You’ve Got Less Than 5 Seconds. Go!
Where am I?
What can I do, get or buy here?
Why should I participate?
According to the folks over at Marketing Experiments, and I believe them, these are the 3 most important questions your website’s landing page(s) must answer. And they must answer them quickly if you want your viewers to engage.
You may not realize this but when someone lands on your site they really want their search to be over. They want you to have the solution to their problem or satisfy whatever desire they have for a product, service or information. Most people don’t want to spend anymore time than absolutely necessary in order to get what they’re looking for.
People don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today I’m going to search for 3 hours and compare all of the details to find the best online parenting class.” No, more than likely they say, “Man, I’ve got a court date coming up and I really need to take that parenting class. I better do a quick search and find what’s out there.”
Guess which site most likely ends up getting their online business. Of course, it’s going to have to be a site on the first page of the search results, but that’s for another post. Other than that, it’s going to be the one that can answer the above questions the fastest and with the most satisfaction to the reader.
Where am I? – Obviously, this question is answered by the site title and URL. (i.e. Breakthrough Parenting – www.BreakthroughParentingOnline.com) But there are other factors at work in the mind of the reader that are helping them to formulate their answer to this question. One of them is the overall appearance of your site. Is this a legitimate company? Is the site professionally designed or does it look “homemade”?
I see more online businesses fail at this than anything else, except for copy, possibly.
If you’re using WordPress there’s no excuse not to have a professional looking site. With the huge selection of quality, premium WordPress themes available today you can turn a cheesy, boring WordPress blog into a slick, professional site in a matter of hours (or less). Yes, it costs a little money (usually $79 or less) but if your site isn’t worth at least that much to you then guess what it’s going to show. Most people are hesitant to do business with companies who don’t care enough, or have enough savvy, to present themselves well.
Even if you’re building simple “name squeeze” or sales letter pages there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way. If you’re doing it the wrong way I guarantee you it’s costing you sales.
Of course this is subjective but there are some basic design guidelines and standards that can and should be followed in order to give your site a professional, trustworthy appearance. You can find them here – C.R.A.P. The Four Principles of Sound Design
What can I do, get or buy here? – This one can be a little tougher to answer. It requires a good understanding of what your audience is looking for reflected in a concise statement of your company’s most important benefit(s). This can be accomplished by using a well crafted tag line that clearly communicates your USP (unique selling proposition)
A common mistake I see on many web sites is that company’s will put some clever slogan in the banner of their site that means absolutely nothing to the average reader. They loose out on a great opportunity to really capture the readers attention and instead they just create confusion. In case you’re wondering. Confusion doesn’t sell. It causes flight. Not good.
Here’s a great resource for writing good tag-lines – http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/fast-company-staff/fast-company-blog/how-write-catchy-slogan
Why should I participate? – This is perhaps the most difficult question to answer in the mind of the reader. What makes you different from your competition? Why should I trust you with my information? Why is your free report worth my time? In short what’s in it for me? How is my participation in your web site, at whatever level, going to make my life better, easier, take away my pain, help me to avoid pain, bring me pleasure, save me money, save me time, etc, etc…?
Why should I do it now? Why can’t it wait until later? What do I stand to loose if I don’t act now? What do I gain by acting quickly?
The list of questions and objections could go on and on. But hopefully you get the point. The truth is you won’t really know the “right” answer until you try some test questions to discover what’s really resonating with your audience. This can be done by using polls and/or surveys and by using multi-variant split testing on your landing pages.
Give your readers what they want, eliminate obstacles and create urgency and your conversions will sky-rocket.
Sincerely, Barry O.
p.s. The Parenting site example used in this post, Breakthrough Parenting Online, is one of our clients. We’ve been working with them to launch their online parenting classes and community site. I welcome your feedback as it relates to this post. What did we get right? What did we get wrong? Please comment below.
Great post – thanks for the excellent resources! I so struggle with tag lines.
I have three comments related to the example site.
(1) What you got right? The URL contains the keyword of what the site is about.
(2) What you did wrong? The title does not contain keywords or even tell what the site is about. In doing a quick check, I noted that people are searching for “free parenting classes”, “parenting classes”, and “online parenting classes.”
So a good example title would be something like “Breakthrough online parenting classes.” This would set apart from competitor parenting sites as being something new, innovative, exciting, etc…
(3) The site looks nice with all the graphics and so forth, but it provides no information up front to entice visitors to dig further into the site itself and see if there is anything of interest or use. The number one thing people are looking for online is useful information.
Just my three cents worth. Thanks for the opportunity to have input.
1. Thanks for your feedback.
2. Great catch on the Home Page title tag! I appreciate that.
Unfortunately, we are using Vtribes for this site. Not my favorite choice…
I had to tweak the template a little to rewrite the Title tags. You’ll notice that all of the other pages use the Page Title for the Title tags. Similar to WordPress but I’m missing the flexibility of All-in-One SEO plug-in.
3. You don’t think it provides any information upfront? I agree the intro text is brief. Perhaps it’s not compelling enough.?. We originally had a longer sales-letter type of Home Page but decided to test this version for a while. Memberships are actually up by quite a bit.
What kind of content do you think would be helpful for the Home Page?
Thanks, Barry O.
I think a little bit more information about what you get with free membership, some bullets, and a call to action… “before the owner wakes up and start charging for it”?
Terry,
Interesting. Thanks for your feedback.
The free membership is actually always free. The only way a member gets charged is if they want to access Premium Membership content. At that point they choose to go through the upgrade process and submit their payment info. Perhaps we should state that clearly on the sign-up page.
In early June we did a “soft launch” to our list, which we built from an announcement blog and free eBook giveaway. Plus, the author had a substantial list she had built over the years of teaching this course live. During that launch we did not offer a free membership. We just offered the first month at $4.95. One thing that we discovered was that most people felt like we asked for a financial commitment too soon.
They requested a free membership option that would allow them to participate in the community and access some of the parenting class before making a financial commitment.
The advantage is that it’s allowed us to grow our membership and start to build critical mass. Now the challenge is to convert as many of those free memberships as possible to premium memberships.
Thanks again for your feedback.
Barry O.
Thanks for a useful overview Barry
Timely for me as I’m thinking about a site re-organisation!
A quick tip on title tags – we’ve found it really makes a difference to have your keywords right at the start of your title. So something like “Free parenting classes online at Breakthrough Parenting” perhaps?
Cheers, Jon
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