EyeView's Blog

The 7 Sins Of Landing Page Design

I was watching Tim Ash’s webinar this week entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design”. It is simultaneously one of the most terrifying and one of the most illuminating lectures I have attended. It’s terrifying because he does a great job of identifying the many traps that people fall into when building out a landing page. But it’s also Illuminating because, unlike other optimization scaremongers, Ash offers tips for redemption for each of the deadly sins he identifies.

I will add the video to the end of this post but with respect to Tim, here are my high level take aways.

Sin 1: Unclear Call To Action

Redemption: Make your Call To Action clear. Ash makes it seem so obvious. You have to know what you want your site visitor to do and then remove the clutter that stops them from doing it.

Sin 2: Too Many Choices

Redemption: Focus, focus, focus. Ash suggests using visual shortcuts to reduce the need for confusing choice-filled text.

Sin 3: Asking For Too Much Information

Redemption: This is all about people dropping out when it’s time for them to fill in a form. Ash asks the key question, “Is this information absolutely necessary to complete the current transaction?” If the answer is “No”, you need to set the question aside at least until later.

Sin 4: Too Much Text

Redemption: Keep it short and sweet. Front load your text with all the good stuff and never use a full sentence when a set of bullets will suffice. The best advice here is to be a ruthless editor of your own work. This is one of the hardest disciplines to master, but well worth learning.

Sin 5: Not Keeping Your Promises

Redemption: Tell the truth, or at least synch up your ad copy with your landing page so that there are no unhappy surprises for your visitors.

Sin 6: Visual Distractions

Redemption: Make your images relevant, not gratuitous and make sure that they don’t obstruct the Call To Action.

Sin 7: Lack of Credibility & Trust

Redemption: Ash recommends that you remove anxiety by featuring well known trust symbols prominently and by drawing attention to clients with better-known brands to borrow their credibility.

There’s so much to take in here that I will be going over this video a few more times. Here is the original video for those of you who want to get the full impact of Tim Ash’s wise counsel.

Trigger Happy

Relax, this is not going to be a blog post about gun control. Here at EyeView, a trigger is the name we have for the part of a webpage that lets you know there is a video to be watched. When you click on the trigger the video starts playing. The trigger can be a static graphic or it can be animated. It can just be a picture or it can have text. If it has text there is an unlimited number of variations to the text that you might try.

Once we have proven for a customer (using A/B testing) that the very fact of introducing a video to a site increases conversion, we like to make sure that as many people as possible elect to watch that video. Here we will look at a number of different triggers that we are currently experimenting with. The intention is not to present definitive evidence of which triggers are more effective at driving views, but to look at the different options. Of course even if you think you know which of two triggers would be more effective, the only way to be certain is to test them against each other simultaneously with real site visitors.

Leaving the comparison testing aside for a moment, let's just take a look at some really interesting triggers that the team here have been working on. Over the next few weeks we'll be testing these "in the field" and I'll be able to report back to you which ones were most effective and for which sites.

Try this one for starters:

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The trigger sits on the page like any other element, but then every few seconds it rattles commanding your attention and giving you the call to action you need to click and start watching the video. Notice also that this trigger shows you exactly how long the video is going to last. Is this more or less likely to encourage someone to watch?

Next up is a different kind of trigger. This one has been designed to reflect the messaging of the site and to encourage visitors who need more information to watch the video that will help them decide to download.

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This next trigger is a cheeky introduction to the video that uses some of the elements of the video to encourage people to watch. The trigger uses the same kind of animation as the video itself and maintains the tone of the surrounding site. With all those arrows pointing to the play button, it couldn't be clearer.

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Finally for this post I am going to showcase a simple trigger. This one is elegant and minimalist with a little extra encouragement for you when you roll the cursor over it. Go on, give it a try.

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That's just a selection of the things we are working on here. Depending on the response I get to this post I may put up some more for you to look at another time. Let me know in the comments which ones you prefer and why you think they'd be more effective.

The 10 Types Of People Visiting Your Site

One of my favorite math-nerd jokes goes like this: There are 10 kinds of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t.

I’m not sure the divisions between customer types are so clearly delineated, but I thought I would try to identify some of the groups.

Some of your visitors are Readers. Readers love to read. They read everything. Readers read your Homepage and your About Us page. They go through each of your tabs seeing how much stuff you have to read and then they read some of it. If you have more documentation to read, they may even be prepared to give you their email just so they can get something more to read. Readers like certain kinds of products. Books, for example. Back in the day when Amazon was a struggling bookseller, they had one key advantage over bricks and mortar retailers that wasn’t just about inventory. Amazon was a place where you could go to read all about a product that was made for specifically for Readers. Awesome.

If your target audience is Readers, you had better make sure you have something good for them to read when they get to your site.

Then there are Clickers. Clickers like to click things. Remember when you went to the Science Museum for your 4^th grade outing? The Clickers were the ones who ran from exhibit to exhibit pulling levers and flipping switches. If there’s a button, they’ll push it. Then they’ll push it again. They’ll click and click until there’s nothing left to click.

If you want to sell something to Clickers, it’s best to make them reach it by clicking, probably more than once.

In pedagogical circles, they call Readers and Clickers “active learners”. Teachers are trained to help students become active learners so they can go out into the world and discover things for themselves.

The corollary is, of course, “passive learners”.

Passive learners are Watchers and Listeners. Watchers and Listeners watch and listen for as long as there is something engrossing enough to keep them. They’re in no hurry to move on as long as they are engaged. But, make no mistake about passive learners, they’re still great learners. Passive learners allow themselves the time to get the information they need to make good decisions. If you deliver a compelling argument to a passive learner he may just stick around long enough to be persuaded.

The reality is that none of us are solely one thing or the other. We all have periods when we prefer to be active learners and other times when we need to watch and listen. Getting the balance right to convert your visitors means being open to testing different options and being smart enough not to rely on a single medium to get the job done.