Landing Page Handbook - How to Raise Conversions. From MarketingSherpa.

Review by: Nick Usborne

This report shows you how to write and design landing pages that deliver exceptional conversion rates. The report uses numerous landing page examples and shares the results achieved.

UPDATE: November, 2007. The Landing Page Handbook has just been updated, with all new data, charts and landing page examples,

I will be updating this review accordingly. In the meantime, you can learn more about the MarketingSherpa 2007 Landing Page Handbook here...

In some ways I feel I have been waiting for this report since I started out online in 1996. Right from the very beginning, as a direct marketer, I knew that what visitors see and read on each screen of each web page can have a huge impact on conversion rates. It was true for direct mail, so why not the web?

And by 1997 I was working with AOL on their pop-ups. We tested a great number of options when it came to copy, design and color choices.

Then suddenly dotcom fever set in and it seemed like nobody was that interested in conversion rates and testing. It was all about noise and traffic.

Has that attitude changed over the years? I think it has. I think a lot of companies now understand that small changes can have a big impact on conversion rates.

But now we have another challenge. It seems few companies are willing to apply the resources to improving and testing their landing pages. I hear it all the time, "Great idea, but we don't have the resources for that".

And every time I hear that, I want to hold up some figures and show people just how dramatic the difference can be when you pay attention to every element on a landing page.

NOTE: When I say landing page, keep one thing in mind...landing pages are ANY pages where people first arrive. If you build a new and unique page to welcome people from a particular email campaign, that is a landing page.

But also...if you optimize your site pages for the search engines and someone arrives from a search engine at a page that is not your home page, that is a landing page as well...and you need to treat it as such.

And the same goes for the entry pages from any link-building work you have been doing.

Anyway, with this report at hand, now I DO have figures to wave around and support my case.

Now I can show people that the copy on a page DOES matter.

And it DOES matter how that copy is presented within the page design.

And it DOES matter what colors you use, what font size you use, what column width you design to.

It also matters how many navigation links there are on a page, whether there are photos on the page, whether there are interactive elements on the page and so on.

You will find a lot of information about this report on MarketingSherpa's own sales page.

But first, and this had me almost jumping out of my socks, here are a few words from Anne Holland from MarketingSherpa. I asked her what she considered to be the most surprising finding in the report. Here is part of her reply:

"I have to say my biggest surprise was really how profoundly the layout of the landing pages affect the amount and type of copy that gets read. I guess as a former copywriter myself, I secretly dreamed if our copy was good enough -- really compelling -- that people would read if not all, at least a goodly amount of it.

After all, they clicked on my link because they wanted to know more, right?

But the data is about 50% of landing page visitors bail in 8 seconds or less, in which time they've read maybe 15 words. If your page is laid out in such a way that the copy is naturally the thing the eye looks at most, then you have a fighting chance at catching these folks and getting a message to them. But colors, placement of images (left vs right), navigation bars, etc, all fight copy-reading.

After I finished the final edits to the Handbook, I spent a little under an hour with our own Web designer, asking him to tweak the design elements on our own SherpaStore.com product pages. Not one word of copy changed. The only goal was to use what I'd learned from Eyetracking to make more visitors "see" the copy on our page, instead of anything else.

Our conversions went up 64%. And yes, that *is* a real number based on real sales.

Again, no copy changes. Just design. So if you have pretty decent copy to start with, then layout changes can make a huge impact."

As a copywriter for the web, that should give you the shivers.

How many times have you wished that site designers would give a little less emphasis to making the page look cute, and a little more time on using design as a means to showcase the message?

This is a big report...

59 samples from real-life campaigns
13 heatmaps: how eyes "see" landing pages
190 pages; 16 tables & charts

As always with MarketingSherpa, the report is dense with facts and figures. This isn't a collection of subjective opinions from self-appointed gurus. The report gives you the hard facts and figures.

If you are a copywriter or content writer online, you need this report. If you are a designer, you need this report. If you have promotional and marketing responsibilities, you need this report.

Find out more about "Landing Page Handbook: How to Raise Conversions"