By Sally Lowery, Director of Revenue Marketing, Ion Interactive
Have you ever noticed that when you start talking landing page testing with marketers, eyes glaze over?
If you dig a little deeper, you quickly realize why. Everyone but the marketer often controls landing page testing. It’s IT dependent, arduous and time-consuming, and it’s a challenge to understand the results. But if you can overcome these barriers, what you get is a critical strategy for driving increased marketing performance and, ultimately, revenue.
By Sally Lowery, Director of Revenue Marketing, Ion Interactive
Have you ever noticed that when you start talking landing page testing with marketers, eyes glaze over?
If you dig a little deeper, you quickly realize why. Everyone but the marketer often controls landing page testing. It’s IT dependent, arduous and time-consuming, and it’s a challenge to understand the results. But if you can overcome these barriers, what you get is a critical strategy for driving increased marketing performance and, ultimately, revenue.
So, how does a marketer faced with these challenges use landing page testing as part of their marketing strategy? Below are six ways to avoid potential headaches and begin driving optimized performance today:
1. Use landing pages. If you send visitors straight to your web site instead of to dedicated landing pages, stop now. It’s important to have a focused conversion path to generate more leads. You can’t improve relevancy, message consistency and engagement by sending everyone to the same place.
2. Reduce IT dependency. If there’s a will, there is a way: Create a marketing ecosystem that relies less upon the IT department to drive program performance. Whether it’s using marketing solutions or calling for committed resources to drive marketing initiatives forward, your marketing team — and not the IT guys — should control marketing performance.
3. Create a testing strategy. Without a strategy, you can’t understand the end game. If you want to drive increased conversions, deeper engagement, or more revenue, it’s critical to think through how an effective landing page optimization strategy will influence those results. Benchmark current performance, and plan for a testing strategy that will positively influence those numbers.
4. Don’t overthink it. Landing page optimization doesn’t have to be hard. Start with the lowest-hanging fruit. Perhaps it’s identifying how varying calls to action may perform, or testing short forms versus long forms. You will be surprised at the impact a small change can have on performance.
5. Know your analytics. It’s critical to understand your key performance indicators today and how testing may influence them tomorrow. Whether it’s reduction in CPL, or increased conversions or more sales, having a pulse on performance is a key to understanding whether or not a test is working in your favor.
6. Don’t be afraid to fail. Not everything is going to work. In fact, many tests don’t work out the way you anticipated. The knowledge you glean from those failed tests are significant informers of future tests as well as of your visitor behavior.
Landing page optimization is important. Don’t forget to make it a prominent part of your performance marketing strategy.
Sally Lowery leads Ion’s marketing team and is focused on developing interactive marketing programs for both customer acquisition and retention. With a keen knowledge of search engine marketing, digital advertising, and demand generation, Sally brings over 14 years of professional marketing experience, including more than eight years in the leading-edge marketing technology space.
