Why You’ve Gotta Have Landing Pages Testing ONE ACTION
Howdy MilValChal’ers — what follows is a looong overdue note on my learnings from Adam’s latest landing page challenge (the first major challenge like this in the group, I think…). The pot was $1k to use on whatever we wanted. Here’s how it all went down and what I learned:
Objective: Adam created a unique link on Unbounce — a revolutionary biz that uses one link to randomly show website visitors 1 of the multiple landing page versions you want to test. The reason for this is it allows you to see which page converts at a higher level so you know what sort of design, copy, graphical, etc elements lead to the highest percentage of conversions.
Adam made the offer to a number of contestants to spend no more than 45 mins editing a unique version of the page — the highest converting page author once the site hit a certain number of views (2,500 I believe was the mark) would be the winner of the $1k.
My process: I’ve been a longtime MilValChal’er, so I‘d run a number of experiments with landing pages. I took the best things I knew from those pages: keep your main content ‘above the fold’, give them ONE CLEAR call to action, make it personable, make it minimally visually appealing (it doesn’t have to be GREAT but if it looks like it’s from the early 90s, you’re done before you even begin…) and designed myself a straightforward and effective looking landing page.
Learnings from landing page construction: I was familiar with Unbounce, but this was the first time I’d actually used it. It’s got a usable page editor, but where it really shines is in it’s analytical ability. It’ll test multiple versions of the page and let you know exactly which one is doing the best. From this standpoint, I loved the program. I find that too many people just put these pages out there hoping that it works, BUT DON’T ACTUALLY MEASURE how people behave when they hit the page. Big Mistake. Unbounce helps you make sure you don’t do this + keeps you focused on getting people to take the one action you want them to take (in this case, an email signup). So, bottom line, if you don’t have something like Unbounce get it now.
Learnings from the contest: At the end of the day, you could make the most beautiful landing page on the planet but if you don’t get people there, you’re sunk. The beauty of our challenge was that we had 7 people competing, which meant 7 people were doing their all to get traffic to the main link. That link would then cause visitors to randomly see a landing page. So, we all drove traffic.
I made it my goal early on to drive a massive amount of traffic to the page. And this is the key message I’d impart to you: If you want to get good data, you have to know how to drive traffic. In my case, I’m still learning a bunch but I’ve also figured out a thing or two… Ultimately, you want to go with the networks that you have quickest access to the most people. For me that was Instagram and LinkedIn. So I went with those two and nailed the fire out of em. The MilValChal was a link in my Instagram Bio line for several weeks and a bunch of people clicked it to join up with a helpful group of entrepreneurs. I also emailed everyone I was connected with on LinkedIn because I’m mainly connected with startup/social entrepreneurs. They click in high numbers. In all, I got 1,179 people to click into the landing page out of our 2,000+ total. My page wound up being the highest converter by about a half percentage point, but my true learning was in driving the traffic and writing email copy that gets people to click to your landing pages. If you can learn to do that, you can test and iterate until you have the winning page or model.
Overall learnings from the contest: I found that many of the other participants didn’t drive that much traffic. Traffic is definitely a big issue, especially when you’re trying to drive targeted traffic. I still struggle with it a ton in my business, but I had the time during the contest to figure out some ways to drive traffic there that I know will serve me going forward.
Having said that, as the contests go forward, I think these pages should have neutral traffic driven to them. That’s the most fair way to test if the someone’s landing page ABSOLUTELY has the features that cause it to convert.
Once that process is in place, this would be a great way for all of us to crowdsource landing pages that convert like mad.
