Landing Page Tips | Finch Sells

1 Conversion Saving Tip For Older Demographics

Sep 08 2011

I don’t want to stereotype, but it goes without saying that some demographics are more able users of the Internet than others. If you’ve ever witnessed your parents attempting to navigate The Facebooks for the first time, you’ll be quite aware that too many options can turn in to Next Step Paralysis. The ability to be completely and utterly unpredictable.

The best way to remedy this confusion is to build every landing page with the attitude that simple is best.

It’s important to build landing pages for the lowest common denominator. And by that, I mean sacrificing your creative urges and making your sales pitch as sweepingly digestible as can be.

Here in the UK, The Guardian has a reading age of 14. The Sun is lower at 8. There are many tools where you can measure the reading age of your copy, with my favourite being the readability test at Juicy Studio. If your reading age is too high, you’ll be losing too many conversions on mindblown casual surfers.

Reading age is one variable, but where older demographics are concerned, the actual structure of your landing page is even more important.

Have you ever stood over the shoulder of a user in your target demographic and watched as they stumbled across your landing page? Try it, you’ll probably be surprised by the results.

This isn’t always convenient, and I’m not suggesting you load up on binoculars and go all fucking Rear Window on your suburban neighbour folk. Thankfully there are services out there that specialise in tracking live footage of users on your site.

Behold:

We all know the importance of split testing, but witnessing the actual screen footage of users on your site is another leap in to the realm of truly getting your target market. These sites allow you to track the mouse, view hotspots of clicks and really drill down for usability data.

I managed to uncover a common flaw in my own landing pages, particularly with older demographics, where there were simply too many options on the page.

Are you building landing pages using the traditional bold Call-to-Action, with separate bullet points calling out various other incentives? I used to do this all the time. I’d have about five different anchor links, each trying to capture different sectors of the market. In the end, it was just too confusing.

Like your great grandmother staring blankly at The Facebooks, too many options is a bad thing. You will often enjoy much more success by having one simple Call-to-Action clearly defined, with a progressive sales funnel that leads the user on to the next step.

Or maybe you won’t.

If you’ve ever sat tearing your hair out at where all your ad clicks are disappearing to, the tools above should uncover some handy clues. If you’re still confused, here are those half price binoculars. Go hide in a hedge and collect some data.

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Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
Make sure you check out the newly redesigned Finch Blogs, which is now a mesmerizing portal of lifestyle design and 3am brainfarts for the online professional.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

Looking To Hire The World’s Worst Graphic Designer

Sep 01 2011

Last week, I received an envelope littered in ‘human handwriting’ font that said this in the footer:

“Dear Mr. Postman, please pay special attention that this letter reaches Mr. Osborn quickly and safely. The contents inside are extremely important!”

Being the cynic that I am, I tossed the envelope aside and tipped my head at the stellar practices of one of my fellow kind. Maybe I know the plotting bastard that sent it. If I did, I’d buy him a drink.

It’s no secret that dumbed down adverts are incredibly popular in the affiliate space.

How many times have you seen the classic 300×250 Before and After banner for a weight loss product? It’s typically etched in less than flattering handwriting boasting one explosive secret that can turn your life on it’s head.

These aesthetically ugly weight loss ads are designed to look like they’ve been slapped together by some proud shedder of the fat, who simply couldn’t keep his mouth shut about the success.

Mainstream markets buy in to the ploy because it seems too amateur to be thrown around by a giant corporation. They’d come up with something much more professional looking, something much more similar to the glossy productions we see on television or in high class magazines.

It’s this contrast that allows an affiliate to break the pattern of banner blindness. By creating ads that are ugly and eye-catching in all the wrong ways, we may lose points in the grandiose stakes, but we don’t lose the most important acquisition of all – the attention of those eyeballs.

Customers instinctively let their guards down when they think they’re mingling with one of their own. They become much more susceptible to the final push towards a sale if they feel like they’re being let in on a secret, rather than pushed towards the crowd. It’s a fine ego act to balance.

Most dating affiliates know that amateur photos regularly outperform those of models in conventional catalogue poses. I could grab my own disheveled face, slap it on a dating ad, and probably enjoy much more success than a traditionally handsome model – simply because mainstream markets are so used to being shown the traditional. They’re blind to it.

I believe this act of ‘avoiding the traditional’ is translatable to all of your online projects.

Does anybody really believe in perfect anymore? Some of my best performing affiliate campaigns are those where I have instantly shot down expectations. Once you’ve burst the bubble, you can re-educate your target market, re-align their expectations and then hit them with a sales pitch that is all the more convincing for your honesty.

Ugly advertising compliments this strategy because it further disconnects the salesman from his traditional footprint.

If you work with an in-house designer, the temptation is always to run with the creatives that look suitably beyond your own Photoshop hackjob capabilities.

Something I always tell any designer who works for me is that I don’t care for visual perfection or art school theory, I only want creatives that reach out of the page and slap the customer in the face. The best way to achieve this is to either be professionally very very awesome… or to use MS Paint.

Anything that falls in to the middle ground is boring, and unlikely to attract the eyeballs that a direct response marketer needs.

Recommended This Week

Lots of Ads is the latest service to offer spying capabilities over Facebook’s most profitable ads. The great appeal for me is the ability to spy on International markets including France, Spain, Argentina, Brazil and many more. Save time on translations and tap in to the most lucrative markets on Facebook. Definitely a worthy addition to your toolkit. First 20 customers only who use code FINCH11 will receive 10% off their lifetime subscription. Enjoy!
Make sure you check out the newly redesigned Finch Blogs, which is now a mesmerizing portal of lifestyle design and 3am brainfarts for the online professional.
If you’re a new reader, please add me to your RSS. Also follow me on Twitter Love you long time. Thanks for reading.

1 Deadly Trick That Converts (Even On Affiliates)

Jun 22 2011

When I chose my apartment in Bangkok, I unwittingly engaged in a sales process that has been tried and tested through the annals of time to produce enormous results.

Estate agents are masters of the art and will spare no blushes in the execution, even if you’re smart enough to know exactly what’s going on around you.

Here’s the situation. It’s 9am in the morning and the estate agent has arrived at your hotel. She tells you she has a few properties to view, and you eagerly jump in the back of her car to get started.

The first property is an absolute dump. Situated in the middle of no man’s land, no aircon, no transport connections and for the estate agent, no hope of a conversion. Of course, I play along nicely and express that it’d make a great home…for the right Thai family. Did she really think she could get me to a sign a contract for the exact property I wasn’t looking for? No, she didn’t, but she knew it would butter me up for what was to follow.

I vividly remember cruising from property to property, the specifications marginally improving to match my needs with each visit. By the end of the day, my girlfriend and I were exhausted and ready to retreat to our hotel room to mull over the options.

“But wait! There’s one more place I’d like you to see… I think it might suit what you’re looking for.”

Lo and behold, she hits us with the single best matching property of the day so far, and we’re both convinced that it’s right for our needs. The perfect size, all the aircon we could guzzle, fantastic sweeping views of Bangkok and a snooker table. A motherfucking snooker table. How did she know I’d fall in love at first sight with my own snooker table?

Maybe it had something to do with the email I’d sent a week ago casually stating what I’d really love in a dream apartment.

This leaves you to ask the question: Was she intentionally wasting my time with a bunch of crappy or “good, but just not quite there” properties? Or was it a fantastically executed tour-de-force of how to setup and nail a conversion?

No prizes for the right answer. Estate agents deal with people like me every day, and get many more opportunities to study the human behaviour than I do to prepare for the exploitation of it. I would tip my hat to her if I had one. It’s simply one of the most effective sales techniques in the book.

Use the power of contrast to create indecision and uncertainty based on the information you already have, before unleashing the ultimate solution that goes above and beyond all that came before. As long as your subject is suitably torn up to that point, there really is little he can do to fight the tactic. Besides, he’s getting what he wanted. Why put up a fight?

Okay, so how can we apply this art of contrasting to boost our affiliate campaigns?

The one commodity an estate agent has that an affiliate marketer rarely gets to exploit is time. While I was being driven around a city I had lived in for just 3 days in the back of somebody else’s car, an affiliate marketer has little “holding rights” over the subject. We have so many options to not listen to a sales pitch (exit the page, browse another tab, get distracted by our balls) that retaining attention becomes the most important stage of the process.

If we go back in time 18 months, you will recall a sweeping craze that involved dual-selling affiliate offers on the same page. Hey, if the reader is happy to buy an acai supplement for $39.95/month, why not hit them with an additional colon cleanse kit for $19.95/month? The upsell seems artificially cheaper after the customer has already invested in a more expensive item. Another valuable asset of contrasting.

Take one look at the GoDaddy checkout process to see the bastard child of Upsell in all his gory detail. Fuck you, GoDaddy. I only wanted a domain and now I’m sitting on 4 dedicated servers, an SSL certificate and enough Adwords vouchers to run my own charity. What part of No Thanks did you not understand?!

Even if we don’t intend to sell two items, it’s possible to sacrifice one as a way of accentuating the most attractive qualities in the item we do want to sell.

How many Plentyoffish members have heard of Match.com? My guess would be pretty much all of them. You can very easily throw up a landing page on POF that attempts to “sell” some basic and uninspiring benefits of joining Match. It’s not going to create much of a stir, but it does one thing very well. It butters up the reader for a more attractive proposition.

So when you hit them further down the page with a largely unknown, new and exciting dating offer, that offers a niche angle relevant to their needs (targeting a Divorced demographic with a Divorce niche offer, for example), you leverage the power of contrast to create a much greater incentive in the reader’s eyes. It’s very subtle, but super effective when executed well.

Dating is just one vertical of many that can be exploited in this way. My favourite angle is to develop the classic long sales pitch – notorious for shilling Clickbank products – only to give away something 100% free at the end. Gaming registrations, downloads, even zip submits if you can get the traffic cheaply enough.

Conversion rates soar in to the sky, particularly if you nail a demographic that is already keyed in to how these long sales letters are typically used.

One of the most effective landing pages I ever built was a flog that promoted $3 job search leads. It was ridiculously profitable because it leveraged the expected extravagance of a flog’s claims, and then gave away something for free when the user wasn’t expecting it. I drew my own conclusions that most of the success was actually down to the contrast from what other affiliates were doing.

Whatever the reason, a little contrast can go a long way. Take a lesson from the estate agents of the world!

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