Digital Intelligence An internet professional blog by Alex Sandrey

Landing page optimisation

A while back I downloaded a recording of a seminar hosted by Omniture by a Dr. Flint McGlaughlin of Marketing Experiments. The Lecture was entitled:

Landing Page Optimization: How to increase Online revenue without increasing Marketing costs

I finally got round to watching it and there were a couple of points that really sung out.

Conversion Heuristic

Firstly was the Markeing Experiments Conversion Heuristic :c=4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a ©

• m = Motivation
• v = (clarity of) Value of proposition
• i = Incentive
• f = Friction
• a = Anxiety

I’m not going to pretend like I can full explain this to you, you should really watch the lecture. That said there were some really clear and obvious take away’s that fall of the back of this.

Value Contributors must be stronger than the Value Inhibitors

It sounds almost silly saying it but it’s true. The combination of the users Motivation, The Value of the proposition to the user and the incentives for the user combined must be greater than the friction and the anxiety of the user.

You might not be able to influence all of those factors but for each one you can nudge in the right direction might make 0.5% in conversions which over 1,000 is 5 more sales over 100,000 is 500 more sales. times that by the value of the sale and you can see why analytic and optimisation is the big business that it is!

People buy from People

This is a great line from Dr. McGlaughlin and again it emphasises the Marketing Experiments approach to get into the mind set of the users rather than their actions. By considering this (people buy from people) you need to look at your site literally as a mouthpiece, anything that a user has to ‘think about’ on their own is a risk to conversion. Does a car show room give you a load of costs and options and sit back and wait for you to make up your mind? of course not! they try and get someone to guide you through the process and ‘make the sale’ as soon as you’ll let them (most places, as soon as you walk through the door).

Key questions

Near the end of the lecture Dr. McGlaughlin posed 4 questions that anyone looking to optimise a page should consider

Why should my ideal Prospect purchase from me rather than any of my competitors?

Good question! His argument was without a USP (unique selling point) your relying on ignorance and Brand loyalty (an element he didn’t mention).

The optimisation ’space’ is still quite new so there are still massive gains to be had by anyone who starts looking into this. Gaines over time can only go down as other businesses, competitors, start to do this as well. Certainly in the field I work in and all the clients I come into contact with, I can’t think of one that is really pushing this. Certinly the big eCommerce guys are all doing it but move away from strictly ’sales’ based sites and business tend to not see the imidiate relevance.

The short answer is, there’s more to a sale that buying a product! collecting an email, sign up to a news letter, a ‘contact request’ or time on certain pages can also be valid and trackable ‘conversions’ on your site.

How can I minimise all the elements in my sale path that cause psychological resistance?

This is talking about ‘friction’. As Dr. McGlaughlin points out, you’ve never get rid of it. As long as you’re asking for something there will be resistance. What the purpose of this question is, is to start the exploratory journey around what exactly you have in your sales path and do you need it?

I had someone show me a case study the other day where the original landing page had 7 inputs. the one that tested the best only had one…

How can I counter the remaining psychological resistance with extra incentive?

As I see this, it really becomes a question of oppotunity cost. Again, using Dr. McGlaughlin’s own words. The best optimised page with the best conversion in the word can still be improved with an increase in incentive or an increase in ‘Value’.

What Value will a user get by converting (or purchasing)? how can you increase that? eCommerce (easy example) may chose to take 10% off? or… include free shipping? Now in those examples that may mean an increase in revenue but decrease in profit or an increase in both depending how much that affects the conversion. That’s where you’ll need to start looking closely at the numbers.

How can I over-correct all of the elements which cause psychological concerns in my sale path?

Over-correct? in a lab, controlled, highly web savvy guinepigs it would be over kill but as Dr. McGlaughlin rightly points out that not all anxiety is rational. A person is rational people aren’t.

By attempting to ‘over-correct’ you should be able to get people to where you want them mentally to be able to convert.

This I think is probably the hardest question of the lot. and it’s probably best explained with an example. Secure transaction. There is for a lot of people, I would consider, an irrational anxiety towards ‘purchasing’ from the web. Often the same people would be more than willing to tell a complete stranger for a phone sale the same information without a care in the world. You’ll see a lot of on-line retailers now (in my opinion) over-emphasise the security and ’secure’ methods with words, logos clear changes to design elements. Anything to surpass this irrational-ness.