Lessons Learned from Analyzing 3000 Landing Pages Pt. 2

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming today. Today's webinar is on one of my favorite topics, conversion rate optimization. We're going to be talking about going from average to amazing, lessons learned from optimizing 3,000+ landing pages. So let's dive right in.

Now, color psychology plays a role in conversions. For instance, you know, red is often associated with urgency in Western cultures, and there is about 62 to 90% of product assessment is being based on color alone. So using color effectively, such as for button styling, can impact users' decisions. Um, now while there isn't a one-size-fits-all perfect color, thoughtful color choices ensure primary buttons are going to stand out and drive conversions. Now in this example, HubSpot pretty infamously tested a red CTA instead of a green CTA and did see a 21% uplift in CTA engagement. So like Neil said at the top of the webinar, it's possible to have an impact. It's just usually a signal that there are other things that could be improved as well.

So I just wanted to add, I've seen the red button test a few times, and it goes against every grain of my assumption that that would win, but I have seen it happen in other instances too, which is kind of interesting.

Now, personalization or targeted marketing involves tailoring experiences based on individual customer attributes. According to Ad Age, 1/3 of marketers view personalization as one of the most crucial capabilities for the future, highlighting that it's growing in importance and enhancing customer engagement and driving conversions. So as you can see, you know, 73% of consumers prefer brands that offer personalized shopping experiences. 83% of users are willing to share data for more personalized experiences, which is, you know, really important and growing more important. As we move into AI and things like that. And 91% of consumers will shop brands that give relevant offers and recommendations. In this example, you can see a personalized pop-up message welcoming return users back. On average, 94% of companies experienced a rise in conversion rates after personalizing their websites. All right, with the basics of CRO covered, let's dive into how these strategies really come to life. So as you know, we analyzed 3,000 landing pages with conversion tracking, focusing on actual purchases or leads rather than softer goals such as email signups. And we categorized them into 2 groups: pages with a conversion rate of 2% or less and those with over 2% to pinpoint really key elements that are driving high conversions. So those key elements include First, choosing your hero design wisely. A hero section is the foundation of a landing page, the first section that really meets the visitor's eye. So a poorly designed hero section could impact site usage and conversion rate metrics. And since users form opinions in just 50 milliseconds and focus 80% of their attention above the fold, a well-designed hero section is really essential for optimizing site usage and conversions. Based on an analysis of numerous websites, we have categorized hero images into 7 distinct types. There's no single best category. The choice depends on your business. For example, you can see here Apple uses product-focused hero images to highlight its design strengths, while Honors, that health hero images emphasizes care and compassion, reflecting their service in home care for parents.

Yeah, this would be a great test right here as far as different types of imagery in the hero.

Absolutely. And I'll say it's a very popular test that we frequently run is targeting immediately that hero section. Hero design can shift conversions from minor to massive. In this example, Toe Grips saw a 3.9% boost by just simply changing the type of dog they were using in the hero image. I'm a dog lover, so they probably both work on me, but still. Still makes a difference.

I feel bad for the guy on the left there.

I know. Now, while, uh, Universal Technical Institute skyrocketed with a 21.4% increase after updating their hero image. When designing your, uh, hero section, just steer clear of certain things. So, um, outdated techniques like carousels and excessive animation. I will say carousels are declining in popularity. I know they were a hot thing for a little bit there, um, but really only 28% of top e-commerce sites are using them, which is down from 52% in 2013, according to a recent UX benchmark by Baymard Institute. They often underperform and they just require a meticulous setup to be deployed correctly. And similarly, unnecessary animations can sometimes overshadow your hero image or messaging, so, and also impact, you know, your site speeds and page performance without offering a ton of value. So just use animations only if they're really enhancing your message.

The big issue with carousels is it becomes overwhelming. It's like a kid in a candy shop. You're giving them too much messaging, too many options. If you can't figure out what's the best way to get them in with one image, one video, whatever it may be, you know, you're doing something wrong. There are of course instances where you should use a carousel, but they're very rare. And we usually see not using one performs better than using one. Again, there's always edge cases. But it's like a kid in a candy shop. Show them 10 different things or 5 different things. They don't know what to do. And a lot of times they don't purchase anything versus just focusing on one thing.

Yeah, if you do have a carousel. So that's another potential test idea, right, is running each slide as a separate variant potentially.

And just to add to that, we call that that paradox of choice. We don't want to overburden users with too many options because then they don't really even know where to start or what they wanted to accomplish on your site in the first place.

Yep, so thinking about using video on the landing page, a lot of times it's very effective for kind of communicating the value, especially with complex products like SaaS or software. So it can be a very effective way to communicate a lot of value with minimal friction, right? So they don't have to read anything, they can kind of just sit back and comprehend the value coming from the video. 30% of the top landing pages incorporate video. I think that number will probably continue to grow as well and can have impacts, you know, as high as or maybe even higher than 86% increases in conversion. So it is kind of a tricky one, you know, depending on the product or the offer, you know, you may not want to use video, but some things to consider If you are thinking about employing video on your landing pages, definitely want to take load speed into account, especially if it loads automatically, because that can dramatically, you know, increase the time to load the actual page, which is not good for SEO or any other number of factors. Another thing is that if the video going to be distracting from the objective, right? Especially if you have an older audience and an autoplay video, that may actually be more disorienting than helpful in that case. And then another thing to consider is the video length, right? So really, the length of the video should be proportional to the complexity of the product or the USP at that point. So A long video could actually increase friction. So it's something to keep in mind.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group. As well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside.

So this is an example of where, you know, you don't necessarily need video for every experience. So, you know, for the mobile site, for example, if you have a background hero video, you may not wanna run that on mobile, but on desktop it may make more sense because they're probably somewhere with potentially a better connection. There's— you can see it, you can see the whole video. So something to consider is that you don't, you know, have to use video across every device or experience.

A detailed list of benefits on your landing page is also really key for impacting conversions. Not everybody landing on your site is going to immediately want to perform a contact action or make a purchase. So by clearly outlining the value propositions and addressing user needs, you build trust and enhance that user experience, and then you're guiding potential customers towards a purchase decision. This approach is particularly effective for these less informed visitors, these less aware and intent-driven visitors, and provides them with necessary information to make a more informed choice. Also, showing it in this nice clean layout again is going to not impact that user paradox of choice and make it easy to view these additional details. By detailing what customers could expect and using these kind of more eye-catching icons on the form landing page for asset preservation, wealth, and tax. We saw a significant boost in both page views and conversion rates. So just by highlighting this is exactly what you're going to get out of filling out this form at the end really drew user attention and encouraged them to commit to the form, go through the different phases of the form, and submit it. To decide which benefit to showcase, evaluate the most valuable attributes. To your users, such as functionality, emotional benefits, financial benefits, environmental benefits, and just tailor your list to what is going to resonate most with your audience to drive the best results. Social proof, showing that other people use and trust your site, is really important factor in establishing trust, as it's deeply rooted in human beings' need to look at how others behave and then mimic it. With 88% of customers trusting user reviews as much as personal recommendations and 97% saying reviews influence their buying decisions. Showcasing testimonials can really boost conversions on sales pages by up to 34%.

I would just add that— oh, go ahead, Neil.

I just want to also add, if you're going to use testimonials, don't use the ones that are like, great product, amazing results. Like, it needs to be thorough, detailed, Very specific. And when you—

Yeah, no, sorry to interrupt. Go ahead, Neil. Go for it. I would say, but also not too long and not too verbose. We wanna have them these kind of concise, not too short, not too long, communicates just those best product or service factors.

Yep. And perfect kind of to pigtail off of that, Aubrey, is you can— there's such a thing as too much social proof and there's also different types Of social proof, and that's where testing comes back in.

Yeah, and, and, and Aubrey's right, no one wants to read, you know, 3 paragraphs of a testimonial. Um, you know, even some of the paragraphs get a little bit too long depending, because it's like a lot of it is just fluff. But the, the key that I've seen to testimonials that work really well is when they're detailed. But yes, no one wants to read, you know, 2 cell phone screens worth of testimonials from the same person. It's just overwhelming.

And if you do have that type of content in abundance, then maybe consider having a dedicated landing page for it or, you know, some type of way to give users access to it if they are really interested in engaging with these long-form testimonials potentially. All right. So as Kyle said, social proof comes in various forms, including testimonials, case studies, user-generated content, celebrity endorsements. In this example, United Water Restoration displayed their Google rating in the hero section with star iconography. And that led to a 17% increase in phone calls and a 27% boost in average session duration and a 1.5% decrease in bounce rate. Meaning users saw that, maybe felt a little more trust. We know that this is a Google business. There's people who have reviewed them that are on Google. I'm going to stay here, explore a little more, and maybe potentially place a call. for their services. And then in this example, Teddy Lane added social proof in the form of an exit intent popup to encourage hesitant visitors to take action, improving their conversion rate by 10%. So again, social proof plays off of our insecurities and desire to do the right thing. So highlighting your expertise and how you've helped others, especially at an important point in that user journey, like they're about to leave the site potentially, can really make all the difference in encouraging I want to take a second to tell you about my podcast co-host's agency.

So NP Digital, so Neil Patel Digital. What they do is they do a whole host of marketing services and they are global. They're worldwide. They have SMB services as well. They have mid-market to enterprise services as well. They cover the entire gamut. So you can just go to npdigital.com to learn more about it. And now back to the episode.

All right, so back to CTAs. The idea here is that you want your calls to action to be very specific and really to kind of support the value exchange, the offer. So, you know, this first point about customised CTAs convert 42% higher than generic or vague CTAs. So if you think about, you know, it's a lead gen form and the button says submit, versus, you know, learn how to optimize landing pages would be more specific, you know, more appealing than what would be kind of the default form CTA. And then, you know, we also have opportunities to personalize those CTAs. So this kind of goes back to the idea of segments. You know, if it's a returning customer, you could potentially change the CTA to be more relevant to them versus a new customer, for example. And then also CTAs should be action-oriented. You know, we want to excite them about the next step in order to encourage them to continue. So here's a good example. Which CTA sounds more appealing? Register now versus teach me how to get 195,000 visitors. I think that the answer is probably obvious there, but that's a pretty good example of kind of reiterating the value exchange in the CTA. So again, kind of words matter here. In this case, we have on the left a list of college programs and kind of the call to action associated with each of those is request info, which sounds like zero fun. You know, obviously there's gonna be a long form That requires quite a bit of information versus kind of, you know, being clear as far as the next step. So that link probably just takes them to the school site, right? So if we're clear and we change those buttons to say visit school's website, that's gonna better set expectations. And ultimately it did improve engagement, 22% click-through rate increase there. So this kind of goes back to the post-CTA idea where You can, around the actual call to action button, you know, you have opportunities to communicate additional value above or below. In this example, it's actually above where you can kind of reiterate value and clarify subsequent steps and better prepare them to take that next step, which in this case was a 26% increase for the portfolio reviews. Another kind of aspect of this test was including this secondary text link, right? So in that case, we're kind of appeasing less motivated prospects. So we give them a way to stay in the funnel if they still aren't ready to actually commit to the primary objective.

Yeah, and I would just add to that briefly, Kyle, that copy at the beginning above the CTA kind of just informed users, like, when you click this button, You're going to be submitting, you're going to be in a form, this form is going to take, you know, X amount of time. So it really just contextualized exactly what they could expect when they engaged with that button. And then, like you said, provided a pathway for users who maybe weren't that intent-driven, weren't ready to engage in a 5 to 10 minute survey or form, but still wanted to contact. So it really was a two-pronged approach to speak to both of those different audiences and different intent levels. All right. So looking at high-quality imagery and clear, compelling language in the hero section are also very crucial for capturing attention, um, and just conveying your page's value. Using sharp, relevant images with text overlays to effectively communicate the benefits and solutions you offer, uh, and ensuring visitors understand why your product or service is the best choice, um, is going to just really help again, clarify who you are and what you're offering immediately upon users coming to your site.

And you can still use high-quality images without it crushing your load time, right? So of course, you know, you can find amazing high-quality images that aren't too big in file size either. Cool. Awesome, everyone. Thank you very much for attending. And if you need help with your marketing, check out npdigital.com. Take care.