Designing Fly Landing Pages – Part 4: Continuity

Your landing pages probably aren’t perfect.

That might be tough to hear, but it’s okay. It’s near impossible for them to be perfect – at least the first time around – even if you’ve been following along since the beginning of the “Designing Fly Landing Pages” blog post series.

This final post in the series is the end of your journey to learning the four key elements you need to design landing pages that delight and convert. So far, we’ve taken a look at Focus, Messaging, and Trust, which have culminated to provide you with a framework and the right tools to work towards designing landing pages that convert. The final piece is Continuity.

In this context, continuity refers to the continuous care and maintenance of a landing page after a campaign has run its course. It also refers to evolution of a good landing page into an excellent landing page. To do this, you’ll need to learn from your experiences and find new ways to improve. Whether this is achieved by looking through the metrics and analytics collected from past campaigns or running tests to determine what performs best, there are many tracks towards designing these elusive, fly landing pages.

Data-Driven Updates

Use data to inform your decisions.

The landing page should be optimized for conversion over time. This can’t be done right out of the gate, so you’ll need to build your landing pages with the foundation in place to be able to provide you with this data. If you don’t, this will lead to a huge blind spot that can cause you to miss out on important information. How can you learn from something if you have no idea it ever happened?

Keep up to date on the latest data and research. Research can help to inform you of best practices and provide you with insight into why certain methods, layouts, or language performs better than others. After running a quick search on Google for “landing page best practices”, you’ll find copious amounts of research done by leading marketing and UX experts in the industry like Unbounce, KISSmetrics, and the Nielsen Norman Group.

These experts have conducted studies and concluded best practices on:

• What you should put above the fold
• How long your forms should be
• The effect of using customer testimonials on your landing page
• And much, much more

One best practice that stands out to us at Vidyard is the use of video on a landing page. Of course we like this one – we’re all about video, and with good reason! Video has been shown to increase conversion rates by 86%. Not only is it more engaging, but including videos on your landing page makes it 53% more likely to appear on the first page of a Google search result.

At Vidyard, we use Google Analytics and KISSmetrics to track web, mobile, and social traffic. These two platforms play key roles within our decision-making process. We’re able to determine the most popular device and browser people view our landing page on, what actions they’re taking on the page, how long they’re spending on it, and more. By knowing this information, we can extrapolate actionable insights that informs us about what works, what doesn’t, and what we should focus on improving.

A/B Testing

Experimentation and testing will lead to a better landing page.

Our lives are filled with experiences that are never quite as good as they could be. A/B testing addresses this by allowing you to compare multiple versions of something to determine which version yields better results – helping you edge ever so closer to that perfect experience. To drive home the importance of A/B testing, Optimizely, an experience optimization platform, secured $58M in Series C funding on Tuesday to optimize the world.

Within the context of landing pages, A/B testing works by measuring the effectiveness each design combination has on the ultimate goal of maximizing conversions. Although implementing best practices are a good starting point, your visitors may react differently to them. By exploring different layouts or messaging on your landing pages, you can discover what works best with your audience.

For a more detailed look into A/B Testing, take a look at this very informative article by Vidyard’s Content Marketing Manager, Kimbe, on How to A/B Test Your Marketing Video.

At Vidyard, we try to incorporate videos into our landing pages whenever we can because we know that they play an integral role in engaging our audience. But, before a visitor can even begin watching a video, they’ve got to first click on it. Fortunately, the Vidyard platform has the ability to split test video thumbnails to find the one that performs best.

Take our homepage for instance. It’s not just any landing page, it’s THE landing page. Home pages typically receive more than 50% of all visitor traffic, so we knew we had to give it some extra care to make it perfect. After running A/B tests on the video thumbnails for our platform video, these were the results:

Of course, the thumbnails with the dog performed the best. Not surprising at all!

I’m sad to say it, but this marks an end to the “Designing Fly Landing Pages” blog post series. I’m getting a little emotional here. Now you know the four key elements that go into designing landing pages, we’d love to hear how they work out for you!

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