MD05: Creating a High Converting Landing Page With Alex Harris
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Today we are talking to Alex Harris from the marketingoptimization.tv podcast about a step by step process on creating a landing page that converts.
Often times we put so much effort into creating offers and products for people, putting up a landing page to gather emails or try to make sales do paid advertising or put a lot of effort into generating traffic to the page only to find out that it´s not converting because we got one little thing wrong and then spend hours of hours figuring out.
That´s why I got Alex on call today, to underline his process for analyzing his audience and creating a page that suits.
Everything is “tweakable” and everything depends, there isn’t a magic formula that will ensure you win all the time. That’s true for anything related to online marketing (and probably life to) but there are certain basic rules that will make your work so much easier.
Here’s What You Are Going to Learn:
Step 1 – Analyze and Gather Data About Your Target Audience/Client (avatar)
Step 2 – Creating the Landing Page From Top To Bottom Starting With The Navigation
Step 3 – The Best Type of Headlines For Any Landing Page in Any Industry
Step 4 – What to Do With the Sub Headline and How to Use it
Step 5 – Images Vs. Video Vs. Audio
Step 6 – Including Social Proof And Why It’s Important
Step 7 – How Long Should Your Copy Be And Getting it There
Step 8 – Colors, Call to Actions and The Lead Gathering Process
Step 9 – MONEY, MONEY, MONEY… just kidding, don’t be greedy 🙂 but yeah success is what comes from applying a proper process to this strategy.
Resources Mentioned by Alex Harris
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Revised Edition
Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Transcript
Hello amigos, welcome to another episode of Moneydiver podcast. I’m coming to you from sunny Florida, it’s an awesome day today. And today, we’re going to be talking to Alex Harris from alexdesigns.com about this step-by-step process of creating a high converting landing page that you can use to gather emails or make sales. And Alex has a lot of experience on creating these high converting landing pages because he has been around for a while, he walks the walk, he has tried a lot of different things regarding to creating these pages and you’re going to get a lot of value from that. So we’re going to jump straight into the interview but before we do that, I want to let you know about a contest that I’m running where you have the chance to win a lifetime premium membership to smartvue.com, my provider of premium WordPress themes and plug-ins that allow you to display different versions of your website so that you can improve your conversion rates, your earnings, your results. You can display different versions of their websites to each of your different visitors based on where they are coming from, based on the specific interest that they have and a lot of different factors. So in order to participate in the contest, head on over to alexdesigns.com/moneydiver and you will be able to see the contest guidelines right there. So let’s dive right into the interview with Alex.
Borja: Hey, what’s up Alex? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here man, I appreciate it.
Alex Harris: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Borja: Okay man, so I want to give a little overview of your background so people understand why they have to implement things that we’re going to talk about right here. Tell me a little about how you get started with conversion rate optimization.
Alex Harris: Yeah, well my background is actually in art. I was originally a studio artist doing fine art and sketching throughout college. And I didn’t know much about the web, I mean my first job was in 2000 and I just jumped right into it. My first project was to create HTML emails that drove traffic to specific landing pages and I didn’t know that this was kind of unique at the time, that it was kind of focused on direct marketing. I always kind of wanted to get a designer and create all these great designs but I was kind of thrown right into direct marketing and I never really focused on any of the operating*stuff. So I immediately got focused on trying to do datajourn* marketing and using analytics understand how to make our web designs better. And through the process of working in corporate for over 11 years, I started out as web designer then I learned HTML CSS and a little bit of web programming and then marketing and sales. So I kind of learned everything by experience and I found that it was really unique that I was doing datajourn*marketing and the conversion focused web design compared to everyone else who was just trying to create pretty pictures online. And what I found is that not many people doing it.
So I went out to different conferences and met many different people who are in this space. So I had the opportunity to work with some of the earliest people doing conversion rate optimization, particularly one of my mentors, Brian Eisenberg*. He’s one of the godfathers of conversion rate optimization. And I had the opportunity to kind of show him that I was a reliable web designer who knew someone was about conversion rate optimization. So I immediately started branding myself as a landing page web designer and for over seven years, I was number one for landing page design on Google. So I got a lot of my initial work that way and that is how I got my initial traction and created my own business in 2004, Alex Designs LLC. So ever since then, I kind of focused on creating landing pages, doing email marketing and now today, doing a lot of e-commerce focused web designing.
Borja: That’s so cool man. And it is funny that people weren’t thinking about that back then, like to create landing pages and to create call to actions and such. I guess nowadays, if you’re not doing that, you’re completely doing it wrong, right?
Alex Harris: Yeah. I mean the guy I worked for, he was really an innovator. We were literally one of the first companies online doing A/B testing. We had a specific conversion funnel*. I worked for a diet and fitness company and the guy who created the company, he was an inventor. He actually created one of the first alarms that go on your clothes, you know when you’re walking out of a store and that alarm is clipped to your clothes? He actually invented that. And he took those inventions and he applied them online and it was all of the iterative process of where he would try his inventions and then create them. So we created our own A/B testing conversion platform and it was all focused on this conversion funnel that we created. We were a diet and fitness company, so as people arrived on our landing page, they would fill out some questions and then go down this conversion funnel, the series of steps in this process to get them to actually convert; sign up for an email address and then actually turn those visitors into customers like collecting their credit card in cash and sale.
Borja: And what was that company called?
Alex Harris: That company is called ediets.com.
Borja: eDiets, oh that is cool. And your website is alexdesigns.com, correct?
Alex Harris: Yes.
Borja: Okay. I just wanted to get it so people can go and check you out. So basically I want to take our listeners through the process of creating a high converting page, how would you do it if you had to start from zero, like what would be the first step where you – if we had a blank canvas?
Alex Harris: It’s a good question because a lot of times, us as website owners or business strategists, we make a lot of assumptions about our business and that’s basically the wrong thing to do. You don’t want to jump to any conclusions and just guess, you really want to use data. So as much as you possibly can, try to collect two different kinds of data; qualitative data and quantitative data. Specifically qualitative data, we get from our customers. We want to understand exactly who our target audience is and then what’s going on in their – in the customer’s mind, what’s the voice of the customer. And we use specific tools to pull that data out. And then there is quantitative data which is like Google analytics, the metrics that are going on our particular websites. So from those two aspects of who is visiting our site and then where we are going, you should be able to get like a good idea to create a specific hypothesis. That way you could put together a specific offer or landing page for your ideal customer and get them to solve a particular problem that they are looking to do.
Borja: Also, you mentioned qualitative data, what if you don’t have like enough pool of customers to get like a survey, do you go out and do like benchmarking or see what your competitors are doing or something like that?
Alex Harris: There’s always ways to collect data. Even if you don’t have a website yet, even if you don’t have a product going, even if they haven’t created a prototype yet, there is ways to do that research. So, more than likely you are in a business vertical and you have some type of competitors. You can go out and watch people go through all of your different competitor sites. You can use something like usertesting.com where you pay per credit, $50 per credit, where you watch people go through your site, your competitor’s site and different Google search queries. You want to…
Borja: That’s – sorry, that’s usertesting.com.
Alex Harris: Yes, exactly.
Borja: Okay, I’ll include that on the show notes so people can go and check that out.
Alex Harris: Yeah and you ask the user who is going to the site, specific questions so you can put all that insight. That way, you can use that insight to validate your hypothesis. That way, we can set up specific educated guesses about what landing pages that we want to create. That way, we know what pains and desires that they have and then we can solve those issues on the landing pages that they arrive on.
Borja: And do you also use like compete.com. I have used compete.com for like traffic measures and to understand what like my competitors are ranking for and like have an estimate of who is going to be coming to my website like from organic traffic for example.
Alex Harris: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you can definitely use compete.com or different tools to reengineer what other people are doing. You can also use what runs where if you are buying advertising online, you can figure out where your competitors are buying advertising. You can use many different tools to kind of reengineer what other people are doing. But a lot of that stuff is kind of – it’s kind of vanity metrics, oh this guy has this much traffic or this has this much history of their domain name. You really want to know exactly what is going on in the customer’s mind.
Borja: Right.
Alex Harris: Let’s say you are – like me, I work for a diet and fitness company for 11 years, so I do a lot of work in the health space. A lot of times when people arrive at my clients’ landing pages, they don’t believe the claims that they are making for health and fitness supplements. So we need to know what people don’t believe, that way we can answer those questions. So they don’t need to back out and make our bounce rates go up or what is going to help them support the claims they can actually complete the sales.
Borja: And validate what you are saying, yeah that’s a strong point because you need proof.
Alex Harris: Yeah and you know also with qualitative data, you can create a survey monkey which is free to get started. You can create your own survey. And then if you have 1, 10 people on your email list, you just email those people individually, one out of those 10 is probably going to give you a little bit of data. And then if possible, try to get them on a Skype call or even a cell phone call and then tell them you will record it and analyze because eventually you’re going to see patterns in all of the people who are visiting your site and they should be the ones who are telling you exactly how to market your product. You want to make it customer centric.
Borja: But getting on a Skype call would be like very time-consuming right? And maybe data from one customer wouldn’t be enough to make a decision, would it be?
Alex Harris: At least it would get you in the mindset of what is going on because as long as you talk to one person at a time, yes it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot to do but more than likely, you’re going to get better long-term results the more customers you talk to. So you might initially start out, you don’t have a business, you might start talking to one or two customers per month and it could eventually be 10 customers per month. I mean me, I know who visits my site and who is going to be reading my content, who is going to be watching my videos, who may actually become a client. All three of those people are kind of different avatars and I try to get those people on to Skype calls. And you can record it with Skype, you could analyze it because eventually you’re going to see language patterns of how people talk about your products. That way you can use that same language back into your marketing. So it can start with one person or 10 people or 100 people, but yeah the best benefit for your conversion focused efforts are going to be the hardest to actually scale.
Borja: That’s so powerful because when I just started doing landing pages, I would just throw up content based on my assumptions. And only until I started doing that, I noticed that I was wasting so much time. So that is so powerful. But now you understand who is going to be coming to your site, you understand who you are targeting and you’re going to start building a landing page correct? Would you include – let’s go from top to bottom on the elements that usually go on a landing page. Would you include a navigation menu on the top?
Alex Harris: It depends. With every case, I’m always going to say it depends on each different scenario.
Borja: I figured that, yes.
Alex Harris: But in the normal case of the traditional pay per click ad. Let’s say someone is buying ad words campaign and they’re driving traffic from Google ad words to a landing page. More than likely, you’re not going to have a navigation but that’s completely different if you have an e-commerce site. With e-commerce sites, people like to window shop, they like to browse through your site. It probably takes four or five interactions with your brand before they probably will convert. So you may actually want to test having a navigation. With my e-commerce sites, we actually leave the navigation on there because it actually reduces the bounce rates and it gives you a better quality score with Google ad words. That’s completely different than natural search or Facebook ads. With Facebook ads, you may want to create a specific landing page that has no navigation at all and it asks for less than you would on a traditional pay per click advertising landing page.
Borja: Yeah because ad words would disavow*– they have like strong guidelines right? They could disavow your website if you don’t include like your privacy policy and all that, like a legal navigation at least right?
Alex Harris: Well yeah, the quality score takes into account click rate, bounce rate and even conversion rate. And if you have a high bounce rate, that means no one is clicking on anything. So if you only have one call to action, that’s the only thing to do on the page, more than likely your bounce rate is going to be really high. So you may want to have some alternative secondary navigation or call to action below the fold so people can go to the next page.
Borja: So in this case, a high bounce rate would be good for you because that means that people are only clicking on what you really want them to click, like on a buy now button or on a sign up button but for Google, it’s not good because they want to see the user going through your website and which I think it doesn’t really make sense that Google does that because like a call to action is a call to action and it means nothing like a visitor goes to a page when they’re going to end up signing up which that is the end purpose of that website. So that is something that I think Google should reanalyze.
Alex Harris: Well, it kind of makes sense in a way that you are cooking – put it this way, when anybody searches for anything on Google, they have some emotional tie to what they are searching for. They have some problem that they are putting into Google as a query and then the results that they get should solve their problem. So if that equation doesn’t match up in the eyes of Google, then your quality score is going to go down. So people click on that ad and then they right your page, then they immediately leave, your ability scores want to be really low because that’s not a good experience for the user, they’re keeping the user in mind. So you want to ensure that not only are you creating the right landing page but you are buying the right ads.
Borja: Right, but maybe they are leaving because they are clicking, like they are signing up to your page and they’re gone. Is that something that Google takes into account? I mean is that something that would affect your quality score?
Alex Harris: Yeah, absolutely. Because majority of people how they search, they search for something and then they go down, right down the page listings or the natural listings, right click open tab, right click open tab, right click open tab. And especially with pay per click advertising ad words, people have no attempts to stand*whatsoever. So you need to, within one second, be able to have a visual hierarchy that’s going to be easy to understand to the particular problem they are trying to solve for that person. If they don’t go forward, if they – in case of a – if you have the email opt-in*, they don’t enter their email opt-in and go forward or click on something to go forward, Google is going to see that as bad and you’re actually going to be paying more money for less results.
Borja: Now, let’s go to the next element which I think is the most powerful one or the most important one which is the title, correct. What are like the main elements that you include in your titles?
Alex Harris: Yeah, as far as the main headline. As soon as you arrive at the landing page, it should be very clear, the problem you’re trying to solve. So there is a term called message match, the ability to match the headline or the unique value proposition to the problem that they just queried. So as soon as you arrive at the landing page, the headline should be very, very clear on what your unique value proposition is, what clearly differentiates you from all of your different competitors within a direct one second response. That way the page can load and within just one second, you can easily understand what the service or product that’s offering and then that leads to relevance and clarity which promotes the call to action for somebody to do next. Landing pages in general, I actually don’t – if you are buying pay per click ads from ad words, I actually don’t recommend putting an email opt-in on the landing page. I actually recommend putting it on the secondary page because you want to try to get people involved and invested in your brand before you ask for something in return.
Borja: So you look like a two-step process opt-in?
Alex Harris: Yeah, well create specific isolated conversion funnels, even quizzes to get people to interact with our pages so they can just move on to the next page. It can…
Borja: And reduce your…
Alex Harris: Bounce rate. Yeah, that way you arrive at a page, it will say I’m selling health and fitness supplements. As soon as you arrive at a landing page, there might be a section that has a call to action but it doesn’t ask for the email address. It’s maybe a drop down, just as soon as you drop down and change it, it automatically goes to the next page, it automatically submits or there is a link there that says okay get this free download or whatever it is. Because it is less – it’s a lower barrier of entry if you get them to actually take action.
Borja: And in the title, do you include like a particular font? Is there like a font that you love the most? Do you use of funds for different industries or that doesn’t really matter?
Alex Harris: I think as long as it is big, clear and legible, easy-to-read and on one line, you know if it wraps, it’s okay but make it really big and easy to understand. Fonts these days, you have an ability to add a lot of fonts than you used to in the past. If you’re using Google fonts, there is a lot of options out there. I would just try to stay away from too much of a stylized fonts, for lack of better words, don’t use Comic Sans but maybe you don’t want to use Arial. Somewhere in between that, as long as it is legible and easy-to-read, I think whatever font you use is okay.
Borja: So basically as long as you are telling the customer what problem you are solving on the title and you make it clear, you’re good right?
Alex Harris: Yeah and relevant to whatever they came from. So you may have multiple – you may have the same landing page with multiple different headlines but it’s all based on particular ads. We all talk about pay per click advertising here, if you are doing natural search landing pages, then it will be a little bit different because it is harder to target.
Borja: Yes exactly. The more targeted you are, the higher conversions will be.
Alex Harris: Yeah absolutely and the less money you spend.
Borja: And the less money you spend. And that’s something for all of those members from smartvue.com that are listening, that something that we were discussing on the course the other day. And remember that you have to think about the specifics that your visitor is interested in and display the contents of that they specifically want to see in order to improve your conversions. And another element that I see a lot of people using are subtitles but they are using like for different things, what is the difference in terms of subtitle and the main title?
Alex Harris: Well in the case of landing pages and particular paid landing pages, as I said people don’t have enough attention spans. So you want to create content, headlines and then sub headlines that are easily skimmable*to understand exactly what is going on and the visual hierarchy brings you down the page, maybe into the call to action. The sub headline is also very important, it’s just another validation for the claims that you are trying to support which is all related around your unique value proposition. So subtitle, it’s just there to support the additional text. More than likely right underneath that subtitle, you have a list of bullets or one or two line paragraphs so it’s easier to read. If you’ve ever seen a direct marketing or direct mail that has been sent to your home, they don’t have huge blocks of paragraphs, more than likely, they are broken up into lines and there are specific breaks a certain point. Because the people who do read, only half of the people actually read your information, the people who do read, they want to read it in chunks. That way it is easier to understand because if you put a big block of text right there, it just looks like it is going to cause friction in my mind and friction is bad; the more friction there is, the more people have anxiety.
Borja: Right, right. I didn’t think about that. Anxiety could really increase your bounce rates.
Alex Harris: Oh yeah, absolutely. There is an actual psychological aspect of how your eyes filter the information before you understand it, that cognitive load. And this is all things that I am actually learning about right now, I’ve actually been doing this for a long time. But in my own podcast, I interviewed people who are specialists in this and they actually study how your brain gets affected by how much information it absorbs in a short period of time. So we’re talking about microseconds here, about how people get that first impression. Because I think there’s a study out there from Harvard, if you have a bad first impression, it takes five additional impressions to change someone’s mind. So…
Borja: Five additional impressions?!
Alex Harris: Yes, absolutely.
Borja: In whatever industry that is?
Alex Harris: Whatever industry. So yeah you want to ensure that your first impression that you make is very direct and specific to the problem that there having.
Borja: Right. And you mentioned your podcast, let’s drop that for the listeners because I think they’re going to get a lot of value from your podcast as well. That’s conversion optimization marketing, correct?
Alex Harris: It’s a marketingoptimization.tv. I interview the best in digital marketing out there. We talk specifically advanced marketing, all focused around conversion rate optimization and lead generation.
Borja: And I’m sensing that this next question is going to have a depend. What graphic elements do you prefer like images versus video?
Alex Harris: Yeah, we all consume content differently. Some of us like to read, some of us like audio, some of us like to watch a video. So it is going to be unique to the scenario but you want to test the right elements for you. And even the video, I would always recommend a video no matter what. A video supports whatever product or service you are selling. But the video could be a different scenario; it could be embedded into the page like an I-frame or it could be a click to open up a new window or it could be a click to open up a new overlay or it could open up the bottom of the page. All of those scenarios are kind of unique and different, but definitely having a video absolutely would help. You always want to have a picture regardless. If you’re using YouTube to show your video, you can have a thumbnail right there, a custom thumbnail that’s part of the video. But you always want some type of photo there or image that supports your unique value proposition.
Borja: And it helps to ease the brain, calm the brain.
Alex Harris: Yeah, people love pictures. Your eyes will automatically go to other people’s eyes or pictures of people, it’s just a natural way. That’s usually the first thing you look at. So as a designer, what we will do is we will come up with a specific visual hierarchy or information architecture where someone arrives on a landing page, they immediately look at the person and then their eyes scan towards the left and then down towards the call to action. All that stuff is very important, that visual hierarchy.
Borja: And talking about the copy, how long should the copy be? And a lot of people say as long as it has to and not a sentence more or less but like on average, do you see a pattern or not?
Alex Harris: I definitely do and you can use data to figure out the right length for you because you don’t want it too long and you don’t want it too short. Because what happens is, there’s two things that happen when anybody arrives at a landing page, they either want to click or they want to scroll. And if you have visual elements that are just above the active window, people will know that there is more elements down below. So if you have to do a lot of selling, if they show a lot of benefits, if you have to do a lot of persuasive aspects to sell your products, you may want more copy. If you’re selling something right off the bat with e-commerce, we have to add a lot of copy because we need to include the ingredients of a health and fitness supplement or what the benefits are going to be. So people want to scroll down and make sure that you are a valid case, that if you’re selling something, maybe you have a guarantee or some type of risk assurance. So all that stuff is going to be kind of hard to fit into above the fold. So if you can have a longer page scrolls down but still keeps them isolated within that funnel to get them to that clear call to action, then yeah, make it as long as you possibly can.
Borja: And what about social proof?
Alex Harris: Social proof is one of the key influencers of persuasion. If anybody is familiar with the famous book from Robert Cialdini, Influence, the Psychology of Persuasion, social proof is one of those influencers. So people like to work with people that they like and more than likely, they like to buy things that other people have bought. So you want to use social proof to build your credibility and build your authority to show that you are not going to ripoff people in the end.
Borja: Absolutely and I have seen social proof kill some of my landing pages and experiments. Like sometimes I will remove social proof to do some testing and it absolutely kills conversion, then I’ll put it back in and conversions are back up, like on a very significant number and that amazes me. I didn’t think that social proof could be so strong on some industries.
Alex Harris: It really is so important because if no one else is using your product, people don’t like to try things. That’s why people like to buy bestsellers or like Apple products, everyone is buying those products. So people want some type of validation that their money is going to be spent well because more than ever, it is more difficult overall just to sell than it has ever been; you have to increase your credibility, you have to have the right authority. And that trust comes into that social proof aspect. If other people or other influencers or other people in your niche are also using these products and getting the results you want, oh, maybe it is right for me too.
Borja: And some people think that this next question is going to be a no-brainer but I have actually seen some different results with this. Do you prefer social proof from customers or from experts?
Alex Harris: Well I mean definitely if you are in an industry where there is a well-known expert and someone has used your product or you have given – and you got a testimonial from it, that’s going to identify with someone right away. There’s a great book out there, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug and you really don’t want to make people think. If I arrive at a health and fitness supplement and I see I don’t know, Tony Little on there or Richard Simmons is using it, it’s fully identified as a credible source. But, that could play differently into a smaller business who just shows specific testimonials like before and afters and it helped the fitness case study. But you just want to show some type of proof because we don’t want to sell like the features of a product, we really want to get the benefits.
Borja: And usually at this point, we’re like 70% down the page and we’re coming across I would guess security and confidence if you’re selling, correct? Like guarantee icons and seals and security seals, what are your thoughts about that?
Alex Harris: Very important. Again, with social proof and authority, people want to know that their information and their money is not going to be stolen. We have a saying in the industry, “don’t make your customer think that you are a person in the garage trying to steal that person’s information”. You want to show that you are a real business, that you paid for SSL certificates, that you have a real online order process in place and that you are not going to steal that person’s information. So the thing with guarantees and seals is that they are visual elements and visual icons that people identify with because people, humans in general, they think in patterns. We are problem solvers and we make sense of things in patterns. So don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t try to create your own unique guarantee symbols, use a generic 30 day money back guarantee symbol or a generic lock symbol, so people can really identify with it that you have that SSL secure ordering online process. And those are going to anchor people’s confidence in your security and trust.
Borja: Yes, absolutely. And what about this opt-in step process because nowadays, it’s very popular and two step opt-in process right, like you click a button and then well the sign up form comes up and this is in case – well I guess this could apply in both free opt-ins and page sales. Do you prefer like having to sign a form right away on the page for having like a two step opt-in process?
Alex Harris: I think in the case of Facebook, people are so used to going to landing pages that ask for email address right away. So I think that is great in that case, but in Google ad words and pay per click advertising which is actually more expensive and harder to convert, I would not recommend asking for an email address right away. People like to interact, they want to actually click and scroll. So you want to actually influence that, you literally want to have baby steps and hold people’s hands along your conversion funnel. So the first page, they really shouldn’t be on the page more than five seconds, they should identify with the page and wanting to click or scroll on something, to do something next. So if you can get them involved in your brand, get them to easily understand what you are offering and then ask questions to get them to interact. That’s more beneficial than just asking for an email address right away.
Borja: And what are your thoughts about colors? Do you prefer certain colors or are they industry dependent?
Alex Harris: Well colors are very unique because you are off one or two hex values and it can make a dramatic difference of what colors you use. There is a thought method that, staying with cool colors, greens and blues can lead to more of a professional aspect and I’ve definitely seen that but you can certainly use red and more sales focused colors but you want use them in the right way. A great example of this is Target. Target is all red but when you arrive to their website, they use the red in the right way to call out their certain call to actions and it leads you down the page with your visual hierarchy in the right way. So as long as the colors are relevant to your kind of scenario, if you are a bank, I probably wouldn’t recommend orange, I wouldn’t relate it to a financial institution but that does work for the actual company called the Orange Financial, that does work for them. So it is going to be unique to yours but as long as you are using colors in the right way, then you are able to have a clear information architecture that leads people to the call to action.
Borja: And Alex, Moneydiver as an online marketing brand has a very strong focus on audience and all the audience part of online marketing, research, segmentation, personalization. So my question is, as a business owner of Alex Designs, who is your avatar? Who is your ideal customer?
Alex Harris: Interesting. Well I thought about this a lot, really the last couple of years because as my business changed, so has my avatar. I really segmented down even niche further to who I really want to work with and I found that my podcast listener is one of avatar, my video watcher is a different avatar and my blog reader is a completely different person.
Borja: Yes, that is so powerful. I’ve been saying that a lot, that different channels bring different avatars. And do you have like different call to actions from these different places for those different avatars?
Alex Harris: Yeah and you have to find like a happy medium to kind of like serve them all they need to understand what they want in their own scenario. In the case of my video person who is going to watch my videos, I know that they have a limited amount of time and they want to get to the information right away. I know my podcast listener, who is probably driving around in the car and he has a little bit more times so I can maybe add a little more emphasis at the beginning of my podcast. Now my client is completely different, my ideal client is the one I really want to work with so I define them even better. So more than likely my target audience is an e-commerce site owner, more than likely male between 35 and 45 and they have – they are married, at least one kid and they have reached a point in their business where they are just not receiving the results that they want. More than likely, they have a do-it-yourself business and they are going through a change. They’re reading all this stuff online and they’re just not seeing the results that they really should by the money they are investing. They have a limited budget, they have limited resources and a lot of the stuff they are really doing themselves. So we want to take into account not only the demographics, where they live or what type of software they are on, are they on big commerce or shopify*but we also want to take into account where they hang out online, what do they do on weekends. And then also, what’s causing them to lose sleep at night, what opportunities are they really missing. If you can sort of dive into what the pains, problems, desires of your ideal target audiences, you are more than likely to sell them more products.
Borja: Yes that’s right and what we were talking about, the different channels linked to different mindsets, that is something I became obsessed a couple years back. And I ended up in, like in Moneydiver, my blog, I display completely different versions of my entire blog, like different call to actions, sometimes even different colors. And the reason I do that is because I kept seeing conversion rates going up and up every time I segmented my visitors further and further. I went as far as segmenting my visitors based on their interest and combining that with their geographical locations. So this is something that I think the online marketing industry is taking a shift to because people are starting to see that you have to do what the off-line guys are doing which is segmenting for further and further which as online guys is even easier for us because we have coding.
Alex Harris: Yeah, yeah I mean it is really interesting because we’re talking about landing pages here. And I mentioned a lot about having some type of question or interactive element on the landing page that is not related to email address. So what you can do is you can actually have several different call to actions, maybe like a drop-down and maybe start to narrow down that target audience. So you have this big group of people who arrive at your landing page, maybe you have a bunch of really radio*buttons or drop-down or a bunch of interactive questions that drills down people to the right problem that they want, maybe two or three pages, maybe it’s one or two pages, but that will help you kind of filter down the right person to the right page that they want to go to. So it’s a great way to use your landing pages to segment*out your different visitors.
Borja: So Alex, I think we have given our listeners everything they need to know to go and create high converting landing page and I want them to really understand like the little things really do matter. So thank you so much, thank you so much for coming on the show and for underlining all of these details for our listeners. And once again, I want to drop the URL of your podcast so that they can go and learn more about conversion rate, it’s marketingoptimization.tv, correct?
Alex Harris: Yes.
Borja: Yes, well Alex, thanks a lot for coming on the show man, I hope to get you back on.
Alex Harris: Yeah man, thanks a lot for having me and guys, just go there and keep optimizing. This stuff just never ends. More than likely, your landing pages, they may not work at first. More than likely, they are not going to work at first but you have to keep on iterating, try different things, fail quickly and eventually, you’ll figure out what works.
Borja: Boom.
Okay, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Alex. And if you did, I would love to hear about it, let me know. Head on over to Twitter and let me know about what you thought of the interview of the podcast. Use the hashtag #moneydiver and tell me your thoughts, your feedback. It’s the only way I can improve really, is by listening to what you have to say and I do this for you. So if I don’t improve based on your feedback, I have nothing to improve on. And you guys just heard from Alex how important data is. Also, if you’re in the process of creating your landing pages and you encounter any problems, let me know. I’ll try to do my best to help you and get you going. And I would love to hear your results with the tips that Alex just gave us. Also you can go over to rebelgrowth.com/episode5 to read the show notes for this episode. And remember that we have a contest going on at alexdesigns.com/moneydiver. So once again guys, thank you so much for taking some time to listen to the show. Go out, eat a duck, have fun.
Thanks,
Really, to know that there’s only a very limited amount of time in your life and that you decide to assign some of that time to listen to me and my guests means the world to me so I promise I will keep on doing my best to serve you.
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