Calls to Action and Landing Page Best Practices (IMU)

June 26, 2009

Professor: Jeanne Hopkins, MECLABS, Marketing Experiments

My takeaway from this presentation: The folks at Marketing Experiments really know their stuff and if I ever have a business that needs (and can afford) their services, I would definitely sign up. Other than that, we seemed to spend most of our time breezing through examples without as much time digging into the details (those questions always seemed to be answered with “It depends…”)

Some useful tidbits:

Don’t just send people to your home page. Instead, create targeted, clear, and concise landing pages with a meaningful call to action. “Click here” or a “submit” button do not count as meaningful calls to action!
Conversion heuristic: C = 4m+3v+2(i-f)-2a
- C = probability of conversion
- m = motivation of user (when they arrive at your landing page; Do they want to learn more? Buy something?)
- v = clarity of value proposition (why should they take the next step? adding testimonials to your site is one way to boost this metric)
- i = incentive to take action (must outweigh the friction elements, gift cards are sometimes used as incentives, free trials are another method)
- f = friction elements in process (how much effort does the user need to exert? are you making them click through lots of pages or fill out very detailed forms?)
- a = anxiety about entering information (are you asking them too much information? or the wrong information?)
Conversion Rate: CR% = (# successes/# actions) * 100