Optimising Landing Page Conversion

Linda -

I will preface my response to say I am assuming you are not talking about a retail product transaction; rather these are campaigns to support a considered purchase. Also I am taking an 'direct marketers' view. Therefore there are elements to consider below but they could be counter to objectives or the intuition of other stake holders in your organization.

1. Manage the Form Fields in Your Registration Flow
You can think of form fields in two dimensions. The first is the perceived price the user must pay to receive an offer. An offer can be an asset (piece of content like a whitepaper, case study etc) or a promise (think price quote, match to right product/vendor or free consultation). The perceived value of that offer will dictate fields/questions a user is willing to complete. Determining what is a fair trade is not easy and should not be made in a vacuum. I recommend searching the Internet for comparable offers and forms. This will give you an idea of the relative market value for the users information.

The second dimension to consider relates to your campaign and sales objectives. Before implementing questions on your registration form, consider how your campaign relates to the stages in the sales process. If the campaign is targeting top of the funnel "marketing qualified prospects" you should optimize the form for conversion, potentially limiting the number of required fields on the form. Thus maximizing initial acquisition opportunities and building your database so you can re-market to users at a later date. If the campaign is targeting mid to bottom of the funnel "sales qualified leads", you may sacrifice form conversion for back-end sales conversion. This is a tricky perspective that requires marketers to understand impact of their campaigns on sales pipeline conversion metrics. Caveat emptor, more qualifying questions and opt-ins do not necessarily translate into better conversion for sales. Examine the data and talk to sales to better understand what user information is truly required to qualify buyers in a purchase process.

2. Registration Page Structure Should Facilitate, Not Impede, User Tracking and Form Completion
It’s an obvious statement and there are a lot of studies on user tracking. What do you consider is the path of least resistance across a web page? My belief is users innately track from top left to bottom right of a web page. There is another camp that believes users track straight down North to South. Regardless of your philosophy, registration page structure should do everything to facilitate form completion.

If you believe the top left to bottom right philosophy then I think your registration page structure follows some simple rules.
a. Your brand mark should appear first at the top left. This is the strongest connection to the ad placement for the user.
b. A prominent 'eyebrow' statement should connect the user to the original ad message and it carries the user across the top of the page from left to right (see #3). This is the bridge to the form element.
c. Form is justified to the right of the page
d. Above the form there should be a strong 'call to action' pulling the user down from the eyebrow and into the form
e. Form button should appear above the fold and in the bottom right quadrant of the user’s browser window
f. Left hand copy should briefly describe the offer/product and include quick, easy to consume, bulleted benefits. Dont forget to include multiple calls to action as well.
g. Limit, eliminate or hide below the fold any exit links from the page (this is a hard core online direct marketing tactic)

Here are two online direct marketing examples from the education vertical:
http://aptm.phoenix.edu/
http://degrees.findtherightschool.com/pt2/prequal.jsp

3. Connect Copy from Your Ad Collateral to the Landing Page
Registration pages should make the user experience feel seamless and appropriate. Each advertising campaign, regardless of the original source (banner, email etc) should connect with the copy on the landing page. Ideally you can execute on this by leveraging dynamic page content. However it may mean you want to create multiple versions of your landing page for each ad campaign or traffic source. The connections between ad and landing page can be as simple as incorporating a tag line or statement from the ad and carry it through to the "eyebrow" of the registration page. The eyebrow is effectively the message in the header of the web page that bridges the user and brings them to the form.

4. Build Forms with Buttons above the Fold, even if it means Breaking Your Form into Multiple Steps.
This is a really simple rule that people overlook. Intuitively you might think multiple steps kill conversion but I've seen a lot of data that supports conversion is optimized when forms are built with buttons appearing above the fold in a user’s browser. Depending on the number of form question fields (see bullet #1); you should consider breaking your process into multiple steps. If you do create a multi-step experience you must set user expectations with copy and visuals to let them know what the registration process entails (i.e. step 1 of 5 etc). The education industry examples above are also examples of multi-step forms.

5. Strong Calls to Action
This is just a standard direct marketing practice and I don’t believe it requires much explanation. A CTA should appear above the form and 2-3 times in the body copy. These are easy to test and I recommend do so on a regular basis.

These are 5 basic rules to help optimize conversion of your registration page. I hope they have helped. Please let me know if you have any clarification questions.

Good Luck - Howie