A landing page that’s relevant to your visitor almost guarantees that it will convert at a higher rate than a non-relevant landing page.
What makes a landing page relevant?
You guessed it right— personalization is the key.
Personalized landing pages are the future. It seems pretty obvious though, but not many are using them.
Names, emails, the company they work for, their job roles are all triggers and pieces of information that you can use to personalize landing pages.
For example, your visitors if they have purchased something from you or signed up for one list, they need not see that same offer or same landing page again. The information that they have used to sign up for one list can be used to prefill additional landing pages and also have additional form fields like company name or job title.
This at its core is personalization at its very basic.
Amazon, for example, takes it a step ahead with landing pages catering to each individual. Based on the user’s browsing history user A sees a very different Amazon homepage than user B.
Amazon personalizes the homepage based on buying choices and browsing history instead of displaying a range of products that would not make much sense to you.
In this post, I am going to explain how you can personalize landing pages with ease for more conversions.
Will people find data collection to be intrusive?
Case studies tell a different story.
By personalizing their service waiters fetched 23% more in tips. All they did was offer mints before and after the service without being asked.
Another report from Monetate discovered that consumers, by and large, don’t mind that websites track their activity, and actually prefer that personalization guides their decision-making.
Here are examples to prove my point.
Geo targeted landing pages can increase conversions
Geo targeting is when your landing page is designed to actively change in response to the location from which the visitor originates.
You might have seen the currency on an eCommerce site changing based on where you are visiting the site from.
Geo targeting is becoming more and more important since mobile is becoming more mainstream. A report suggests that mobile devices surpassed PC use in search for local businesses and services. Over 52% of searches for local information happen on mobile devices.
70% of consumers have no problem sharing location information provided they are compensated in the form of coupons or rewards according to this report.
As such, geo targeted landing pages can put your marketing on steroids.
Here’s an interesting example of the same from a company called Hertz. Hertz’s landing page for travel booking changes based on the visitor’s country of origin.
This is for Singapore users. Notice how the image reflects people from Singapore and specific offers with the word Singapore in context below.
The one below is for users from Chile. The landing page is entirely different.
You can see the change in not only the use of the word Singapore but the language as well.
The offers on this landing page are specific to residents of Chile.
Making the landing page resonate with the user’s location can do wonders for your marketing. It’s not only more personal but also makes more sense to the visitor.
In yet another example, Groupon, the popular couponing website has specific offers for people belonging to different regions.
Spare no doubt, this is a landing page indeed for opt-ins.
Additionally, you can always employ some measure of social proof. In the above example the people of Ottawa are targeted. This could be made better by adding a sentence for social proof that says that x number of people from Ottawa signed up for such and such offer.
This could add more opt-ins to the landing page form.
How user segmentation can improve conversions?
Customer segmentation or user segmentation in simple words is the science of segregating your customers into different groups based on some common characteristics.
These characteristics can be a common age group, common demographics, similar job titles etc.
It’s based on the belief that customers sharing common characteristics may also have similar interests and needs which can be targeted with ease.
In the example below, I am going to show how a company, DoggyLoot was able to get more conversions by personalizing landing pages and using the info available for email campaigns.
They started by segmenting new subscribers.
Segmenting new subscribers with questions
The segmentation happens during the sign-up process (signing up is mandatory to use the site). The first question is “How big is your dog?” and the last question is the email address. This kind of segmentation helps the team send emails relevant to the kind of dog the user has.
The information gathering carried on even after the person signed up. They asked subscribers for more info once they had signed up. In one way the process is akin to Amazon’s personalized landing pages.
On another note, Amazon uses user’s behavioral data to customize landing pages and then send relevant email promotions.
Instead, here the DoggyLoot team asked for info directly from their users.
They didn’t stop with that.
Segmenting current subscribers
In order to coax existing users/customers to give over more data on their dogs, which they had a very large pool of, they had to make some changes into the profiles of users.
Making changes to the subscriber landing page
The subscriber profile page or landing page now added a “My dog’s” page where users could enter information like name of the dog, breed of the dog, size, gender and other relevant info.
By collecting the information they were able to send relevant emails to users. Just to cite an example, dogs may be small (under 20 pounds, medium (between 20 to 40 pounds) and large (above 40 pounds).
Promotional emails sent to large dog owners (collected by personalizing subscriber landing pages) had 410% higher click through rate than other emails.
Another piece of data that was collected was the dog’s birthday. Wishing the owner’s on the dog’s birthdays resulted in a CTR over 750%.
By asking for their pet’s birthday and wishing the owners on the day they were able to take conversions to 70% than what was previously recorded.
In other case study, Secret Escapes used personalization for more conversions.
Personalization experiment for Logged-In Users
In an experiment similar to that conducted by Doggyloot, Secret escapes, a tour and travels site, personalized the profile pages of users. In other words, the landing page where logged in users landed.
However in this case, rather than asking or incentivizing users to complete profiles, the team used search data to personalize the pages.
Earlier on, the vacation listings consisted of a random set of listings relevant to say a discount or popularity pertaining to the general season.
Now they saw listings that were personalized and catered to what they had searched earlier.
According to the product manager of Secret Escapes, Tom Evans , “Personalisation is one of the things I really expect to blow up in 2015,” he continued. “With so much data lying around about our customers, and their behaviour, we now have a great opportunity to optimise their experience by providing more relevant sales and information.”
People who previously searched for and landed to the site from ad advert for New York related listings saw New York listings when logged in.
Here are the results they got from that little experiment.
- Clicks to sale from listing page: +24.4%
- Clicks to purchase page: +30.4%
- Completed purchases: +210%
How to drive traffic to user specific landing pages with PPC ads
Designing user specific landing pages can be a mountain of trouble. Especially when you are targeting a lot of different keywords.
However, if you take the trouble you could very well optimize the ads for best performance and drive relevant leads all day long.
Here’s a case study that goes into the details of the same.
Jennifer Brady, Director of Marketing at UMassOnline a student recruitment site used customized landing pages to drive the cost of acquisition for leads from over $300 to $26 a pop.
According to her, “When we first started to implement, we had a very generic landing page, “It had basic copy about who we are, what we do, and how many degrees we offered. It was not specific to a program or a discipline.”
Her team built landing pages in batches of 10, tested them out and retained 50 pages
Next they launched multiple program specific landing pages and as a result of that started witnessing lower costs of acquisition for leads.
The next step in the process was refining the pages for better results.
This was done by selecting an individual landing page to perform tests. Based on the learnings they were able to extend the gains to other pages from the experiments.
These tests went for about 6 months.
“We found that our original messaging was actually pulling very well and our image that we were using was causing a great response also,” Brady says.
Accordingly, many other pages were updated to adhere to results obtained from the test study and personalized landing pages did the trick for them.
Overall, the results looked something like this.
Lead volume per month increased 88.4%, when comparing March 2008 to July 2009, after they completed landing page design and testing.
- Cost-per-lead stood came down to $26 from $300.
- Custom landing pages leads cost stood $22.75
- Generic page’s leads cost stood at $40.37
- Increased conversions 107% — from 9.52% to 19.7%.
You were introduced to Tom Evans earlier. He ran yet another experiment with PPC and landing pages.
In this experiment the ad copy resonated with the landing page copy.
This is symmetric messaging or in simple words, keeping the scent.
Secret Escapes “spa” PPC ad in Google.
The ads that Tom ran were for spa related keywords on Adwords. These keywords were tested against two different set of personalized landing pages.
Variation one saw the use of the keyword spa.
In variation two, the landing page copy was kept similar to the ad copy and thus carried over the scent.
What were the results of the experiment?
Secret Escapes saw a 32% increase in conversions in new user signups from visitors who received the symmetrical messaging in variation 2, with the landing page and ad copy maintaining the same scent.
This is how you increase conversions, by making little changes and testing and scaling what works.
Concluding thoughts!
Now that you have read the post, you can appreciate how powerful personalized landing pages can be.
Personalized landing pages are nothing but the technique of using known information about a visitor and the leveraging it to turn a higher profit.
This could be something as simple as knowing and leveraging where the visitor came from.
Even Obama did that during his re-election campaign. Notice, how the landing page targets and speaks to visitors who came from Reddit. The big bold headline really stands out.
With the advent of big data and more and more techniques available to us, personalized content and landing pages are becoming more and more popular.
Setting that aside, older marketing techniques including email marketing are losing their edge.
It’s necessary to bring something new to the forefront to keep people interested.
What’s more, people don’t mind being tracked if it enables marketers to send them more relevant offerings.
According to Dr. Scott Brave (CTO at Baynote), personalization is to “provide customers with interactive experiences tailored to optimally satisfy their individual needs.” Needs, in this discussion, are critical. He says that, “needs are the motivating factor behind everything we do. They drive all of our behaviors.” Additionally, according to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, esteem is one of the top needs that drive behavior.
You are on the right track when you decided to target people with personalized landing pages.
Do let me know what you think in the comments below.