Landing Pages

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Guarantee Blindness

Guarantee blindness

Nowadays guarantees are essential to good results, but only the best guarantees are really noticed.

Do you offer a “30-day money-back” or “100% satisfaction” guarantee?

As great as those sound, they’re just not as effective as they used to be.

People don’t notice standard guarantees anymore. They’ve got guarantee blindness.

One of the most important things a good copywriter does is make your prospects believe—beyond a doubt—that they’re going to get incredible results.

But whether you hire a copywriter or you write your own sales pages, you should understand how guarantee blindness affects your sales; otherwise, you can only hope the copywriter knows how to form a great guarantee.

Strong guarantees are almost sure to create more sales than refunds, so offering them makes sense (as long as your product is as good as it’s supposed to be).

But to get really great results, you need to make the guarantee shine so brightly that even the blind will see it.

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Focus Points

Focus point

Focus points are one of the most important conversion techniques you can learn to use.

When visitors come to your site, you need to give them something to focus on.

If nothing on the page captures their attention, the page looks unfinished and amateurish, at best.

And your visitors leave.

Sure, you need to grab their attention, but I’m not talking about writing strong headlines or understanding your customers’ innermost desires.

I’m talking about a critically important web design technique: how to use focus points to lead visitors to your conversion goals.

It’s something you need to be aware of even if you haven’t designed your own site and don’t do the updating.

Your designer might not know anything about it.

And that means your visitors might be leaving your site just as fast as they get there.

But a word of warning: focus points aren’t the easiest things to get right.

You should know how to use them, though, because they can make a huge difference in your conversion rates.

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White House Landing Page – Video Critique

White House Landing PageThe White House landing page is the page you see when you visit their site (for the first time). They use a so-called welcome gate to direct new visitors to the landing page.

The goal is to get people to join their emailing list.

And to be honest, the page is quite okay. But it could be better and here are some ways they could increase their conversion.

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Landing Page Video Tutorial – How to Build Opt In Landing Pages

Landing Page Video TutorialLanding pages are the most effective way to get visitors to take a specific action.

Opt in landing pages try to get people to opt in to an emailing list. And if done well, they can do that very, very effectively.

But most opt in landing pages are so poorly written and designed that their conversion is minimal.

What’s your opt in landing page’s conversion? Is it 70%? Is it 50%? Is it even 25%?

Would you be willing to do some changes to double your conversion? Or to get even 10 more percents of visitors to opt in.

Here’s a video tutorial that explains the most common mistakes and shows you how to increase your conversion.

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3 Strategies for Email Marketing and How to Succeed with Each

3 Strategies to Email Marketing

The three strategies to email marketing can all work well, if your copy is good. photo: Glen Edelson

Email marketing has the highest response rate out of any marketing method.

Does that mean spamming works? Well, someone has to buy something from spammers, otherwise they’d become extinct.

But there’s spamming, and then there’s quality direct email marketing.

The latter is one of the best strategies to market B-2-B products and services, but B-2-C businesses can learn a lot from it too.

It might not be right for you. Maybe content email marketing works better for your business, but understanding the principles behind the other two email strategies will make a huge difference to your success.

So, here are the three strategies to email marketing, how to figure out which is best for your business, and how to succeed with each.

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How to Seduce a Goldfish

People have the attention-span of a goldfish. And that affects your marketing.

People have the attention span of a goldfish. And that affects your marketing.

Have you ever knocked on the side of a fish tank and felt betrayed by the goldfishes that ignored you?

You push your face against the side, yell at them—loudly enough to wake up a fossil—or serve their favorite purple treats that smell like chicken poo, and they’re still more fascinated by the water around them than you.

Does your website or marketing efforts remind you of that fish tank? No matter what you do, no one notices.

It could be that people have the attention span of a goldfish.

Depending on the goldfish, it’s somewhere between three and 10 seconds.

That’s how long you have to turn apathy into solid interest or risk losing your visitors and prospects to other sites and businesses.

Understanding what makes people excited about your message is the key to effective writing and marketing.

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101 Headline Formulas that Capture Attention and Get Your Message Read

101 Headline Formulas - The Ultimate Swipe File

“The Only Swipe File You’ll Ever Need”

The headline is the most important part of any text.

It will either keep people reading what you have to say, or send them away.

How many headlines do you read during a day? Twitter, Facebook, email, magazines, etc. Altogether 100? Maybe more?

And how many of those make you read more?

An average headline gets around 25% of people to read on. And even fewer read to the end. Even when reading and leaving are the only possibilities (landing pages, magazines, etc.).

What do you think happens to those percentages in Twitter where dozens of headlines fight for attention?

So, what can you do to beat the odds?

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Stockmann Syndrome – Don’t Try this (Landing Page) at Home

Landing Page Conversion

You can’t always hit the bulls-eye, but you’ll always do fine with these three landing page principles. photo: ##Erika**

Landing pages are a cornerstone of online marketing, but sometimes even large companies forget how to build effective landing pages.

Stockmann is the best known and most prestigious department store in Finland. They’ve been around for 125 years and their special sale is an event people wait almost religiously.

Their marketing is usually really good, but the other day I stumbled onto their opt-in email list landing page. All the three basic elements of an effective landing page were wrong.

I could not believe they could go so wrong with their marketing. But so does many other major companies all around the world.

If you follow these three basic guidelines, you’re landing page will get at least an average conversion. But if you forget even one of these basics, your conversion will sink.

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5 Most Important Design Aspects of a Business Website

The New Blog Theme and the New Website are Finished

My new blog theme and the new website are finally online.

The new blog theme and a website I built from scratch are finally here. It took me about 11 weeks and 100 liters of tea (yes tea, not coffee).

I’m not a developer so I won’t attempt to say much about the coding. I’m a business owner and the goal of my blog is to support my business; that was the starting point for the design.

But why on earth did I decide to do it myself instead of hiring someone to do it for me? Uhmm… Because I wanted to be in full control of every element and I had no idea how much work it would be ;) The depressing part is that I’m nowhere near finished; there’s a lot I’m going to change. But for now, the basics are done.

I did learn a lot and these things apply to every web site, not just blogs, meant to drive business.

So, here’s the five most important design aspects of a website from a business stand point.

Copyright 2012 Peter Sandeen - Simply Effective Marketing | +358 41 433 0144 | contact {at] petersandeen [dot} com