Posted by:
David Dittman
June 30, 2007
Issue #165
I hope all you guys had a great week and are ready for another power packed installment of Working IT Out!
This issue is going to be nuts!
We’re diving head first into landing page design and how we can effectively use some simple guidelines to streamline our site.
In this issue:
- Hard earned secrets from Clayton himself …
- Why most landing pages don’t get the conversions they deserve …
- Some simple guidelines you can use to start making your landing pages better …
- And much, much more!
This week I’m going to give you the fly on the wall perspective of what Clayton and I talk about when discussing landing page layout.
One great thing about working with a copywriting legend is that you get little tidbits of information at every turn and often when you least expect it.
John and I sometimes shake our heads in amazement after Clayton comes down from a hard day at work and in no time flat, takes the problems that we had and reduces them to rubble with a seemingly easy solution.
Although easy is a relative word; what’s easy to him would’ve taken John and I all day, if ever to come up with.
My plan this week is to take a couple of the gems that I’ve learned about laying out a landing page for the Web.
One key concept that has really sunk in with me was that I had to always take into account the reader’s experience as they’re going through the webpage.
The Reader’s Experience is KEY
Taking into account the fact that readability is our biggest key, let’s identify a few different tactics that need to be practiced when you design your landing page.
Let’s start our project the best way I know how. Let’s come up with a readability plan.
Truly the key to all projects and designing a landing page isn’t any different, it’s that you have to have a plan. It’s OK to abandon the plan midstream or change it altogether but, having a good starting direction is the key because as we have all found out the hardest thing in most projects is starting it.
For me I usually go about this one of two ways.
- Use print sample of what I want to turn into a webpage.
- Find a webpage that I want to emulate.
Either way the goal here is not to steal somebody else’s design but, to give you a clear plan of attack and maybe push your mind into new directions along the way.
I usually find myself laying out a webpage that was originally a print version. So I’m going to go through the process I use when doing so.
The first thing we need to do is come up with the general layout of the webpage. As we think about our layout we have to go through the direct mail piece and find which parts we can and can’t use. We also have to come up with a list of what parts need to be redesigned.
For example, many direct-mail packages have entire pages devoted to testimonials. When you break up the running copy by spanning the testimonials across the whole page, you present the problem of breaking the natural flow of a reader and it’s usually more of a distraction and makes the transition back into the copy difficult.
An easy solution is to take the testimonials and use them in a sidebar.
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Posted by:
Julie McManus
June 29, 2007
Issue #164
Dear Business Builder,
Happy Friday and welcome back to In the ‘Net Trenches.
What a fantastic vacation we had last week in St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. St. John is the smallest of the U.S. Virgin Islands (about the size of Manhattan) and the Virgin Islands National Park covers nearly three-quarters of the island.
The Island has some of the most beautiful white sand beaches and crystal clear blue water I’ve ever seen. And incredible reefs right off the beach for really easy snorkeling.
And my kids had a blast. In one of my past issues, I’d written how my daughter was apprehensive about taking a vacation on an island … especially one you could only get to by ferry boat. Well, I’m happy to say the closer we got to the vacation the more excited she got. By the time we got to the ferry part of our trip she was so distracted playing with a little boy she met on the dock … she might as well have been traveling by car.
In fact, I’m the one that actually got sea sick! The trip over from St. Thomas to St. John takes about 45 minutes and the seas were quite a bit rougher than I expected. By the time we pulled into the dock at the Westin Resort, I was one step away from turning a lovely shade of lime green.
A Marketing Lesson Where
You Least Expect It!
The Westin on St. John is a fantastic resort. An incredible quarter acre pool … tennis courts … a nice little beach … great food … workout room … kids club … you name it, the Westin has it going on. And, it has fantastic hillside villas overlooking the bay that we stayed in.
We met quite a few people on our trip from all over the States and many of them choose to come back to the Westin St. John over and over again. I even overhead one woman saying that she and her husband spend three weeks a year there and would never go anywhere else!
That’s customer loyalty at its finest and I have no doubt the Westin’s hospitality program has a lot to do with it.
One of the hardest yet most important things to do is retain customers … no matter whether you’re marketing an online or offline business. Today’s consumer is extremely price conscious and the Internet makes comparison shopping as easy as pressing a few keys.
It’s very expensive to get a new customer, but once you have them … you need to do whatever it takes to keep them because selling to your back end is where the real revenue comes from.
But what can you do to ensure your customers don’t head on over to another site selling similar wares or drive across town for a better bargain?
Let’s take a closer look at what the Westin St. John is doing and maybe it’ll spark some ideas …
Surprise and Delights
Around Every Corner!
The surprise and delights started the minute we got to baggage claim in St. Thomas. Now, I don’t know how much time you’ve spent in Caribbean Island airports, but they aren’t exactly like in the States.
They’re teeny little airports and once you hit the baggage claim you’re basically outside and it’s time to sweat buckets. They’re cramped and there are usually just one or two baggage conveyors so multiple flights’ luggage is mixed together with several hundred people all trying to claim the same damn red suitcase (my husband’s words).
So imagine our delight – as we come off the plane and head down to the sweltering hot baggage claim with two hungry and cranky kids – to find a small air conditioned, nicely decorated lounge with comfy couches, a refrigerator full of free water, a basket full of toys and a shelf full of books for the kids, all for guests staying at the Westin.
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Posted by:
Michael Masterson
June 28, 2007
Issue #163
"We are moving toward a global economy. One way of approaching that is to pull the covers over your head. Another is to say: It may be more complicated – but that’s the world I am going to live in, I might as well be good at it."
– Phil Condit
If you can develop a product or service that sells well in Bangor, Maine … why couldn’t you also sell it in Toulouse, France or Bonne, Germany ?
This is what BB did. Twelve years ago - when his publishing company was in the $30 million to $50 million range - he moved to London, where he bought into a foundering newsletter marketing business. By applying the lessons he’d learned in the States to England’s market and hiring and training great local talent, he built up a valuable, profitable $20 million ancillary business.
From England, BB branched out into Germany, France, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, and Australia. Today, the international side of his business is about as large as the entire business was 12 years ago. That’s a great deal of growth in a relatively short length of time. It happened because BB was able to transfer successful products, procedures, and marketing protocols to new markets quickly.
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
June 27, 2007
Issue #162
In this issue:
- How electronics manufacturers and software developers discount without discounting …
- How to buy money for pennies on the dollar and pay your customers the face value to buy your products …
- How info-marketers can create powerful sales incentives and reward their best customers with FREE MONEY …
- And more!
Dear Web Business Builder,
Electronics manufacturers and software developers have been offering mail-in rebates for years. It’s great marketing, because it allows you to offer a price incentive for pennies on the dollar. How so?
Picture The Family Guy walking into a Best Buy store and getting all misty-eyed over a brand new home theatre system. He sees the “after mail in rebate” price, and it gives him a reason to buy right away. Before he even leaves the store he’s thinking about how much furniture he can rent with his rebate check.
Meanwhile, the manufacturer is laughing all the way to the bank. Why? Because somewhere between obtaining the rebate form … cutting out the UPC code … finding an envelope … photocopying the receipt … and mailing the whole thing away … plenty of people just say “oh screw it”, and never bother to redeem their rebate … or they just forget.
Only about 20% of these babies on average get redeemed …
Let’s look at the numbers. Manufacturer A offers its home theatre system at $599. Manufacturer B offers its at $499 after $100 mail-in rebate.
Manufacturer B ends up selling 50% more units, but since only 20% of the people who bought during the promotion bothered to claim their rebate, manufacturer B sold its home theatre system for an average of around $579 per unit, only $20 less than manufacturer A.
It’s like free money!
The impact on a company’s bottom line can be startling. Wall Street was stunned recently when digital video recorder maker TIVO reported quarterly losses of $5 million less than expected, the result of 50,000 new subscribers failing to redeem their mail-in rebates.
How to buy money
for pennies on the dollar
and pay your customers the face value
to buy your products …
I got to thinking. Could rebates be applied profitably in other industries were they’re not already prevalent?
After all, most entrepreneurial fortunes are made without brand new ideas. Instead, entrepreneurs tend to twist, combine and alter proven winners, often transplanting them from one industry to the next.
Well it turns out the electronics industry’s dirty little secret is already out of the bag. There are now companies out there that underwrite rebates and sell them to other companies. If you sell a high-ticket item, these companies will sell you cash rebates for pennies on the dollar, which you can then offer your prospective clients as incentives to purchase.
Suppose you’re a realtor. Clinch the deal by offering a seller a cash reward for listing with you when the deal closes. Running a marina? Ace the competition by offering a cash reward when someone buys a big expensive boat from you. Selling mortgages? Have borrowers tripping over each other to sign on your dotted line by offering a huge cash incentive.
And these aren’t chintzy $50 or $100 rewards either. You can buy big monster size cash rewards of up to $10,000, for as little as $1,750. How does it work?
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
June 25, 2007
Issue #160
Dear Business Builder,
I’m up to my eyeballs in copy cubs, and I love ‘em to death.
Every blessed one of them is a brilliant, gifted, fresh-faced kid with a big dream in his or her heart and an obsession for copywriting. And frankly, I’m convinced that each one of them will go farther and have far greater successes than I have.
For one thing, they’re smarter than me … better educated than I am … and they already know far more about copywriting than I ever will.
They’ve devoured every copywriting course, book, seminar and e-zine they’ve been able to lay their hands on.
They’ve gobbled up copywriting rules, maxims, proverbs, templates and formulas like an army of starving Sumo wrestlers chowing down at a free buffet.
They’ve perused every new swipe and every new insight as passionately as a furloughed sailor chases skirts.
They can quote Hopkins, Caples, Reeves, Ogilvy and Schwartz chapter and verse. They can recite everything Bencivenga, Halbert, Carlton, Masterson and Makepeace have ever written.
They remind me of race horses in the starting gate … champing at the bit … pawing the ground … every creative muscle in their bodies tensed, flexed and ready to explode into action at the slightest twitch of the starter’s trigger finger.
… And the same damned thing happens every time I give one of them his or her first assignment:
KABLOOEY! Their heads explode.
I can see the train wreck that’s sure to follow even as we discuss their first assignment:
The frenzied note-taking …
The tortured expressions on their young faces as they mentally juggle dozens of complex, seemingly contradictory rules they’ve learned by heart …
The numbness in their eyes as they consider the massive emotional and financial rewards they imagine will follow if they get this right – and the consequences (too horrific to contemplate) if they screw this up.
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