So, mobile SEO deserves a special treatment of its own. This, of course, means that once the user arrives from search to your landing pages, his/her behavior does not change suddenly. The same constraints of location and small screen size apply on landing pages, and that is why it is very important to take this aspect seriously if you get any significant or important mobile traffic.

Do I Really Need Separate Landing Pages For Mobiles?

I hear you that developing custom landing pages for mobile screen sizes is a significant investment, both in terms of time and money. Moreover, you cannot forget the continued investment you need to commit for maintaining and upgrading those mobile-friendly pages and websites. Is such an effort really worth it?

Wait, did I just write “mobile-friendly”?

This isn’t what I mean by mobile-friendly website!

There’s a big difference between websites that are mobile-friendly and websites that are specifically developed for mobiles, the ones that use special features like pinching and zooming and take notice of the fact that limited screen size poses constraints of a different kind.

With most modern smartphones, I’d go on to say that most websites (unless they were coded in the IE6 era and never updated) are mobile friendly. Fire up your iPhone or Android Phone and you would be able to view any website perfectly. So thanks to the latest mobile browsers, the phrase mobile-friendly is really a superfluous tag.

How To Develop A Made-For-Mobiles Landing Page

If your business is serious about mobile device usage, what it needs to do is to invest in making sure your website and landing pages have versions that are made exclusively with mobiles in mind. Since limited screen size on mobiles and their on-the-go usage pose special constraints, simply retouching your existing website to make it “mobile-friendly” will not suffice.

Following are some of the things you need to take care of if you want to maximize your sales and conversions on mobiles:

1. Users should be able to read the page without zooming.

It is crucial for your mobile screen to be just big enough so the user can view the entire landing page without having to zoom or scroll up and down. You don’t want your call-to-action (CTA) being placed at a location on your landing page which isn’t easily viewable and consequently, inaccessible to the user.

Often, it is observed that mobile phone users do not care to zoom or scroll up and down a webpage. One reason could well be the fact that such users who view webpages extensively on a mobile phone are usually on the go and often in a rush. Another could be human-interaction factors such as mobile phone designs, screen shapes, keypad usability and comfort, etc. But, you’ve got the idea, keep it wide enough!

2. Place your content in a way so as to focus on all important elements.

Since screen size is always a critical factor that determines the amount of exposure your viewer can have; it is always advisable to place crucial content in the right places. If there is an important element on your website that you want to make visible immediately, especially with the ones that affect conversion rates, always make it noticeable immediately to the user.

It could well mean that you would have to enlarge it amidst other insignificant elements, or place it in key areas, but CTA location will be the key to your conversion rates.

3. Minimize the content; make it simple, consistent and easily navigable.

Due to screen-size constraints, it is not easy for a mobile user to navigate through a website. Hence, it is of paramount importance that content should be prioritized, and a landing page loaded with excessive content should be avoided.

All links and action buttons should lead the user to the heart of information, making a clear path to the actions you want the user to perform.

Users may not have enough patience to go through large chunks of text to arrive at information about content they are looking specifically for. However, as always, a picture says a thousand words instead. It is very advisable to convey messages through highly appealing graphics.

4. Make navigation easy and simple.

Navigation features should be made as simple as possible. To have content throughout the website readily accessible to the user, you have to include a search bar, back-to-home, menu options and other significant buttons in the right places for easy navigation.

Action buttons should be of prominent and noticeable sizes, and they should have enough spacing to actually have the users scroll comfortably using their fingers.

5. Scalability issues across screen sizes should not be neglected.

An example of a responsive website

Even though it is equally important, by scalability, I don’t mean the ability of a website to handle the traffic. It is disappointing to have a webpage that doesn’t scale to all mobile devices since there are at least over 500 different screen sizes between Android, iPhone, Windows, Blackberry and tablets, thus making it difficult to have a truly optimized landing page for all mobile phones.

New paradigms such as responsive design really help in making sure the website is displayed perfectly across different screen sizes.

6. Make sure your page scales to both landscape and portrait views.

Tilt in a mobile device is a regularly used function, so do not assume that your visitors will only view your website in the portrait mode. Also ensure that your webpage is coded on technologies like HTML and not on Flash since it is not compatible with all mobile phone browsers.

7. Fonts and appearances do matter.

Although it may not seem apparent, fonts do make a significant difference to the user experience, especially when the scope of vision is limited. Only content that is strikingly different in appearance will stand out from the pack.

You must create a visually appealing effect in the minds of your readers wherein a crucial chunk of information is given its due importance.

8. Make it load faster for the reduced attention span of your user.

Unlike a bigger screen which can draw the attention of a user for a longer period of time, you do not enjoy such privileges. Hence, it is best to make your page load faster by avoiding unnecessary objects that increase page loading time such as heavy images, frames, bigger pages, flash, etc.

9. Use the geo-location of the visitor to personalize your website.

On mobiles, it is easier to get a more accurate location of the visitor than is possible on desktops. In fact, using technologies such as Geolocation API, you can get exact GPS coordinates, if available.

Now, if your business has a significant offline presence, you can do all sorts of magic, such as inviting your visitors to visit your offices or factories, if they are nearby.

Or, you could show them the location of your nearest outlet with distance from their current location. Depending on the business case, the opportunities to use the geolocation data are limitless.

10. A/B test what works best on mobiles!

Being in the A/B testing industry for years (disclaimer: I’m CEO of the company behind Visual Website Optimizer), I have come to fall in love with A/B testing, and my favorite tip has become: ignore all the tips!

Traditionally, A/B testing has been limited to the usual websites and landing pages. However, as we have seen, mobiles pose the unique constraint of their limited screen size and also provide us an extra signal of visitor geo-location.

The nine tips mentioned above should be taken as a guideline to help test your own hypotheses. It is quite likely that your visitors do not like the use of their geo-location for customizing the experience for them. Or it is also likely that you reduce text to such an extent that your visitors start feeling uncertain about your products or services.

It is very important to treat the tips as a way to generate ideas for your A/B and multivariate tests to optimize sales and conversions. With today’s tools and technologies, developing and executing A/B tests specifically for mobiles has become very easy and cost effective.

I hope you appreciated the 10 tips and that these tips may serve as a quick checklist while you go about developing your made-for-mobile webpages and landing pages. In case you think an important factor has been missed in the list, I’m happy to discuss in the comments below!

Photo is from jdhancock and used under Creative Commons license; second photo is from Wikipedia.

With more and more people having their primary Web experience on mobile devices, this platform cannot be ignored. In fact, companies that innovate specifically for mobile devices are the ones who will have an early lead for the next couple of years.

Eventually, every company will have to have a mobile strategy, so there’s no question of whether one should take mobiles seriously; the only question is when, and my answer to that would be: the sooner the better.

StatCounter’s data clearly shows how mobile share is steadily growing

There are two main aspects of mobile devices that differentiate them from desktops, laptops and other traditional computing devices. The first aspect is, of course, the portability factor. People access the Web on mobile devices when they are on the go. Hence, where they are and what they are doing becomes very pertinent to what kind of experience they expect.

The second aspect of mobiles is the screen size. Yes, with the launch of iPhone 5 and gigantic devices like Samsung Note and Galaxy SIII, I realize mobile screens are getting bigger; but they’re still nowhere near the standard 13’’-17’’ screens we have become comfortable with on our desktops and laptops.

A user experience that actually uses the constraints set by a smaller screen is the one that people would like on mobiles.

Search On The Mobiles

What I am most interested in exploring is how these two constraints affect traditional user experience on the Web. Specifically, I am interested in how search and conversion behavior changes.

Talking about search, about 15-20% of all searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc., are from mobiles. So how does search behavior change on mobiles? Let’s see!

Search Behavior Due To Location

Research by Microsoft reported that about 30% of all mobile searches have a local intent, and Google reported that 61% of searches result in a phone call. Clearly, people accessing the Web on mobiles are interested in things around them.

Search engines already do a great job of customizing search results according to the user’s location, but if you are a local business, the least you can do is to specify your business’s location on various search engine’s Web master settings.

Google’s data shows mobile search is growing too!

Search engines also pick location signals from the Title and other text present on a website. If you have a local business, it makes a lot of sense to emphasize the location on the website so the search engines will know it is an important aspect of your business and hence prioritize your website in search results whenever a user is around your location.

But what if your business is not limited to one location; can you still take advantage of a user’s location?

In such a case, you should be creating internal pages for various locations your business is present in, and you should also have a clear hierarchy starting from the homepage to signal search engines that these location specific internal pages are important, too.

Of course, the usual parameters (like speed, relevance, backlinks, etc.) that search engines consider in ranking a page still apply, but the idea is to get individual pages ranked for different locations your users may be searching from.

Search Behavior Due To Screen Size

As I said, the second aspect of search behavior is how it is affected by the small screen size we have on mobiles. There are practical and psychological constraints that change the way people search, interact with search results, and then visit the pages of interest.

The first and foremost difference between desktop and mobile search is in the paid results or advertisements. Due to the small size of the screen, typically the number of advertisements are far less on mobile devices as compared to desktops; so, organic results on mobiles become more important as compared to desktops.

Search results page on desktops

Another aspect of mobile search results is the number of results you can digest at one moment. On a typical mobile phone (I’m excluding tablets here), you would see a maximum of 3 or 4 search results above the fold.

See example below:

Search result page on mobile devices

Contrast it with the desktop, and you will realize that the attention on mobiles is concentrated on just the top three results, while on desktops you can take a broad glance and see which result interests you the most. This means getting to the top ten is no longer enough; what you are looking for is the top three.

Unlike desktops, where people sit comfortably and give a lot of time and attention to what they are searching for, mobile users are typically not in the research mode. So they are not as likely to go to page two and beyond of search results. In fact, they are more likely to refine their search terms than go on exploring the item they’re looking for.

An interesting paper from Google titled A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search presented a number of relevant findings:

• Diversity of search queries is lesser as compared to desktop, but the nature of queries is similar
• It’s harder to type on a mobile, so users won’t spend indefinite time searching for something specific; rather, they would simply try some other means of getting the information they want
• The small screen size and unnatural keypad also means that the rate of exploration is low; users typically have specific search goals on the mobile

This means that search behavior on mobiles is definitely unique, and that impacts your SEO strategy. You, of course, don’t want to sacrifice your desktop website rankings for this, so a great way is to have a separate mobile website that is structured and optimized for the mobile user experience. There are some good articles on the Web that detail this practice called (pretty straightforwardly) “Mobile SEO.”

Hope you found this article useful. In upcoming articles I will write about how user behavior changes from a conversion perspective. That is, I will be exploring how users’ behavior changes once they land on your website and why it deserves to be treated specially.

The holiday season also means you need to perform a job loved (or hated, depending on which side of fence you reside) by many: researching and purchasing gifts.

In earlier days, options for gifts were limited to 10 or 20 odd items available at your next-door mom-and-pop shop. But these days, thanks to the hyper-connected world, you can find most exotic gifts online: from instant underpants to an inflatable 6-foot alien.

The holiday season is the most important period for e-commerce websites. Last year, it was estimated that consumers spent about $38 billion online during the holiday season alone, which is about 24% of total online sales generated in 2010.

In other words, about a quarter of total yearly sales online is generated during just two months: November and December. Clearly, the holiday season is what defines most of the e-commerce companies.

A/B Testing & Conversion Rate Optimization During Holiday Season

E-commerce customers that I work with can be clearly segmented into two buckets: one who stops A/B testing completely in order to focus on holidays, the other who goes into hyper-excited mode and tries out a lot of ideas (using A/B testing) because s/he wants to make most out of holidays.

A/B testing different offers: which version increased sales by 41%?

My personal preference is to always keep testing new ideas and strategies even during the holiday season because trends change from year to year and what may have worked in 2010 may not necessarily work in 2011. Hence, the importance of testing and experimentation.

Let’s talk about five tips that you can test this holiday season to boost your online sales:

1.  Mobile website/app

Clearly, one of the most important shifts recently has been in mobile space. More and more consumers are purchasing gifts using their iPhones, iPads and Droids. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, go find an agency right now that can quickly make one for you.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can also develop your own little app/game this holiday season. Your e-commerce store should be seen where most eyeballs are, and these days they are hooked on mobiles.

2.  Split test a holiday-themed website

If you usually don’t change the look and feel of your website, try making an alternative holiday-themed website (with all bells and whistles, literally). And, if you have completely switched to a holiday theme, try split testing it against your usual website. Maybe your visitors are bored of that holiday look?

The point I’m trying to make here is that without split testing different themes on your website, you will never know which one makes your customers purchase more!

3.  A/B test different offers: free shipping, discounts, special packing, etc.

There are hundreds of special offers/promotions you can run during the holidays. Of course, the big question is which one to actually run on your website? Well, why don’t you A/B test different offers? One of our customers found out that a next-day shipping offer outperformed a $5 discount offer or a free shipping offer, and ultimately increased sales by 41%.

4.  Change default call to actions

Usually your button says “Add to cart” or “Buy now,” why don’t you A/B test them against “Gift Now” or even something unusual such as “Add to your Santa list.” Visitors are usually in an upbeat mood during the holidays, and a little creativity will go a long way in amusing them (and hence making them buy more).

5.  Segment and personalize

If you kept track of what a particular visitor bought last year, you can use that information to personalize and recommend new items this time. This may be little difficult if you don’t have a personalization platform already running on your website, but doing simple segmentation and targeting should be easy (using an off-the-shelf tool or in-house coding).

Try showing different items on the homepage depending on whether the visitor uses MacOS or Windows, visits during work or in the evening, arrives from Facebook or a search engine. Other numerous variables can help you do first level of personalization quite easily, thereby increasing your conversions and sales.

This holiday season, I hope you try these ideas on your website and pleasantly see your sales break all previous records.

Photo from colonelchi. Used under Creative Commons license

Another reason why A/B testing is so important for e-commerce websites is because their conversion goal is not some indirect metric such as leads or downloads but a direct sale.

They can measure impact of the changes they do directly in terms of revenue. If tweaking some element on website increases average order value or revenue per visitor, it gives a direct push to company’s bottomline.

Since there are practically infinite number of elements that e-commerce websites can test, for now, I will discuss four of the most important ones and back them with case studies found on the Internet and from my company’s customers.

If you are part of an e-commerce website and are not A/B testing, then you should start doing right away. As you will see from case studies linked below, A/B testing has a very high ROI.

Testing Area #1: Call-to-Action Buttons

Testing call-to-action buttons: this version increased sales by 6.3%

The buy now button (or call-to-action button as it is often called) is perhaps the most important element that an e-commerce website should be testing. There are various reasons why your existing buy now button may not be working well.

It may not be noticeable or it may not be very motivating or perhaps your visitors don’t even realize it is a Buy Now button (if you happen to use some uncommon terminology such as Purchase). There are various elements of the button that you can test to improve conversions:

• Button color and size: Larger and brighter generally works better. See this case study where red colored link increased conversions by 53%
• Button placement: TaylorGifts increased clicks on the button by 10% simply by bringing add-to-cart button and pricing closer
• Button text: RIPT Apparel, an online clothing store, increased sales by 6.3% simply by changing text on their buttons to convey limited time offers

Testing Area #2: Pricing, Discounts or Shipping Strategies

Testing shipping and discount strategies: first variation increased sales by 41%

Various pricing strategies can be tested to motivate the prospective window-shopper to complete a successful sale. Even though testing pricing is hard and risky, there are ways to do it right. If you setup your price test correctly, you can gain a lot of insight into your visitor behavior.

For example, you can test ideas such as:

• Ending prices with .95, .97 or .99: there are various primers on psychological testing that you can read and accordingly test on your website.
• Design of pricing box: the way you show pricing can have a lot of impact. Is it to the left of product image or is it to the right? Is it closer to add-to-cart button? Do you have money back guarantee written next to your pricing?

You can also test your discount or shipping strategies.

For example, SmileyCookie, an online cookie store, found out that their customer don’t care as much about free shipping or discounts, as they care about next-day shipping. In fact, just by changing the policy that they display on al pages, they managed to increase sales by 41%.

Testing Area #3: Product Display & Search Results

Adding a new category menu (to the left) increased conversions by 34%

Which products to show on homepage? In a particular category, do you show bestsellers or do you show newest products? Which product categories to show in the menu? These are some of the questions that you can answer via A/B testing.

Visitors respond to different products differently and as a marketer it is incredibly hard to guess which mix of products will produce maximum revenue. If you think you know it all and your e-commerce website has right product mix, read this case study on Mobal, who increased total sales by 27% just by adding a new product to the mix.

Similarly, you can test the default order of search results or number of search results to show. You can even test whether product recommendations increases revenue (by making them purchase more) or decreases revenue (by confusing them with too many choices).

Testing Area #4: Checkout Page

Reducing number of input fields on checkout page led to 25% less abandonments

Visitors are so close to making the purchase, yet they sometimes abandon their shopping on the checkout page.

It is like going to a supermarket, adding products and then dragging the cart towards the payment counter before simply running away towards the exit gate deciding not to purchase the stuff.

Nobody does that in real world, so why do visitors do this online? Well, shopping cart abandonment is real and there are various reasons for it. Perhaps visitors don’t trust you or perhaps you added a surprise cost (tax or shipping). Or simply perhaps you require your visitors to create a login before completing the checkout. (All of these reasons are not valid in offline retail world)

Various ideas that e-commerce websites can use to A/B test on checkout page are:

• Including or excluding a trust seal/badge. Slideshop added a trust badge and increased sales by 15%, while ICouponBlog removed a trust badge and increased conversions. This shows there is no definite answer and you must A/B test.
• Removing unnecessary input fields and providing overview of order. That’s exactly what ReplaceDirect tested on their checkout page and they successfully decreased cart abandonments by 25%

There are many more ideas on what you can test on checkout page. The GetElastic blog has a wonderful article on 12 checkout blunders that you must read.

There are, however, numerous other ignored opportunities that marketers seldom look at with an eye to increase overall sales and conversions.

In this article, I am going to talk about five of those ignored opportunities that you can exploit to see a boost in conversion rate.

404 Error Pages

Error pages are perhaps the most neglected aspect of a website. Microsoft estimated that 2-10% of total site traffic arrives on an error page. This is a significant number and interestingly, many marketers ignore this traffic. There are some excellent guides on the Internet to help you make most of the 404 traffic, but here are some general tips:

• Provide search functionality so that users can easily find out what they were looking for
• Display a list of top visited pages on your website
• Display your contact information or offer live chat on 404 error pages

Conversion Optimization On Flash Elements

Many websites have Flash elements. These may be banners, buttons, videos or other interactive elements. However, these elements rarely get A/B tested because it is not very straightforward to setup a test on Flash. Just like other HTML elements on the page, testing Flash is crucial if you are serious about increasing conversion rate.

Consider following scenarios where the opportunity for conversion optimization is usually ignored:

• For Flash based video players, do you measure which ‘Play’ buttons work best and how long the visitor watches a video?
• For Flash based banners, do you measure which parts visitors usually click on and which they ignore?
• Do you track clicks on flash based buttons or test call to action text?

Thank You Pages

It’s usually considered that once the user has made a conversion (such as a purchase or a signup) the job of a marketer is over. But if user was motivated to do one conversion, surely he can do more as well.

In fact, thank you pages are one of the best opportunities on your website to upsell and cross sell. Unfortunately, most e-commerce sites thank you pages are bland. At best, they would simply provide an order summary and their contact details.

My recommendation is to optimize thank you pages even further with the following tips:

• Consider providing a discount for their next purchases. Many “offline” businesses (notably pizza joints) could give you discount coupons on your purchase that can be redeemed on next purchase. Your thank you page surely can perform a similar (or even better) job.
• If you are selling product, consider selling some services associated with it. Or, consider selling add-ons like faster delivery or better packaging as an option on Thank You page.
• At the very least, offer a newsletter subscription option on your Thank You pages so your customers can keep up with product updates and other announcements.

Support Pages

Not many marketers consider support section of their website as an opportunity to increase conversions. Instead, support pages are seen as purely informational channels designed to help solve customers’ problems.

It is true that solving customer problems is indeed support section’s primary functionality. However, a satisfied customer on a relevant support page provides a great opportunity to upsell and cross sell.

Most of the conversion optimization tips relevant to Thank You pages can be applied to support pages as well (in both cases the visitor is usually a customer):

• Announce your new and upcoming products
• Entice customers with freebies to signup for your newsletter

While not directly relevant to increasing conversions, you should also measure the performance of your knowledgebase in terms of how successful they are in terms of answering your customers’ problems. Every email or phone call your knowledgebase prevents is a significant cost savings for you.

Business Cards

Yes, this one is as unconventional as it can get! Every employee in your organization has business cards that are usually freely exchange in a professional context. Even though business cards are widely distributed, it is seldom seen as a medium for conversion rate optimization.

Again, like support pages, it is true that primary functionality of business cards is informational. However, back of a business card provides with a blank canvas where you can put your message to improve conversions.

Consider following ideas to improve conversions from a business card:

• Provide a discount coupon printed on a card which can be redeemed on your website
• Treat back of a business card as a landing page. Put customer logos and perhaps some case studies as well. Of course, given the limited space you will have to be creative
• Promise a freebie if they signup for your newsletter on your website (don’t forget to mention the number of subscribers. It serves as social proof!)

Summing It All

There are numerous other places that you can optimize for conversions. It all boils down to being creative and A/B testing relentlessly all of the touch-points you have with your customers and prospects.

Photo from kenteegarden. Used under Creative Commons license.

It’s true that testing all parts of a landing page is the only way to optimize conversions but many times, there are low hanging optimization opportunities that can be addressed right away.

Again and again, in hundreds of A/B tests, I have seen marketers fix these low hanging opportunities and increase conversions dramatically. Note that I am not saying these are the only fixes you can make, but in my opinion, many landing pages on the web have not even done this level one of optimization. So, if you have a landing page and are feeling giddy to test something, here’s what you should start with.

Headlines Are More Important Than You Think

Headlines would be unimportant if visitors on the Web had the patience of a cow. It would be an ideal world if they end up spending hours just to understand your offering. Sadly, visitors have short attention span and are typically considering multiple offerings (from competitors) simultaneously.

Within first few seconds, if your headline doesn’t talk about what you are offering, most visitors are going to bounce. The job of a headline is to convey visitor what the offering is and convince him to spend further time on the landing page.

If you want to test headlines, start with these best practices:

• Have a headline. I’m surprised to see how many landing pages lack headlines. If you don’t have one, try including one.
• Headline should be concrete. Don’t talk about “How we have revolutionized XYZ” or “Welcome to Bob’s ABC site” or “Be ready to be amazed”. Simply talk about what your offering is about. Maybe something like: “Social media monitoring for Fortune 500 companies”.
• Headline should be the first thing a visitor looks at. If you have a small headline or one with poor contrast, that defeats the point. Have a large, prominent block of text that you can actually call a headline.

There are some detailed case studies from our customers who tested headlines and increased conversion rate. Have a look:

• 127% increase in conversions by doing a headline change
• Single headline change increased conversions by 90%

Call To Action Buttons: Probably The Easiest Way To Increase Conversions

Visitors have low attention spans and don’t like to think too much while surfing the Web. That’s the assumption you have to take while designing and optimizing a landing page. The job of call to action button, as the name suggests, is to scream on the landing page and ask for visitor to take some action.

If you want to fix call to action buttons, follow the guidelines below.

Many of our customers have tested their call to action buttons. Here are some of the prominent case studies:

• Don’t have too many calls to action. When you enter a retail store, imagine if multiple sales people compete for your attention. Would you feel comfortable shopping in such a store? I guess not. Similar case holds for landing pages as well. If you have multiple calls to action (like “Signup for trial”, “Download whitepaper” and “Newsletter signup” on the same page), you are going to confuse visitor on what should s/he be doing next. Try minimizing number of calls to action. The ideal is just one no-brainer call to action.
• Have an actionable call to action. Having dull calls to action like “Submit” or “Click here” does not excite and inform any visitor. Try to incorporate benefits into the call to action itself. Something like: “Get Started Now for Free”, “Buy now to save $25″ or “Join 25,000 other customers”. Learn the art of good copywriting and apply it on your call to action.
• Have a big, prominent, visible call to action. You don’t want visitors to specifically look for a call to action on a page. It should jump right before their eyes. This is a reason why in repeated A/B tests, it has been found that red colored call to actions (on a white background) work much better as compared to dull colors.

Many of our customers have tested their call to action buttons. Here are some of the prominent case studies:

• Two magical words improve conversion rate by 28%
• A simple change in Buy Now button increased sales by 6.3%
• Red link boosts clickthroughs by over 53%

Social Proof: The Rarely Used Magic Tonic For Landing Pages

After fixing headlines and call to action button, it’s time to introduce some social proof on your landing page. In spite of working so well in removing fear and hesitation from visitors’ minds, social proof is rarely displayed on landing pages. It is very important that some kind of assurance is given to the visitor. And social proof does a great job of doing that.

Once a visitor is convinced that the offering is relevant to his needs, he wants to understand who else has been using it. He wants to know whether you are an established brand with thousands of customers or an upstart one person business.

Social proof allays all these fears by convincing the visitor that his time will not get wasted on the landing page because hundreds of other people have benefited from the offering. So, at a prominent location on a landing page (preferably above page fold), try including social proof (can be any of the following):

• Logos or number of customers/users
• Testimonials
• Case Studies
• Media Coverage, etc.

There is one interesting case study by one of our customers where they increased sales by 34% just by including a testimonial.

Summing It All Up

Headlines, call to action button and social proof. These three elements of a landing page are low hanging opportunities that all marketers can utilize to increase conversion rate. But a key point to note here is that these are opportunities for testing and not a guarantee of increasing conversion rate. There are many examples on the Internet where landing pages perform well even when they have poor headlines, small call to action buttons and no social proof at all.

Hence start testing using the ideas in this post but don’t take them for granted!