Having an insatiable appetite to test, retest, and test again is an essential quality for any digital marketer. Because it’s only through testing your ideas, hunches and, sometimes, gut instinct that you can truly understand what works for your business and your customers.
The team at VisualWebsiteOptimizer has shared details of a fascinating test they conducted on one of their clients’ websites, South Africa’s Yuppiechef.com.
Conventional wisdom…
…says that every page of your site should carry the same navigation menus, headers and footers. And, in most instances, we allow this same logic to flow into campaign landing pages that act as the primary entry point from some form of marketing stimulus like paid search ads or posts to our social networking pages.
Unconventional wisdom…
…however, says differently. In its test on VisualWebsiteOptimizer, YuppieChef compared the effectiveness of two subtly different landing pages:
LANDING PAGE A:
based on the standard webpage template:
LANDING PAGE B:
as above but without the distracting top navigation choices:
The results were unambiguous.
On Landing Page A, the conversion rate was 3% (i.e. 3% of visitors clicked on the primary call to action button)
On Landing Page B, the conversion rate was 100% higher at 6% (i.e. 6% of visitors clicked on the primary call to action button)
By eliminating unnecessary choices and distractions, the team learned how to dramatically improve the return on investment from their marketing activities.
The lesson:
Campaign landing pages should exist to serve the primary call to action (CTA) above all other possible outcomes. Their only purpose is to move people quickly and seamlessly into following the desired path to this CTA. By removing superfluous information and streamlining your page design to focus attention on this CTA you may be able to sharply increase conversion rates. When it comes to landing pages, sometimes less really is more.
Further reading: