on images. If nothing happens when they click on your image, prospects may think your site is broken or bad and you miss a marketing opportunity.

Mistake #2. No copy under image

Eyetracking reports show visitors are extremely likely to read copy that’s immediately under images. Makes sense, we’ve all been trained by print media to expect captions under pictures. So if you have an image online that’s not captioned, again you’re wasting a marketing opportunity.

Mistake #3. Radio button vs check buttons

When you use radio buttons for an interactive form where one answer is pre-checked, you run the risk that people will submit that answer without making sure it’s the right one for them.

In our case, about 30% of the people who submitted our little form asking for the Mistakes report mistakenly left the pre-checked button on an option they didn’t want. Whups.

Mistake #4. Forward slash URL

Most marketers create landing page hotlinks for campaigns by using their regular URL plus a forward slash with the campaign name. Example: MarketingSherpa.com/Mistakes

The problem is most people (a) know they can get to a Web page by going to a dot com without bothering with the extra bit after the forward slash and (b) are lazy typists. Which meant last year thousands of visitors went straight to our home page looking for a link to special offer instead of typing in the extra bit after the forward slash to get there directly.

This impedes your campaign tracking abilities and conversions overall.

So, this year I vowed to create the Perfect Landing Page for our all-new Summit promo, this time for the Top 10 Sales Lead Hell Cartoons.

OK, so it’s not perfect. But at least I avoided the mistakes from last year. The image is clickable. There’s a lovely caption. None of the interactive buttons are pre-checked. Plus, no one will get lost on our regular home page looking for the promo link because the promo features a “vanity” URL www.SalesLeadHell.com.

The campaign launched three weeks ago and so far conversions are running at about 68%. Wahoo!

(Yes, I know it’s not remotely a perfect a/b test, because it’s a year later and of course our offer is different, but I’m dancing in my office anyway.)

Got suggestions for how either landing pages could be improved further? Let us know at feedback@marketingsherpa.com. Thanks very much.

Attempt #1. Old landing page for Mistakes Report offer: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/mistakes

Atttempt #2. New landing page for Top 10 Cartoons offer: http://www.salesleadhell.com

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