CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Program Review- Week 8

Landing Page Optimization

Starting with the landing page analysis, it was important to touch upon some fundamentals like:

1. What is a landing page: A Landing page is an opening page or the first page the user sees after clicking on an ad.
2. The role of landing page: Landing page helps in reducing the noise and cuts straight to the topic that got the user interested in clicking the ad. It reduces the buying cycle.
3. Landing page optimisation: The optimisation process should start with a more heuristic approach.

We explored Fast vs Slow thinking which I found very interesting. The work has been inspired by Daniel Kahenman and Brian Cugelman in their book “Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow”.

There are two systems of thinking:

1. Fast or Intuitive thinking

2. Slow or Analytical thinking

We then looked at the different cognitive biases:

1. Priming: Exposure to one stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus.
2. Framing: The way you deliver a message has a direct impact on how it is perceived.
3. WYSIATI: When we’re kind of moving along in everyday life in system one, our reality is what we have in front of us.

Next, we learned about dopamine and cortisol and how these hormones affect us in psychology.

Dopamine is the happy chemical released by our brain when we achieve a reward or a complete a task.

It is supposed to drive you constantly towards new and bigger rewards, well, part of that is the habituation, you quickly get used to that dopamine release and it basically kind of goes back to neutral, so in a sense, you’re always chasing the dragon.

The diagram below also explains the various levels where dopamine release is good and is bad.

This ties to the landing page experience that advises us not to create disappointment indicating experiences.

Cortisol is also known as the “Stress” Hormone.

It is like a built-in alarm system which helps us to avoid pain.

For marketers, it is important to understand human behaviour in order to align the landing page experience accordingly.

Hence it is important to strive for a balance between dopamine and cortisol.

This definitely helped me to empathise with the users and demystified some of the user behaviour.

We then moved on to understanding wireframing and information hierarchy.

Wireframing is just to arrange the ideas of a landing page out. It doesn’t deal with the colours or images but just creating an outside layer.

Information hierarchy is defined asthe logical way the information is presented on the landing page.

This can be done by:

1. Start by defining the who, what and where. Who is the audience, what are they looking for, where are they in the awareness journey?
2. Move on to the questions. What is their motivation? What are their questions? What are the barriers?

We can undertake LPO through the quantitative and qualitative routes.

One of the quantitative route that can answer the “what” and “where” of our analysis is through GA.

The Aagaard’s custom report has created some of the quick one’s that can be seen to pick such quick wins. The report focusses on Landing page/Device Source, Second page/Exit page, Gender/Age, Device/Browser, Users/page.

Moving on to the qualitative research for LPO, that answers the “why” of the analysis, I learnt about:

1. Full funnel walkthrough deals with understanding what the user sees at different stages of the funnel in 5 seconds and after completely going through the landing page. The questions asked focus on keeping the personal bias aside and not leading the respondents.
2. Customer interviews should focus on understanding their perspective on the product, the brand image, the pain points through some short and lofty questions.
3. Customer success team interviews should focus on understanding the top challenges, elevator pitch and barriers that customers face daily.
4. Customer review sites can help in understanding the pain points from a larger audience pool. The key here is to read a lot of reviews.
5. Session recording through tools like Hotjar and CrazyEgg can provide great insight in the way users interact with the landing page. The heatmap, click map and scroll map all help us in understanding the depth and breadth of user engagement with the landing page. We should always look for patterns.
6. Feedback polls help in capturing the user emotions in real-time while they are browsing the landing page. We just need to be sure to keep the questions as short and non-intrusive as possible. A good way is to avoid placing questions right on first entry and exit behaviour. Find weak spots in the funnel and implement polls to better understand the reason behind user drop-offs.
7. Usability testing focusses on hiring or tapping into users closely linked to the TG and running some tests like the 5 second tests, click tests, preference tests.

The top 5 important elements for copywriting on your page:

1. Headline: Trigger dopamine and should trigger stay behaviour. There are some basic formulas that one can take reference from:
2. a. (Do something difficult) in (short amount of time) without (problem)
3. b. (Do something difficult) in (short amount of time) and (get something valuable)
4. c. Avoid (something frustrating) by (doing something difficult) in (a short amount of time) with (product X)
5. Benefits/Features: It’s always a tussle between what to show. I personally consider the headlines after H1 should convey the value and not the features.
6. Credibility: Through testimonials, keep it short and always use the real photos of the users.
7. Expectation manager: Who, what, where, when and how much should be used to manage expectations.
8. Call-to-action: Give a clear idea of what happens when a user clicks. Focus with what you can get not part with.

This helps in producing a great landing page experience for the users.

The use of contrasting colours, using enough space and allowing the page to breathe is sometimes overlooked.

I then moved to the much-awaited course by Momoko Price focussing on product messaging.

We first explored page teardowns .

Momoko talks about some of the models upon which the course is set and it seems like I have a lot of side reading to do here :)

1. MEClab’s conversion heuristic formula
2. Robert Cialdini’s 7 principles of persuasion that includes:
3. Social Proof, Authority, Linking, Scarcity/Urgency, Reciprocity, Commitment/Consistency, Unity (us vs. them)
4. Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising
5. Be specific, Offer service, Tell the full story, Be a sales (wo)man.