Upside Downturn

The past 6 months I’ve been elevating the importance of landing pages in my projects. Typically it’d only be the homepage that I’d paid substantial efforts on. However, with my increased efforts on pay-per-click campaigns, and SEM, I wanted make sure the page that visitors first see continues the experience of where they’ve come from and removes barriers to them actioning either first contact or a sale.

So here, I’ve brought together some of the real world examples of psychological tricks people use in the real world attention locations that translate superduper well to landing pages, and are things that you should definitely consider on your landing page design.

Shopping channel heaven

Watching those muppets on The Apprentice (last night) try and sell on home shopping tv was a hoot. One trick that proper shopping channel pro’s use is rather than saying “call now, our operators are ready”, they use “If our operators are busy, please try again”. It’s a subtle difference, but embeds in the viewer that other people are ordering, and that they shouldn’t miss out, without explicitly stating so.

On your website landing pages, is their subtle wording you can use that implies that gazillions of other customers are buying your product or service right now?

*example used taken “Yes! 50 Secrets from the science of persuasion”, by R. Caldini & friends.

My local coffee shop

I like my local coffee shop, it’s not a Starbucks, it’s run by Adam, a guy like me trying to make living for his family. Recently, he had a promotion day, where he had his baristas out on the highstreet handing out mini-lattes, and a buy-5-coffee’s-get-1-free loyalty card, with 3 of the places stamped already, so only 2 left to get.

Who doesn’t like a free coffee on their way to work? I certainly do, and I like Adam’s photo on the flyer, I want to go to his coffee shop.

If you deconstruct Adams’ offer, he’s giving you a mini coffee, yet that not’s the full product, so you probably will still need your morning cup, but you’ve got the flava now.  He’s doing his offer at walk-to-work time, so the freebies match the customers normal requirements, their daily cup, let’s start the habit.

And the loyalty card, being pre-stamped, is f**ing genius. People see that they are more than half way to a free cup. This is so much more effective than giving them a two-stamp loyalty card.

So Adam identified the walking-to-work crowd, and built the components of his campaign around this, rather starting with the incentive first, he looked at mechanisms for creating habits.

Your landing page should start foremost with the potential customer, where have they come from?, what are the thinking?, and then once you understand the customer plan offers, and incentives around this.

Checkout impulse buys

A few years ago UK supermeerkats moved the chocolates away from the checkouts much to the joy of parents who are now not pestered “Muuuum I neeed this Mars bar, and I neeeeed the Skittles and I neeeeed the Snickers …”.

Still, the checkout is a location where supermarkets have your attention whilst you are loading your foodstuff and dog onto the carousel. So now at the checkout the sweets have been replaced by a raft of financial products, credit cards, pet insurance, car comparison insurance, mobile phone offers and more to tempt you.

So I recently paid more attention, in the stats, to the length that a person was spending on one of my client’s websites pages. I was surprised to find that the staff profiles pages had a significantly longer page viewing time than other pages. The profile pages are attention locations, just like the checkouts… Armed with this information, we created a series of product intros, different for each member of staffs profile page, so each member of staff in effect is introducing a product line. Guess what happened to sales, with these super personal product introduction?

Where ever you have someone’s attention, it is a potential selling point. Rinse it baby.

Rip off farmers markets

There are ton of things you can learn about marketing from seeing some farmer flog you overpriced locally grown organic vegetables. My friend Anthony runs a heirloom organic vegetables stall, which in itself is a good idea, as people are intrigued by white sprouting broccoli, purple carrots, and other funny vegetables.

But! What is more interesting is his constant incremental marketing and that he writes notes on in. One week his wife wrote careful titles of products rather than the computer print outs – Sales increased. Next week, he put his products in wicker baskets rather than cardboard boxes – sales increased. The following week, he wrote cooking/serving suggestions alongside the vegetable – sales increased

Guess what? Doing incremental changes to your landing pages works. In its nature, spending time tinkering and getting into the mind of your customer really f***ing works. Building a landing page and hoping for the best doesn’t.

You really have to test, report, try a new thing, test, report, try a new thing, test, report, try a new thing.. And then you’ll have the highest converting landing page possible.

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Next time, I look at some of the tools you need to do this landing page milarkey effectively.

Paolo marketing, strategy