What I Learned from the Inbound AMA with Oli Gardner
Last week, Oli Gardner, co-founder and creative director of Unbounce, did an AMA on Inbound.org. Unbounce is everyone’s favorite DIY Landing Page Platform for marketers and advertisers and lets you quickly A/B test your pages without knowing how to code. He did quite a lengthy AMA so we distilled Oli’s responses into the five most ubiquitous topics. As with all my summaries, the words are mostly their own with some of mine thrown in for clarity/readability.
1. On Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization
Oli wrote quite a lot on this topic (as you can imagine). With more companies beginning (albeit slowly) to drive traffic towards dedicated landing pages instead of homepages, CRO is even more important. Oli maintains that even with new features (dynamic pages and whatnot), the marketer should remember the mantra: “one page, one purpose.” The purpose should be to execute on the promise of a campaign, not to make it richer or more interactive just for its own sake.
Here are the major takeaways on Landing Page CRO:
It Depends on Your Inbound Channel
When testing the effectiveness of your landing page, it depends on the context of the inbound channel. If you are driving someone from a blog post or email, start the conversation in the email or post but continue the conversation on the landing page. Oli calls this "Contextual Design" or "Conversion Momentum." For other situations like PPC ads, it's critical to match the copy from the ad exactly to the headline of your landing page. You should design respectful experiences based on matching the source and destination, which he calls "Conversion Coupling.” Test both approaches to see what works best.
Some recommended resources:
Suggestion #3 in this post gives a great example of how using a conversational approach lifted conversions by 29%.
On design vs. purpose
Unbounce’s Most Surprising CRO Win was a Qualaroo Survey on their Templates Page
The most surprisingly CRO win came during a test Unbounce ran on their templates page. Oli asked a few questions with Qualaroo and discovered three questions consistently being raised:
How much are the templates?
Where can I download them?
Can I use them with Wordpress?
Since none of these questions were relevant (the landing pages are used WITHIN Unbounce), they introduced a demonstration of “Context of Use,” which they added to the top of the page. Unbounce hypothesized that visitors who are better informed about how the templates can be used will lead to more and better-qualified signups.
The result was a 43% lift in new trial starts! In addition, people who touch that page convert better than those who don't. Average site conversion rate is 1.75%, and when the templates page is viewed it goes up to 2.3%.
Things to Avoid When Testing Landing Pages
Oli offers that improper (or no) documentation can lead to false positives and correlation/causation fallacies. For example, Unbounce ran a test on their pricing page that lifted paid trial start conversions, but because it was a longer page, it pushed the free signup option further down the page. This decimated their free signup numbers (who upgrade at a later date). Because of inadequate documentation, it took them three weeks to figure out what had changed.
In addition, there is some danger to “test for the hell of it.” Before starting a test you need to at least have some understanding of how a feature impacts your (potential) customers. Changing something that people value is disrespectful to your users. If you can determine pain points through research and usability testing you'll be better positioned to start in the right place. Recently, Oli ran a test where he changed the CTA on the Unbounce.com homepage to "See plans and pricing.” The click-through rate on the button went up 80%. But the full funnel goal (new trial starts) went down 19%. In this situation, it was important to look beyond CRO alone.
2. On Increasing Social Selling
Oli’s favorite methodology in social sharing is to offer two methods to get an eBook or marketing asset: “pay” with your email address or tweet it out. This increases shares because it's a requirement if you don't want to give up your email. It's also a great way to maintain momentum on a landing page that you are no longer actively promoting through a campaign.
There is some friction that users may be reluctant to tweet if they don’t know the quality of the asset they’re sharing. To lift conversions on landing pages for eBooks, try adding a preview (such as a chapter or a slide deck) to alleviate that friction. This will result in more tweets and email captures. Oli isn’t concerned that Google or comparable authorities will penalize this type of social sharing because you’re delivering something of value and on-topic. Here’s another example of the popular social sharing methodology at work.
Jonathan Crowe, the person who had originally asked Oli the question, suggested Hubspot’s take on this popular strategy:
Download the File
Email to a Friend
Pay with a Tweet to Get a Bonu
3. On How He Built His Twitter Following
Oli described his process for systemically building his Twitter following:
Use a site like Twellow or FollowerWonk to find your target follower. For Oli, it was marketers whose bios contained keywords relevant to their audience (lead gen, conversion, optimization, a/b testing etc.).
Manually follow a few hundred per day. This produces ~30% return in people following you back.
Share about 10 pieces of excellent content per day (including 0-1 of your own).
Retweet 5-10 pieces of content from the new people you followed.
Use tools to weed out inactive accounts and unfollow them. Oli forgets what he used but Tweepi and JustUnfollow can help. He also manually purged his account every few days.
Oli warns that for a time, this will give you a higher following than followers count, which looks bad, but a necessary evil to accelerate the process. The “follow-so-they-follow-back” approach isn't ideal but four years ago, it was an effective way to get your follower count up. Today, Oli would prefer to be more organic, even though it can be terribly slow.
4. On Marketing Content
Oli approaches marketing content in a deliberate manner. According to Oli, content reuse gets you the most value.
His procedure:
Write a big piece of content like an eBook and put up a lead-gen landing page
Write a blog post introducing it and link it to the landing page
Share the post and landing page on social
Email the landing page to leads and customers
Create a Slideshare deck with highlights from the eBook
Run a webinar based on the concept of the eBook
Write a guest post on the topic and link to the eBook landing page
If you’re struggling for a marketing asset idea, Oli suggests contacting a group of influencers in your target subject and ask them for a single tip. Compile their suggestions into a post/eBook. This also encourages your influencers to share your asset to their network.
5. Here are all the resources referenced by Oli throughout the AMA:
Guides and Best Practices
Landing pages and conversion
Landing pages for content marketing
Design vs. Function on landing pages
Social sharing
Email marketing
Copywriting
Copyblogger
Tools and Vendors (other than Unbounce)
Qualaroo
KISSmetrics
Google Analytics
FollowerWonk
GoToWebinar
Zapier
Twellow
Slideshare
Customer.io
We want to make sure Inbound.org is getting the credit for this. We’re big fans. Find Oli here and on Twitter.
