Provide your visitors with sufficient scent
This post discusses the importance of scent and trigger words on a landing page.
In order to have a successful landing page, it’s important to provide your visitors with sufficient scent. This will lure them to complete the desired action.
Think about a mouse trap: the cheese provides scent, while the mouse performs the desired action. In this case, the mouse is trapped (not the best example). You don’t want to harm your potential customers, but you do want to provide them with strong scent to increase the possibility of completing an action – an action that you identify as a conversion.
What is scent?
Scent is made up of the parts of your website that attract visitors; the parts that stand out for them. These could be images, links or headings that “speak” to the visitor and quickly reassure them that they are browsing a relevant webpage.
It’s important to remember that all website visitors are different and have unique needs. Marketers create groups of visitors and define personas.
Wikipedia defines persona (marketing) as: (In marketing and user-centered design, personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic, attitude and/or behavior set that might use a site, brand or product in a similar way.)
When designing or optimising your landing page, think about the type of visitors (personas) visiting your landing page. What will your visitors be looking for? Does your landing page immediately address their needs? Are there sufficient links for the visitor to continue their session? Including sufficient links ensures that the visitor remains in a state of belief – belief that your website will provide them with an answer. Visitors need to believe that they will find this answer, even if they don’t find exactly what they’re looking for on the initial landing page.
A simple example:
You own a jewellery store that’s been operating for 75 years, specialising in the finest engagement rings.
You have a website, and the search phrase providing the majority of visitors is “diamond engagement rings”.
A gentleman may be doing research in order to find the perfect engagement ring. Alternatively, a lady may be trying to find her ultimate engagement ring, so that she can indicate to her boyfriend the ring she desires.
Ideally, the scent you want to include on your landing page should appeal to both personas.
By including the below content on your landing page, you will address the requirements of both personas.
This may appeal to men browsing your site:
“Give her the perfect engagement ring”
“Ensure she is thrilled with this worthy and precious engagement ring”
While this may appeal to women browsing your site:
“Show him your ultimate engagement ring”
The following may speak to both ladies and gents:
“How our diamonds are crafted”
“View our state-of-the-art Range”
“Over 75 years’ experience in jewellery”
“Our Store History”
This copy may also appeal to people who are meticulous or require a lot of reassurance – people who like to make decisions based on facts.
Checklist
Included below is a simple checklist you can use to evaluate your landing page content and/or relevancy.
*While going through this checklist to evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page content, it is extremely important to remember the top search phrases that are driving visitors to your landing page.
- Is the content (answer to search phrase) immediately available to your website visitors?
- How much related and persuasive content is provided to entice your visitor?
- Do your links contain trigger words that prompt visitors to obtain more information?
- Does the landing page address the following:
- Why the visitor should take further action;
- What the offer is;
- How to get started / what to do next.
Of course, there are also many design-related components that contribute to a successful landing page. Such components might include: navigation structure; headers and sub-headers call-to-action; search facility and more.
So next time you evaluate the effectiveness of your landing page, ask yourself – “Is there sufficient scent for the different types of persona that enter my landing page via my top keywords?”
Optimising the content of your landing page, and gearing it towards your visitors’ interests – based on the top search phrases – will have a positive impact.
If You Build It They Will Come. But Will They Stay?
An important part of a solid digital strategy is effective budget planning. Of that budget the main ongoing talking point is generally traffic generation, or in other words “how much and where should we invest in order to get people into our website”. In fact many digital strategies are completely based around budget allocation for traffic channels. These strategies resemble a process as follows:
The goal of this post is to focus on one of the most overlooked and beneficial areas to invest in: Conversion Optimisation. More specifically, the cost benefit of budgeting for and executing Conversion Optimisation projects.
You may ask what Conversion Optimisation is. The broad answer would be “anything which could increases conversion rates”. For the purpose of this post let’s just focus on site changes, where examples would include testing different landing page layouts, testing different call to action copy or even just testing the colour of a button.
Now before we continue, I would like to highlight the underlying principle for this post: Successful Optimisation projects have ongoing benefits. While increasing conversions purely through increasing traffic is an ongoing cost increase and with little effect on ROI. In other words: successful optimisation project = once off cost = extended benefit.
Let’s use a practical example to really show the principle:
- You have a website.
- It sells widgets at R100 each.
- For every 1000 visits to your site you sell 20 widgets. In other words your conversion rate is 2%.
- You get an average of 40000 visits to your site every month.
- You’re paid traffic brings in 30000 of your monthly visits and costs R60 000. That’s R2 for every visit.
So assuming you don’t invest in conversion optimisation and all other things held constant your forecast over the next four quarters will look something like this:
Now let’s say you take 10% of your traffic budget in the first 2 Quarters and invest in conversion optimisation testing. The first quarter you start with a landing page test and increase your conversion rate to 2.1% the second quarter you hit it ‘big’ and increase it again to 2.30% with more effective copy. Then in the final quarters you put all your budget back into just traffic generation. Your forecast will look like this:
Through no budget increases you have managed to increase your ROI and yearly revenue by R80 400.
This is of course a huge simplification, but the principle I am trying to drive home is not that conversion optimisation will always produce rewards (the first quarter actually had less ROI and revenue) or in what ratios you should allocate budget. Rather what I want to drive home it that optimisation efforts do cost money and require an ongoing commitment of testing and implementing to really reap the extended benefits.
So if need be, start small, but make sure to start at all. The chances are the more you practice and test the better your organization will become at running and implementing successful tests, which means even lower marginal costs for optimisation and more potential wins.
