Nobody likes to mess up, but we’ve all been there. And what sets truly remarkable marketers apart from everyone else isn’t that they don’t ever make mistakes. They do. It’s just that they learn from their failures. 

As Barack Obama put it, “You can’t let your failures define you. You have to let your failures teach you.” (Thanks, Obama. No, really. Thank you.) 

With that in mind, we asked 11 experienced marketers to share what they’ve learned from their past blunders. These pros are living proof that we can learn as much from those times things didn’t go our way as we can from our biggest wins. As you’ll see, getting it wrong helped them grow their business, develop a customer-focused philosophy, improve their abilities as a leader, and much more.

So let’s dive right in.

Jump Straight to a Lesson Learned from a Marketing Fail

1. Target the Right Keywords
2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing
3. Put QA Checks in Place
4. Add Automated Checks When You QA
5. Validate New Ideas with Customer Research
6. Test One Change At a Time
7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations
8. Create Clear Content Briefs
9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team
10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact
11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

1. Target the Right Keywords

Every marketer knows the value of organic keywords. Understanding what your target audience is searching for (and how you can rank for specific keywords) can help you optimize your campaigns and develop an effective SEO strategy. 

But what if a piece of content doesn’t rank at all? What if it ends up ten pages deep in the SERPs? What if it forever sinks to the deep Mariana Trench of Google?

Take Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. He spent over 20 hours on a 4,100+ word article (and a 12-minute video) only to have it fail as a piece of organic content. He figured he’d optimize it for a popular phrase, get it to rank, and win a steady stream of traffic. But that never happened. 

Andy owns up to why he failed:

I didn’t dig in deep enough while checking competition. As it turns out, the high ranking pages have huge numbers of inbound links. Even though the difficulty score was low, the linking root domain numbers were off the charts. But I never checked.

Andy learned a powerful lesson: your content won’t rank by magic.

You need to put hard work into targeting the right phrases that can compound traffic over time. To avoid losing your content in Google search obscurity, take the time to research the keywords you want to target first. 

And don’t just look at search volume. Make sure you check out how your competitors rank to ensure you’re ready to take them on. You want to know if you’re going up against the Mohammed Ali of content before you throw your hat into the ring.

2. Develop Buyer Personas to Inform Your Marketing

Buyer personas go hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy. They’re the needle to your strategy’s thread. The arrow to your bow. The Kim to your Kanye. (You see where I’m going with this.) 

Defining the ideal customer audience you want to attract will help you market to them in the best way possible. However, to build robust, accurate buyer personas, you need one thing: data. 

Early on in his career, Brandon Gains, VP of marketing at MonetizeMore, created personas from gut-feeling alone. He didn’t validate them through qualitative research, surveys, and interviews. And without a formal process to gather internal and external data points, he failed to involve a large customer base in his company’s marketing and product direction. 

But to get internal buy-in from department heads, he needed more than his gut feeling. He needed to fix how his company crafted buyer personas:

We reignited our user research process and developed more of a scientific approach that incorporates internal and external research into concrete deliverables that I use across the company.

Like Brandon says, you need to ground your buyer personas in research and data—a.k.a. the real world (and, no, not the MTV version). Even though it’s nitty-gritty work, setting up customer interviews and internal discussions across your sales, customer success, product, and marketing teams will pay off in the long run. You’ll be able to better determine your objectives and anticipate consumer needs. 

3. Put QA Checks in Place

Quality assurance is one step you should never skip, but it’s also the one you’ll be most tempted to skip. Don’t do it. Resist the urge. QA is key for ensuring a high-performing campaign.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes: how would you feel if you clicked on a link that went to a nonexistent page? Frustrated or annoyed? Definitely. Content with typos and broken links can create a bad first impression.

It’s what happened to Scott McLeod, chief of staff at Resident. He learned the hard way about the importance of QAing after running ads to a landing page that didn’t load. (It’s a big no-no considering you need to ensure your site loads as quickly as possible.)

His advice? Be extra mindful to check that you inspect every aspect of your campaign. Or, to put it another (bigger, bolder) way:

You need to provide a seamless user experience for your customers that will make ’em love you. Treat it like a first date: you want to please your prospects from the get-go so they’ll have more reason to want to keep dating you. (And maybe even marry you.) 

We specifically have the team follow from ad to checkout, especially for major sales or mass communications … Creating redundancy in the QA process or review process leads to less mishaps.

When you have ten other things to do, it can be tempting to call something done without going through the crucial last step of QAing it. But ensuring you take this time will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

4. Add Automated Checks When You QA

While Scott recommends running QA checks, Derric Haynie, chief ecommerce technologist at Ecommerce Tech, takes it one step further. He suggests using automated checks to protect you from tiny errors that can cost you your ad spend. The best marketers do this to provide the best post-click experience from ad to landing page.

This realization didn’t come to Derric immediately, though. It’s something he learned after running a PPC campaign that drove to a dead 404 page. A small oversight that meant throwing $10K down the drain. (In McDonald’s terms, it’s equal to 40,000 Chicken McNuggets. A whole lotta nugs.)

Luckily, Google Ads includes final URLs to help make sure your ads are leading your prospects to the right landing page. Derric uses this field, especially for dynamic ads.

Nowadays, I’m using Google’s ‘Final URL’ column and either copy/pasting or exporting all the URLs to check the final destination works. They now have a landing page validation checker built in.

Incorporate automated QA checks into your process wherever you can. You’ll minimize human error, and might even have some budget left over for a 10-piece McNugget. 

5. Validate New Ideas With Customer Research

These days, data needs to be the driving force behind any marketing strategy. It’s a must-have for any business’s growth and success. (If Obi-Wan Kenobi were a marketer, I’m sure he’d want you to use the data force.) 

But don’t take my word for it. Here’s Google:

Ask any great marketer, and they’ll tell you that they don’t make business decisions without the data to back it. It’s a best practice, but one we can easily forget.

Marc Bitanga, Founder & Managing Director at Discoverable Media, almost committed an epic fail because a key stakeholder of a media company was determined to make a drastic change to their website without the data to support it. 

The stakeholder thought the change would lead to a big win. Marc, on the other hand, felt like it wasn’t a good idea. Working with his UX team, he conducted research to confirm his hunch. He recorded real-life feedback sessions with customers to validate the stakeholder’s requirements.

Turns out Marc’s intuition was right: the proposed changes would have led to a bad experience for website visitors. If anything, Marc is a prime example of why research is the key to making informed decisions. And Marc has learned his lesson:

I avoid similar fails today by conducting as much customer research as possible to improve customer centricity.

Remember to keep your customers at the heart of every marketing idea and decision so that you can determine if an idea is viable or not. It’s frequently the difference between crash-and-burn ideas and successful ones.

6. Test One Change at a Time

Great marketing comes from testing, analyzing, and iterating based on results. (It’s an art and a science.) As marketers, we’re always busy pushing campaigns out the door, but we need to remind ourselves not to get in over our heads. When testing, that means taking a step back and making changes one at a time, versus all at once. 

For instance, Casie Gillette, senior director of digital marketing at KoMarketing, redesigned a big website for a client that involved a ton of changes at once. Everything from updating URLs, switching CMS systems, and updating content. Her mistake?

We hadn’t tested moving a site to HTTPS and changing all of the URLs and content at the same time.

The modifications led to a massive loss in qualified traffic and leads all at once, plus a host of pesky technical issues. Casie knew page content revisions and testing were both necessary to improve relevance and ranking. To increase conversions, her team tested on-page tags, created guides to compete in SERPs, and even optimized their landing pages with CTAs, banners, and forms.

It was basically an all-out blitz to find what was working and how to replicate it across the site … It really came down to consistency, testing, and replication.

There’s no magical one-size-fits-all recipe for success. But you can focus your testing efforts rather than tackling everything at once. That way, you can identify what works and what doesn’t. (It’s a testing best practice.)

7. Set Realistic Goals and Expectations

Goals are the building blocks for any marketer. They provide clarity and guidance for when you start putting together a marketing strategy and action plan. But making sure your goals are well-defined and realistic is often easier said than done, especially if you’re ambitious.

Sphoorti Bhandare, PR and content whisperer—yep, you read that right—prepared for a big store launch one month in advance. Despite her proactive planning, though, things started to fall apart one by one a week before they were set to go live.

With little time and no contingency plan, Sphoorti postponed the launch. While not ideal, it did help her realize where she failed:

We hugely underestimated the effort required to make the launch successful and didn’t really write down a crisis communication plan for worst-case scenarios.

Many things can go wrong on a marketing campaign. When you start a new project, ask yourself: do I have the time, resources, and budget I need to accomplish everything? Then set specific, realistic marketing goals and inform everyone of them. 

The biggest lesson I took from this was to set realistic goals and expectations and consistently monitor them. Not only for the marketing team, but for every department, vendor, and executive involved.

Having a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve can help hold you and your team accountable within a given time frame. If you aren’t able to reach your goals in the end, that’s OK. The beauty of goal-setting is taking a step back and seeing how or where you can improve next time.

8. Create Clear Content Briefs

You’ve got your strategy. You’ve got your buyer personas. Now you’ve got to whip together some content that supports this overall strategy and speaks directly to your buyers. Before you do anything, sitting down to create a clear content brief is one of the smartest time investments you can make. 

(Believe me, you’ll thank yourself later.)

The best marketers would agree that a content brief can paint a clear picture for anyone you work with. Taru Bhargava of Foundation Marketing is one of them. 

When she first started out as a content marketer, Taru commissioned freelance writers to contribute long-form articles. To save time, she only provided them with a topic. Little did she know that this approach would backfire. 

Guess what? The lack of a detailed brief resulted in commissioned articles that suffered in quality. And, even more importantly, it turned into an enormous waste of time and effort. Realizing her blunder, Taru now follows a framework to include everything that’s required for someone to know before they create any content—the voice and tone, target audience, competitors, keywords, internal links, and more. 

Sticking to a content brief and overcommunicating the expectations is always a good strategy when working with freelancers … Providing them with as much info as possible in the first go is the best way to avoid the to & fro of edits.

Creating a content brief as your north star helps everyone understand what you want to accomplish with a piece of content. A brief can take the guesswork out of content creation, saving you time and money. 

9. Promote Visibility Within Your Team

We live in a fast-paced marketing world. Timelines fluctuate. Campaigns change. Requests from different stakeholders come at any given moment. Communicating these changes to every member of your team can be a significant challenge.

For example, Eric Siu, CEO of Single Grain, made a $500K deal to run a promotional campaign for a SaaS company. The problem? He didn’t tell his team, which left everyone scrambling at the last minute when orders started rolling in. Oops. You can imagine his colleagues weren’t too happy.

Eric admits he failed, but shares what he took away from the experience:

I learned that inter-departmental communication is important. It was a marketing fail, yes. But because so much of marketing is evangelizing your own marketing within the company, I lost respect and trust.

Making others aware of the work you’re doing—especially if that work involves them—is the key. When there’s so many tasks on the go, we need to hear something several times before we process it. Be extra clear and overcommunicate, so no one you’re working with gets caught by surprise. Then keep open lines of communication between you and any team you’re working with.

10. Prioritize Projects Based on Potential Impact

Managing a laundry list of priorities is probably nothing new to you. You’ve got top-level business objectives, departmental strategic initiatives, and marketing priorities to think about. But selecting the priorities that will have the greatest impact can be very tricky—especially when you have pressure from stakeholders to pursue certain projects.  

Back in 2018, the Unbounce content team wondered if Call to Action Conference might warrant a digital magazine-style recap. We wanted to write recap material to extend the lifespan of the live event. And we were inspired by Montreal’s G2 conference and the amazing, physical print book their organizers use to commemorate the experience.

Excited, the Unbounce team jumped at the chance to create a ‘zine. But, as Unbounce’s Head of Content Marketing, Jennifer Pepper, says, “there were several other content projects I should have prioritized instead. Despite eagerness and stakeholders hoping to squeeze the most reuse out of our live event, there were more pressing content priorities and I should have a) trusted my gut and b) made a more solid case for working on the projects I knew could have a greater overall payoff for the business.”

Jen now prioritizes far more ruthlessly, having learned to advocate for the right work more vocally. Her ultimate takeaway?

If you own prioritization, it’s up to you to uncover the opportunities and make sure you’re making the strongest case to stakeholders on the right stuff to create. As a content lead, it’s about how you can educate stakeholders so they understand why some things are more worthy of your team’s time than others.

11. Don’t Sell Yourself Short

Whether you’re leading a big marketing team or just part of one, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. Different experts have different opinions, and not everybody is right 100% of the time. How do you manage them?

Kasey Bayne, head of marketing at DataTrue, faced a difficult situation early in her career. Someone she was working with wanted to break into a new market by doing a big trade show. With no lead time or reputation in that industry (not to mention a very tight budget) Kasey had significant doubts. She voiced her concerns at first, but, against her better judgment, eventually agreed to the move. 

The trade show turned out to be a flop. Kasey learned a valuable lesson nonetheless. “When you are the expert or marketing leader in your team, it’s important to be strong about your recommendations,” she says.

Prepare your case, bring your data, and your experience to present a solid recommendation as best as you can without being so quick to give in to others.

No matter your age or years of experience in the industry, trust your knowledge as a marketer. Don’t be afraid to stand up for yourself and voice your concerns or suggestions. (As Marc Bitanga would say, it’s even better when you’re able to back up those arguments with data.) 

If at First You Fail, Try Again!

Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has one of those days.

From these 11 examples, we can see how even experienced, expert marketers can fail. (And fail again.) But, crucially, they transform their mistakes into insights about what not to do in the future. 

So if you happen to make a mistake—and you probably will—think of it as a learning opportunity. No need to wrap yourself in a blanket of shame; own your failures and turn them into your own personal ‘aha!’ moment. 

Go on—take chances, make mistakes, and get messy.

You’ll be in great company. 

Have marketing fails you’d like to share? Leave them in the comments below, and let us know what you learned.

So wrong.

And, yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “That’s a bullshit clickbait title, Oli.” Thing is, not only is it completely true, but the impact of this mistake is countless ROI calculations that are totally incorrect. A quick LinkedIn search for roles in marketing and advertising produced 2,282,979 results in the US and Canada alone. How many of those people are presenting the wrong numbers to their bosses and clients?

To understand what’s happening, we first need to consider how it’s happening—and why.

The Three Levels of Marketing IQ

The theme of this year’s CTAConf in September is Marketing IQ, and one of the concepts I’ll be talking about in my keynote is the three levels of marketing intelligence—each of which manifests its own version of how lead generation is done and measured.

Low IQ Marketing

This is spammy marketing that chases leads at all cost—”hacks” and “tricks” that deliver a really poor experience and produce results that aren’t useful. These are techniques that have no business in the operations of a respectable marketing team or an organization with strong core values.

Fixed IQ Marketing

This is marketing that’s good, but doesn’t go deep enough. You might have a great landing page, but you’re only measuring success by the conversion rate or the number of conversions—both of which are great metrics that are unfortunately incorrect. This leads to the inaccurate ROI calculations I mentioned earlier.

High IQ Marketing

This is marketing that takes things to a new level, going past surface-level findings to understand the true value of your generated leads. High IQ marketers apply a more intelligent method to calculating their ROI, which I’ll get to in a moment.

What Does Marketing IQ Look Like?

Here’s what I mean. All B2B lead gen campaigns will produce two types of leads that aren’t actually leads.

• Spam email addresses from form-filling bots.
• Fake email addresses from people who don’t want to be put on a list.

With this in mind, if you don’t go through your leads list and clean out the bad data, your conversion rate calculations (and hence your ROI calculations) are incorrect. You may have software to do this, which is great—but often you’ll just be working with a spreadsheet. That means you would need to manually go through to calculate how many of your leads aren’t real.

For instance, I recently ran a campaign (let’s call it Campaign X) in which 3% of the leads were spam and 8% were fake. Worse, another 36% were personal Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! email addresses, which don’t represent the ideal type of leads for marketing B2B products.

In this scenario, a low IQ marketer wouldn’t even notice (or care, frankly) that a third of their leads are junk. A fixed IQ marketer might remove the 11% (3% and 8%) of bad form fills and recalculate their conversion rate—a step in the right direction, but we can do better.

We need to think like high IQ marketers. We can improve the way we optimize our campaigns by going beyond conversion rates and considering micro metrics.

High IQ Marketing: Using Micro Metrics to Optimize Smarter

Micro metrics are a more nuanced look at what’s happening in the campaign experience. They provide us with alternative ways to measure performance—beyond the top-level conversion rate.

In Campaign X, we can consider the following three values as micro metrics that can be individually optimized:

1. The percentage of spam email addresses entered by bots.
2. The percentage of fake email addresses entered by humans.
3. The percentage of professional or branded email addresses.

In regard to the metric #3, a branded email address is one that includes the company you work for (like oli@unbounce.com), as opposed to your personal email address (such as london_oli@hotmail.com, my first and long inactive email address). This is important, because having someone’s branded email address means that you get to see which companies are signing up. Plus, when you do your follow-up email marketing, you know you’re contacting someone when they’re thinking about business (rather than sitting on the toilet checking their personal email).

If you wanted to optimize the landing page in Campaign X, you’d go through some of the normal steps of doing research coupled with ideation around possible improvements—but you might not have a strong starting position in terms of focus. By zeroing in on the micro metrics, we know exactly which aspects of behavior we’re trying to influence.

High IQ Marketing: Micro Metrics in Practice

Using micro metrics, I’ll walk through some of the optimization ideas that I implemented in Campaign X (and how they performed in an A/B test).

Optimizing Micro Metric #1: Spam Emails

In this instance, you could add a CAPTCHA or honeypot to try to prevent the spam bots getting through, but I decided to focus on optimizing metrics #2 and #3 as they presented larger opportunities.

Optimizing Micro Metric #2: Fake Emails

The goal of Campaign X was to gain access to a free landing page course, but people were entering fake emails hoping that they would get access regardless. (They did—it redirected them to the course after the form was submitted.) To fix this problem, I added a simple statement beside the email field that stated: “Enter the email address you’d like us to send the course link to.” People felt that they had to add a real email address in order to continue.

Impact: The number of fake emails dropped from 7.9% to 5%—an improvement of 35%.

Optimizing Micro Metric #3: Branded Emails

For this one, I leaned on some experimentation I did a few years ago where I tested changing the label on the email address field. In my research, I found that by rewriting “Email Address” to say “Business Email Address,” the number of branded emails went up by almost 60%. (I guess you get what you ask for.)

Impact: When I leveraged this research and applied it to Campaign X, it helped increase the number of branded emails from 66.4% to 80.8%—an increase of 21.7%.

What Can We Learn from Micro Metrics?

Earlier in my career, I’d look at a page and try to find things I could make “better” (which was largely subjective, even though it was based on 20 years of web experience) and it limited my number of successful A/B tests. By following a micro-metric approach instead, I’ve been able to learn faster and win more because I’m focused on behavior rather than perceived motivation.

If you want to improve your marketing through a better understanding of your true lead gen conversion rates, I’d suggest the following:

1. Do the manual labor of clicking through every lead you have—then count the percentage that are spam, fake, or personal (rather than branded).
2. Adjust your conversion rates and conversion counts accordingly.
3. Compare your new results to what you were previously reporting and communicate the correct numbers to your stakeholders.
4. Set up some micro metrics based on your observations and try to optimize specifically for them (rather than making the whole page “better”).

The simple but arduous task of manually inspecting your leads can provide a ton of insight that will inspire (or depress) you, depending on what you find.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

It’s not just the complexity of building a valuable product that stands out from your competitors. The nature of the software as a service (SaaS) model is that your customers need to resubscribe every month (or year, depending). And no matter how great your platform is, that’ll inevitably mean churn.

For SaaS marketers, volume is the name of the game. You need to be constantly feeding more leads into the top of the funnel—leads that your team can nurture, demo, and convert.

We marketers know that acquisition is a whole lot easier when you create compelling content that gets people interested in your product. A must-read ebook or can’t-miss webinar (gated on a high-converting, on-brand landing page) is one of your best opportunities to gather more information about your visitors and start moving them down the funnel.

But even if you’ve got amazing, gateable resources at the ready, SaaS products eat up a ton of development resources, regularly leaving marketing teams in the lurch when it comes to front-end dev. Without the capacity to build landing pages and collect leads on your own, it can be a struggle to turn your hard-earned traffic into new subscriptions.

How Can Resource-Strapped SaaS Marketers Put Lead Gen Content to Work?

Just ask Taylor. After taking over as Head of Content Marketing at Later (a leading Instagram marketing platform), she and her small team managed to:

• Independently create 26+ dedicated landing pages for each of Later’s content assets.
• Generate 100,000+ leads with the intent to nurture new subscriptions for the platform.
• Maintain an average conversion rate of roughly 60% across all of Later’s landing pages.
• Lower the brand’s cost-per-acquisition through their Facebook and Google ads.

How did Taylor and her team pull it off? We got the team on the phone to find out.

Challenge: Building Landing Pages for Gated Content—Without a Developer

Taylor joined Later near the end of 2015. As the company’s first marketing hire, she made content a core pillar of Later’s acquisition strategy.

From the beginning, Taylor and her team focused on delivering value: deep-dive advice and comprehensive how-tos for executing an effective Instagram marketing strategy. With a steady stream of awesome content (plus promotion on social), Taylor grew monthly blog visitors from thirty thousand to over a million in just two years.

That’s a whole lotta peepers, no doubt—but Later needed a way to turn those visitors into leads.

Taylor knew that pointing blog and social traffic toward landing pages with gated content would help Later collect key information about their visitors and move them onto the nurture track. Like most SaaS businesses, though, they had a small marketing team and developer resources were mostly tied up in the platform. That meant Taylor’s crew had to create landing pages on their own.

We have a small creative team. We needed landing pages for each downloadable asset, but creating and executing on each one took a long time. […] We only had one designer on our team, and web design wasn’t our strongest skill set.

If Taylor was going to realize her vision for acquisition, she needed a fast and easy way to build landing pages—without any help from developers.

The Solution: A Drag-and-Drop Builder & Quick-Start Templates

Once Taylor’s team discovered a way to build landing pages without relying on developers, it was a whole new ball game.

Unbounce’s landing page templates have allowed us to execute a lot faster. We can create tens of landing pages quickly while also maintaining a high conversion rate.

This solution solved a couple of problems for Taylor right away. For one, Unbounce’s drag-and-drop builder and functional templates made it easy for her team to assemble gorgeous, on-brand landing pages in a jiffy. That means Taylor can now launch a dedicated page for every new resource her team puts together, like educational webinars and downloadable icon sets.

By directing visitors to landing pages through calls to action on popular blog posts and across social channels, Taylor and her team can learn more about their readers (like their industry and following size) and get them into the appropriate nurture track.

Here’s an example of how Later turns their blog visitors into leads using gated content:

Unbounce has also made life way easier for Later’s Lead Communication Designer, Chin Tan.

The best thing about Unbounce is that I can quickly see what’s working and what isn’t working, and tweak it on the spot instead of having to write another line of code or planning something completely different.

The Results: 100k+ New Leads and 60%+ Conversion Rates

With landing pages built in Unbounce, Later has collected more than 100,000 leads (and counting) from their gated resources. That probably has something to do with their conversion rates, which average around 60%—well over any industry benchmark.

And because landing pages have made Later’s Google and Facebook ads more effective, Taylor says that she’s reduced the cost of nabbing those leads, too.

Our designers have created a lot of ad-specific landing pages in Unbounce, which has helped us lower the cost-per-acquisition of new leads.

Check out this recent example of Later converting on their huge social following with a simple (but valuable) gated asset:

That’s not all. Unbounce has given Taylor’s team way more insight into the effectiveness of their landing pages, helping them keep a pulse on their campaign performance.

The dashboard to see conversions is one of the biggest improvements we’ve seen since implementing Unbounce. Now, we can easily A/B test two pages and see at a glance which is performing better.

SaaS Brands Grow with Unbounce

In just a few short years, Taylor built a content ecosystem that established Later as an industry thought leader with a monster online following. By adding landing pages built with Unbounce, she kicked her content strategy into overdrive and collected tens of thousands of new leads for the SaaS platform.

(Wipe your mouths, fellow SaaS marketers. You’re drooling.)

If we’ve learned one thing from Taylor, it’s that having the freedom to execute on your marketing initiatives is key. Because they’ve removed the need for a front-end developer and taken control of the building process, Taylor and her team are able to launch new landing pages faster. That means every new piece of content they create is another opportunity to generate leads.

Want the same kind of results for your business? The first step is to produce some truly awesome content. Then you’re going to need a great landing page.

But as buzzwords come and go, you’re likely to come across an outdated or unusual phrase like “squeeze pages” for the first time and wonder—hey, what the heck does that even mean?

It doesn’t help that everyone seems to have their own definition of what a squeeze page actually is. Some people say it’s a type of landing page. Others say it’s an overlay, like a popup or splash page.

Well, we’re here to set the record straight.

Here’s the Definitive Definition of a Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is a type of landing page marketers use to collect just email addresses from visitors. You persuade or “squeeze” visitors to provide this info by presenting a special offer, gating valuable content, or restricting access in some way.

Squeeze pages are usually quite short, but they almost always include:

• A headline that clearly communicates the benefit you are going to provide
• Supporting text that gives enough information for the visitor to make a decision
• An embedded form that includes just one or two fields (typically, name and email address) so visitors can take action without leaving the page

And the thing is, squeeze pages sound like they’re a lot more annoying than they actually are. (Nobody wants to be squeezed … that just sounds uncomfortable.) You shouldn’t coerce visitors into doing anything they don’t want to do—the best squeeze pages offer up something really valuable in exchange for that email address. It’s a worthwhile, non-spammy trade.

More like a gentle hug than a squeeze, actually. (But I guess a “gentle hug page” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?)

Wait, What’s the Difference Between a Squeeze Page and a Landing Page?

A squeeze page is a type of landing page—one that is specifically designed to capture visitor email addresses (versus other types of information). So this comparison isn’t so much like apples and oranges … it’s more like comparing apples to a very specific type of apple.

Both landing pages and squeeze pages pack everything you need onto a single page. They’re both great for targeted campaigns when you’re trying to get visitors to take a certain action. And they both usually only have one main CTA, so you can easily track conversions.

That being said, there are a few key differences between landing pages and squeeze pages:

How Do You Make a Good Squeeze Page?

For this, the first thing you need to do is create a great lead magnet. After all, you’re asking somebody to give up their email address—one of the most important and private pieces of contact information they have. You better be able to offer up somethin’ real good to them in exchange.

Here are some of the most common lead magnets marketers use to attract leads on squeeze pages:

• A video or video series
• A newsletter
• A contest
• A coupon
• A printable PDF
• A free report
• A free webinar
• An interview series
• A free video course
• A podcast
• A whitepaper
• An interactive checklist or worksheet
• A free text-based email course
• A free starter kit or toolbox
• A template of some kind

Four Squeeze Page Examples Built Using Unbounce

1. The regular squeeze

Here’s an example of a classic squeeze page, courtesy of the fine SaaS marketers over at Officevibe. In this case, they’re using an Unbounce-built squeeze page to capture email addresses in exchange for a free ebook on leadership.

A page like this has just enough content to get visitors interested in the ebook, and no distractions for them to click away. They smartly call out the main benefit of the ebook right in the headline (“learn how to be a good leader”), and highlight the three big topics covered in the guide for people who are still on the fence. They can experiment with this amount of copy to see how it converts and try variants to see if more copy really does equal more downloads.

But just because the goal of the page is simple doesn’t mean you can’t personalize it for your customers. Officevibe carries over its signature illustrative style to bring forward some of their playful brand personality.

The result? This squeeze page has a conversion rate of over 35%.

Oh, and one other thing: notice the disclaimer underneath the download button? “By clicking, you consent to receive culture and engagement communications from Officevibe.” This isn’t just there as a legal requirement—it’s also a smart way to set expectations for visitors. Now, they won’t be surprised when your follow-up emails start showing up in their inbox.

2. The extra squeeze

Looking to take a different approach? You could always try something more like what Healthy Spot has done here. Rather than gate their free coupon behind an email form, they’ve made the coupon readily available at the top of the page for visitors—no strings attached.

The optional squeeze comes after the fact, with a simple one-field email form to sign up for their newsletter.

What’s clever about this approach is that Healthy Spot has already demonstrated the value they provide with the coupon. When visitors see the form right underneath, it makes them wonder what other dog haircut deals they might unlock by signing up.

3. The full-page squeeze

There’s nothing wrong with a quick squeeze, but sometimes adding a little length to your page can make it even more persuasive. Check out this example from Bariatric Eating, promoting their “Ultimate WLS Thanksgiving ebook.” It’s converting at a rate of over 41%!

This beautiful example is full of recipes, coupons, and tips for bariatric eaters around the turkey holiday. But whereas most other squeeze pages would end here, you can actually scroll down to discover a whole second half to this page.

What’s great about this approach is how everything you need is packed in above the fold, but then expanded on underneath. The recipe section is sure to tempt hungry visitors into giving up their email address (that cranberry sauce sounds mighty tasty), while the “About the Author” section builds more credibility.

And of course, the page keeps squeezing you towards the free ebook, right up until the end.

4. The interactive squeeze

Now, here’s a squeeze page that looks completely different from all the other examples we’ve featured so far. 

To help promote their “Wellness Collection” of herbal teas, the team over at Herbaly created this powerful lead generation quiz. The goal is to help visitors self-identify whether they might be at risk of diabetes through a series of dietary, fitness, and health-related questions.

Not only does this interactive squeeze page line up perfectly with the Herbaly target audience, but it also converts at a fantastic rate of over 40%. By the time visitors get to the end of the 13 questions, they’re primed and ready to give up their email address in exchange for the results.

And What Should You Do After a Squeeze Page Finishes, Uh … Squeezing?

If your squeeze page is successful, you’ll soon have a ton of new email addresses. These are leads that have expressed some interest in a topic related to your business, so it’s in your best interest to follow up with them ASAP.

Here are some steps you’ll want to take after your page is finished squeezing:

1. Deliver the Goods – Whatever it is you were promising in exchange for their contact information, now is the time to deliver. Whether it’s a free ebook, template, webinar, or something else entirely—make sure you get the content to your new leads as quickly and easily as possible.
2. Show a “Thank You” Page – Someone trusted you with their email address, the least you can do is say thank you. Use this as an opportunity to tell your visitors what will happen next and preemptively answer any questions they might have.
3. Push Lead Info Into Your CRM – If you’re using a tool like Salesforce, you’ll want to set up your squeeze page so the leads get automatically routed to your customer database. This will be important so you can attribute where these leads originally came from and trigger eventual nurture.
4. Send an Immediate Email – Set up an automated email that triggers whenever someone fills out the form on your squeeze page. This email should remind visitors why they gave you their email address in the first place, and explain what happens next.
5. Follow Up with Drip Marketing – Add any leads that come through your squeeze page to a drip email campaign. This will keep them moving further down the funnel, and closer towards a purchase. You can recommend similar content, offer them promotions, or add them to your newsletter.

So, Do Squeeze Pages Work?

Squeeze pages typically see some of the highest conversion rates out of all the different types of landing pages. Visitors have already expressed their interest by clicking on the page—so really, you just want to make it as easy and seamless as possible for them to enter their email address and get what they came for.

And while “squeeze page” might be an uncommon phrase these days, marketers still love to use them for lead generation campaigns. They’re powerful because they’re so easy to create and duplicate, which means you can spend more time testing different elements on them, figuring out what works for your audience, and optimizing them for conversions.

In this case, the juice really is worth the squeeze.

But here at Unbounce, we know that there’s more to a landing page than looks. We want the kind of page that won’t embarrass you when you bring it home to your CMO. One that you can really, you know… build a campaign with.

What we really want is a landing page that converts.

What Makes a High-Converting Landing Page?

(“Yeah, yeah, take me to the high-converting landing page examples!”)

People have created a lot of landing pages with the Unbounce Builder (like, so many, you guys), so we think we’ve got a pretty good understanding of what makes a page convert. Over the years, it’s become clear that nearly all successful landing pages have some key elements in common.

High-converting landing pages:

• • Have a strong, contextual hero shot and supporting imagery
    Your hero shot (the primary image or video on your landing page above the fold) is the first thing visitors are going to focus on, so you’d better make it captivating. Show your product or service in the context of use: demonstrate how it works and make it easy for people to visualize themselves enjoying the benefits.
  • Present a single and focused call to action
    Your call to action (CTA) is the one thing you want visitors to do on your page and your primary conversion metric. Make sure your CTA is obvious (from a design perspective) and compelling (from a copy perspective). Best practice is generally to remove any secondary links that might cause someone to leave your page before converting through your CTA, including site navigation.
  • Clearly state your value proposition with a compelling header and subhead
    Why should visitors accept your call to action? Use your headline and subheadline to articulate your value proposition, clearly stating the benefits of your offer and what makes you different from your competitors.
  • Outline the features and benefits (with emphasis on the latter)
    Sure, people need to know what your product or service does, but they’re much more likely to convert if they understand the benefits they’ll receive by following through with your CTA. Benefits-oriented messaging (as we’ll see in some examples) is one of the best ways to drive conversions.
  • Include testimonials and other forms of social proof
    People are much more likely to convert on your landing page if they believe that others have done it before them and have been happy with the results. Social proof—testimonials, reviews, partner logos—can be a fast and effective way to build credibility with your prospects. (What’s the difference between a prospect and a lead, anyway?)

High-Converting Landing Page Examples

Before we dive into our high-converting landing pages examples, let’s set some ground rules. All of the pages featured below have had at least 500 visitors on the low end, though many have had more than 100,000. They’re also all converting at a rate of at least 30%. (For reference, the average landing conversion rate sits somewhere around 4%.)

It’s worth noting that conversion rate is influenced by many factors outside the actual content of your landing page. For example, we know that the average conversion rate varies widely depending on your industry. Be sure to check out our Conversion Benchmark Report to see how you stack up against your competitors.

There’s also the question of traffic quality: if your page is getting a lot of traffic from poorly-targeted ads, your conversion rate is going to be lower than it would be with more qualified visitors. And, of course, click-through pages are going to convert higher than lead gen pages because the conversion goal is much simpler. Keep these things in mind before judging your own pages too harshly.

With that disclaimer out of the way, here are 15 high-converting landing page examples from Unbounce customers (with conversion tips from the people who actually built them).

1. Promo

Industry: Social Media / Conversion Rate: 46.94%

Promo’s high-converting hint: Use video to increase visitor engagement and drive conversions.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it at least several more times: using video on your landing page is a great way to boost engagement and crank up your conversion rate. In fact, including some moving pictures on your page can increase conversions by as much as 80%. A worthwhile investment, no?

Promo thought so, too, which is why they included a ton of video content on this landing page for their video creation service—from the header, to the explainer video, to the sample videos that visitors can actually use in their own marketing.

Noted Yael Miriam Klass, Content Lead at Promo:

We specialize in creating converting videos that attract viewers and elicit action.

To that end, our landing page has a beautiful and dynamic header video taking up the first fold, overlaid with text that shows a clear value proposition.

Still, video is just part of the equation. You want visitors to convert, and that means getting them to follow through with your call to action. Don’t worry—Yael’s on it: “No landing page can make an impact without direct text and an eye-popping CTA button on the first fold.” Promo nailed those elements, then topped it all off with a swack of testimonials and strong client logos. Great job.

2. edX

Industry: Education / Conversion Rate: 52.68%

edX’s high-converting hint: Simplify your pitch and make the benefits crystal clear.

Us marketers tend to be so close to our products and services that we can sometimes overload prospects with too much information. “Yes, our core offering is X, but how ’bout these bells? What about them whistles?” No, they probably didn’t know about those extra benefits—but at this stage, they probably didn’t need to.

On the landing pages for their online courses, edX’s Senior Growth Marketer Josh Grossman chose to pare the message down to just the main points he wanted to visitors to take away. “Rather than get bogged down in the details of the course, we made it easy for people to understand what they’ll learn using just a few bullet points.” That, and an unambiguous head and subhead followed by solid social proof.

“In our testing, shorter copy worked better than longer copy,” Josh added. “Either you want to learn Python, or you don’t.”

That’s an insight we should all take to heart. Some people aren’t going to want what you’ve got, no matter how much extra information you throw at them. Better to save your breath (or word count) and focus on the people who do.

3. Simply Business

Industry: Insurance / Conversion Rate: 62.26%

Simply Business’s high-converting hint: Present complicated products in an uncomplicated way.

Insurance has always been a complex product. Between liabilities, deductibles, prohibited risks, and loads of other terms we had to Google, just signing up can feel like a crash course in law. And by the time you’re covered, you still might not understand what being covered even really means.

Simply Business wants to change that, and it lives up to its name with this landing page that makes business insurance feel, well, simple.

Rather than risk overwhelming visitors with a ton of information about their policies, Simply Business keeps things light. The headline immediately soothes some of the most common concerns about insurance—that it’s complicated, that it’s expensive—and the bulleted how-to instructions make signup feel like a breeze.

It’s only after visitors click through the call to action that Simply Business introduces some friction in a multi-step form—but by then, visitors have already overcome that first mental hurdle and are much more likely to see it through.

4. Later

Industry: Social Media / Conversion Rate: 57.92%

Later’s high-converting hint: Maintain conversion scent and balance your incentives.

Humans are fickle creatures. They’re easily distracted. They get confused. Mostly, they’re bad. As a marketer, that means you often need to hold their hands—or, for our purposes, hold their noses—through each step of the purchase process.

Conversion scent is the principle of keeping written and visual cues consistent all through the consumer journey. That’s what Later did for this lead generation campaign, as Chin Tan, the company’s Communication Design Lead, explains:

We maintained conversion scent throughout the campaign. The offer matches what’s in the ad, in the email, in the creative before the landing page, and after the page as well.

Chin also acknowledges that the simplicity of the offer contributed to the page’s success. “It’s clear right away what you’re getting: you’re exchanging your email for access to the guide. The form isn’t too long and only requests pertinent information.” Asking for too many personal details at this top stage of the funnel can spook visitors. Make sure your ask matches the value of the incentive you’re offering.

5. The Listings Lab

Industry: Real Estate

The Listings Lab’s high-converting hint: Use straightforward design and focus on the offer.

Another lead generation page, our example from The Listings Lab isn’t the flashiest on the list, but don’t let that fool you: this simple page packs a punch.

First, let’s talk design. The Listings Lab has done a great job of condensing all of the page content into a small space without making anything feel crowded. Visitors don’t need to scroll to understand what’s on offer and why it’s valuable.

“A mock-up of the download helps people feel that it’s a well-produced, real thing that they can read,” offered Yves Lenouvel, Marketing Director at The Listings Lab. “Bold text on the form’s big, colorful button draws people’s attention to the CTA.” Not to mention the directional cue, which is another nice touch.

Still, it’s the benefits-oriented copy that puts this page over the top. The Listings Lab really zeroes in on key pain points for realtors—cold calling, poor leads, long hours—and offers an alternative. “The first piece of copy people see is speaking to the visitors’ pain and then presenting them with a solution.” Read the guide, make more money, get your life back. What’s not to like?

Bonus points for a privacy statement that instills confidence while keepin’ it casual.

6. Twillory

Industry: Clothing / Conversion Rate: 46.85%

Twillory’s high-converting hint: Build custom experiences for your mobile visitors.

We don’t need to tell you that mobile consumers should be a priority. (Although we have been telling you for, like, ever.) By 2017, mobile had become the dominant source of web traffic worldwide at 50.3%—a segment that expanded last year, reaching 52.2%. It’s no longer enough to think of mobile consumers as part of your online audience. In 2019, they’re often the majority. (Check those GA reports, people.)

Aditya Bagri, Digital Automation Manager at Agency Within, described how his outfit is adjusting to a world in which consumers’ first experience with a brand is often on their phones:

Our landing page creation strategy is mobile-first, and optimizing for mobile helps us get first-time viewers down the funnel.

Better than merely building mobile-responsive pages, many brands are creating separate experiences for their mobile visitors.

Enter Agency Within and Twillory. On desktop, this landing page includes videos and GIFs—elements that have been shown to increase visitor engagement and help drive conversions. On mobile, though, we get a stripped-down version that maintains the visual appeal of its big brother while also ensuring lightning-fast load times on cellular connections.

And Twillory gets an extra nod for using an Unbounce popup to give visitors additional conversion incentives.

7. TyresOnTheDrive

Industry: Automotive

TyresOnTheDrive’s high-converting hint: Be clear in your headline and then back it up with social proof.

When it comes to landing page copy, clarity leads to conversions. Your visitors should know within seconds exactly what you’re offering and why they need to care. If they don’t, they’re likely to bounce.

This page from TyresOnTheDrive illustrates the importance of clarity with a headline that immediately conveys the value proposition: “Expert Tyre Fitting At Your Home or Work.” Right away, we know the differentiator is that we don’t have to go to a mechanic—they’re coming to us. Coupled with a quick how-to, a load of testimonials, and a big-brand logo collage, we have enough information about TyresOnTheDrive to make a purchase decision in a very short period of time.

The result? Conversions through the roof.

But great conversion rates aren’t an excuse to stop testing. Chris Wood, TyresOnTheDrive’s Senior UX Designer, described how the company has played with other pitch angles yet keeps coming back to the fundamentals. “We’re finding that more benefit-oriented messaging seems to convert better than pushing offers and promotions.”

8. ooba

Industry: Finance / Conversion Rate: 35.57%

ooba’s high-converting hint: Use a descriptive call to action that tells visitors what’ll happen next.

Yes, it’s important that your visitors know what you’re offering the moment they hit your page. But just as essential is that visitors know what you want them to do—and what will happen when they do it.

This page for ooba (designed by digital agency Signpost) provides a great example of an effective call to action. At a glance, the copy—along with the contextual cues and supporting information—tells us what we can expect when we fill out the form.

“The form is positioned at the top of the page, above the fold, which makes the action we want the user to take clear from the outset,” said Adam Lange, CEO at Signpost. “The contrasting color draws the user’s attention to the end goal, and the descriptive button confirms the action they’re about to take.”

The form asks for a lot of information, but that might actually help build credibility in this context—we’re trying to get a home loan, not sign up for a newsletter. It makes sense that we’d need to provide some details if we’re expecting to be pre-qualified.

9. ClaimCompass

Industry: Legal / Conversion Rate: 30.02%

ClaimCompass’s high-converting hint: Ensure visitors have enough information to convert (and then ask them again).

What’s that old saying? “If at first they don’t convert, try, try again”? (It’s not. Please don’t say that to people.)

However, that’s precisely what ClaimCompass did for this landing page targeting travelers who’d been on delayed flights to, from, and within the European Union, where legislation mandates that airlines pay compensation for significant travel disruptions.

Alexander Sumin, the company’s Co-Founder and CMO, described the surprisingly difficult task of getting people to collect their no-strings cash.

We tried to provide some valuable information and back it with authority—not only the social proof and media logos, but briefly explaining how it all works.

That adds more credibility to the offer, which is important when you’re promising free money.

ClaimCompass recognized that they’d be talking to customers with varying degrees of EU regulatory expertise. (Any GDPR-heads out there?) As such, they knew some people would have enough information to convert right away while others would need some educating.

“The entire landing page is designed to make people click on one of the three CTA buttons,” Alex explained. “If the offer is appealing, they don’t need to scroll further. If it isn’t, the sections below provide more clarity on the process, with images, benefits, and social proof. Each scroll is supposed to get the users closer to clicking the CTA.”

10. Extreme Lounging

Industry: Furniture

Extreme Lounging’s high-converting hint: Run giveaway campaigns to drive leads like crazy.

Extreme Lounging might have the simplest landing page in this list from a copy and design perspective—but, boy, it sure is effective.

The whole page amounts to a hero image, headline, and email form, prompting visitors to register for a chance to win a limited edition chair. There are no listed benefits, no competitive differentiators. (Presumably Extreme Lounging has done some of that legwork before people hit this page.) Here, it’s all about building leads. You want this chair? Cool, give us your email. No reason to make things complicated.

Some marketers will object to the basic style, but it’s hard to argue with Extreme Lounging’s results. They’ve been running a new contest (with a new landing page) each month for over half a year, and although they prefer to keep the exact number under wraps, suffice to say that their conversion rate would make you blush.

It just goes to show: no matter how good you look or sweet you talk, nothing motivates people quite like free.

11. onX

Industry: Navigation / Conversion Rate: 61.15%

onX’s high-converting hint: Match visitor search intent in written and visual content.

Something we at Unbounce have really hammered home over the years is the importance of message match. When someone clicks a Google ad for, say, topographic hunting maps, they expect to land on a page with copy that aligns with their original search intent. Even better? A page that immediately demonstrates the searcher is in the right place through the accompanying imagery.

For a great example, look no further than this page from onX, which (at the time of writing) sports a conversion rate over 50% higher than the average. We asked Ryan Watson, User Acquisition Manager at onX, why he thought the landing page has been so successful:

The landing page creative showed the user exactly what they were looking for from a PPC Google Ads search click.

Correlating the search with an exact visual cue is a must with product feature landing pages and search strategy.

Ryan also credits A/B testing for onX’s high-converting landing page. “We tested many different CTAs, and we found one that worked and got a massive click-through rate.” Hey, landing page best practices never hurt, either.

How does your conversion rate stack up?

Download the Unbounce Conversion Benchmark Report to see how your landing page performance compares to competitors in your industry.

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12. Investing Shortcuts

Industry: Finance / Conversion Rate: 51.32%

Investing Shortcuts’s high-converting hint: Create urgency in your offer whenever possible.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is one of the most powerful tools in every marketer’s arsenal. People hate it when their peers are having fun, being cool, or making money without them. It’s petty and vindictive, sure, but it’s also innately human. (Man, we’re picking on our species today.)

This landing page for Investing Shortcuts (built by Strikepoint Media) harnesses FOMO to push conversions into overdrive. The copy highlights the meteoric rise of Bitcoin’s value and urges visitors to get in while the gettin’s still good. “This page had the most success when Bitcoin was hot, so it was the right offer and the right time,” explained Jeremy Blossom, Co-Founder and CEO of Strikepoint. Anyone out there still HODLing?

Bitcoin’s popularity aside, a lot of what makes this a high-converting page comes down to good fundamentals. “While it isn’t the prettiest page, the copy connects with readers and builds on their interest in the subject matter while clearly communicating the value of the guide,” Jeremy noted. “The page also uses the ‘featured on’ logos and a high-profile quote for social proof.”

13. MyTutor

Industry: Education / Conversion Rate: 55.29%

MyTutor’s high-converting hint: Present the right offer to the right people at the right time.

So much of a campaign’s success comes down to effective targeting. It’s not just about reaching your target demographic—it’s also about presenting them with highly-targeted offers that make sense in the context of their experience at that particular moment.

Our previous example from Investing Shortcuts demonstrates how an offer can be well-timed for a major cultural event (like the crypto-frenzy of late 2017). This landing page from MyTutor, though, goes one step further. It shows how marketers can connect with their audience at a significant (and even deeply personal) moment in their individual lives, during which the offer is especially meaningful.

Gemma Pearson, Digital Marketing Manager at MyTutor, explains: “This landing page was a fundamental part of our exam results day campaign. It was designed to encourage students who hadn’t achieved the grades they needed to get back on track with a tutor to support their needs.”

Most of us have done poorly on a test, and (I’m comfortable speaking for all of us here) it sucks. The last thing Gemma wanted to do with this page is appear to be scolding or lecturing students that might need a little help.

The relevant, positive messaging—along with timing and a clear CTA—were key factors in this landing page’s success.

It provided messaging that both empathized with their situation and offered a clear solution to get the results they needed.

Now that’s how you make a pitch that resonates.

14. College Board

Industry: Education / Conversion Rate: 77.38%

College Board’s high-converting hint: Set an expiry date on your call to action.

Like the past couple of landing pages, this one from College Board—a nonprofit aimed at expanding access to higher education—is all about using time to motivate conversions.

The goal here is getting would-be college applicants (who’ve already taken the PSAT/NMSQT) to register for an upcoming SAT and improve their chances of being accepted at the school of their choice. That oughta be incentive enough, but sometimes (and I’m drawing heavily on my own meandering academic experience) students need a kick in the pants. And if there’s one thing they understand, it’s deadlines.

College Board makes it super clear how long students still have to sign up for the next SAT by including a countdown just below the top CTA and a hard cutoff date alongside the bottom. Coupled with copy that’s one part urgency (“Seats are filling up fast!”) and another part encouragement (“You’re already prepared!”), this landing page successfully urges students to take the next step in their academic careers.

15. FilterEasy

Industry: Home Repair / Conversion Rate: 34.52%

FilterEasy’s high-converting hint: It’s not always clear why a landing page is successful—and that’s okay, too.

Every so often, you’ll build a landing page that strikes conversion gold. It’s got a higher form-fill rate than you’ve ever seen. It’s driving revenue like crazy. It’s cutting down challengers like Russell Crowe in that movie about gladiators. (What was it called?)

That’s what happened to Rianna Riddle, Growth Marketing Director at FilterEasy. She built a killer page, then found herself grappling with a question we’ve often asked ourselves: what exactly is making this page successful?

“Honestly, we’re still constantly testing to figure out what’s so great about this landing page,” Ri explained. “We’ve challenged it several times, and none of the challengers have beat this champion page—even the ones we were absolutely convinced would beat it.”

The reality is that building high-converting landing pages isn’t an exact science. Sure, there are best practices that can improve your page’s chances of success, and Ri employs them here: straightforward design, strong benefits statements, great social proof, compelling offer. Ultimately, though, the only way we can be confident that we’ve achieved our best page is by continuing to test.

Christmas is not right around the corner. The holiday shopping season is not upon us. You’ve got oodles of sunny summer days ahead before you need to start worrying about untangling the lights, trimming the turkey, or leaving presents under the tree. (Thank goodness!)

But if you’re in ecommerce, that’s a different story. It turns out that right now is the best time to start planning your next holiday campaign.

In fact, most experienced ecomm marketers start prepping long before Thanksgiving and Black Friday roll around. There’s just too much at stake not to. In 2018, for example, US consumers spent a whopping $7.9 billion on Cyber Monday. (Heck, they spent $2.2 billion on their phones alone.) Cyber Monday 2018 represents the biggest ecomm sales day in history, and 2019 is projected to be even bigger.

And there are other important reasons you should start prepping…

Sure, that’s a lot of cheese on the table. But, according to Jonathan Naccache of Webistry, heavy discounting also cuts into profits:

The holiday period is a double-edged sword. Due to heavy discounting, your sales might not even be profitable, even if you generate an above-average volume of sales. This is why planning is so important. November and December are all about volume, so every dollar you can save when it comes to your cost-per-acquisition can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Building up your audiences and ramping up your ads in the preceding 3-6 months is very important. 

Jonathan Naccache, Webistry

More obviously, Naccache points out that preparing simply takes a lot of work: “You’ll need great content (more than one piece) for your ads,” he says, and that may involve “many sets of banners, several video pieces, different iterations of copy” as well as “a series of dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences.”

Taylor Holiday (yeah, that’s his real name) of Common Thread Collective says his agency does massive research and planning before running a summit for their clients in mid-August. Why? So everyone is good and ready for the make-it-or-it-break months:

The reason it is so important to begin planning well in advance is because holiday outcomes are created in October and November.

Taylor Holiday, Common Thread Collective

Common Thread have a lot of data to back them up here. Emails they acquire in October, for instance, have the highest 90-day value of any time of the year. “It’s not rocket science to understand that email is valuable during this period,” says Holiday, “but it does require foresight and research into the exact value of email subscriptions to make the payback immediately profitable.” Common Thread found that running email campaigns in November and December will be “up to 5x as valuable as any other month,” so they need to be ready to build email lists in October.

So Naccache and Holiday clearly know that there are big wins—and big challenges—on the horizon. Planning in July (or even earlier) makes tons of sense to them. But for many marketers, it’s almost too easy to get planning late and let the holiday pass you by without running your own specials. That’s a mistake.

With that in mind, Unbounce has teamed up with a few heavy-hitters of marketing to give you the rundown on how you can start with your holiday campaigns and landing pages today. (So, uh, Merry Christmas!)

Read on, or jump straight to any of the subtopics below:

1. Rethinking Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers
2. Writing Copy for Gift Buyers
3. Learning from the Ghosts of Deals Past
4. Using the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

1. Rethink Your Promos for Holiday Shoppers

You’re running a holiday sale, eh?

15% off, you say?

Free shipping on all orders over $100?

That’s terrific. 

But here’s the thing about holiday discounts: during this period, most shoppers are so bombarded with deals and offers that they become inured to simple bargains. (Plus, your competitors likely have similar perks on to go, so there’s that…) 

Unless you’re prepared to cut bone-deep, building a campaign around a discount may not be enough to create genuine excitement. Instead, the experts recommend that you create promotions that use specific psychological triggers. 

Here are a few ideas to help you go beyond lame-duck discounts:

BOGO (Buy One, Get One) Deals

Do you remember that episode of The Simpsons when Homer gives Marge a bowling ball for her birthday? You know, the one with his name engraved on it? As you’ll recall, she wasn’t pleased:

Don’t be too hard on Homer. By buying Marge a present that he wants for himself, he’s exhibiting pretty normal human behavior.

In fact, it’s one reason that “buy one, get one free” deals can be more persuasive than straightforward discounts around the holidays. It’s not just a free thing, it’s that you get to play Scrooge and Santa at the same time: “I really want this thing for myself,” your customers will tell themselves: “I’ll pick one up for me, and give the other one to my friend.”

(There’s a fascinating study to be done on whether BOGO buyers think they’re keeping the “free” item or giving that one away.)

BOGO promotions also work brilliantly for products that you might naturally want to pair or share. Take a look at how Starbucks’ yearly “Buy One, Share One” promotion conjures the spirit of giving:

While traditional BOGO might appeal to greed, Starbucks combines the urgency of a very narrow purchase window (limited time, from 2-5 pm) with messaging that implies generosity. (We’ve seen customers build very similar limited promos using popups on their websites.)

Tiered Deals

BOGO promotions can be very attractive, but done wrong, they can also take a bite of profits and hurt your brand. Aaron Orendorff, the founder of iconiContent and former editor in chief at Shopify Plus, suggests instead creating promos that encourage more spending:

Not only is traditional discounting becoming less effective over the holidays, but it can also substantially lower brand value as well as AOV (average order value). The answer is creative deal structures that drive AOV from the ad or email to the onsite experience right through to the checkout.

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

One of Orendorff’s favorite examples is Brooklinen, who created a tiered “spend more, save more” deal structure to increase order values.

• Spend $150, get a free gift
• Spend $250, get 10% off
• Spend $350, get 15% off
• Spend $450, get 20% off

Orendorff points out that Brooklinen doesn’t mess around when it comes to encouraging buyers to take it up a tier: “Brooklinen featured that exact deal in all their promotions: organic, paid, and email. The real genius is the brand also integrated the tiers into its checkout, prompting shoppers to spend more and nudging them into the next tier.” It looks like this:

Mixed Product Bundling

Like BOGO, bundling involves combining multiple products into a single package. It attracts customers with the promise of greater value.

You can certainly bundle the same product together, but mixed bundling works best by joining your products into a single, discounted bundle. Why? Since people generally prefer experiential gifts to physical ones, this form of bundling transforms your product into an experience by offering a total package.

And it can be as simple as what Australian retailer Joyce Mayne did when they bundled a Fujifilm Instax camera with its accessories. Check it out:

The promo page for this bundle no longer exists online, but supporting copy went straight for the heart: “This would make for a brilliant Christmas present for anyone who loves to seize the moment and share memories with friends and family.” Notice how Joyce Mayne reframe the purchase in terms of a shared experience.

Scrooge-Style Discounting

For the right type of brand, sometimes the best approach is to only offer discounts at the holidays—and at no other time of the year.

For example, Lush Cosmetics runs once-a-year-only BOGO sale on December 26th (or Boxing Day to those of us outside the U.S.). By only offering it once a year, they create urgency and reinforce the perception that their products are too valued to discount.

Lush sticks to its guns when it comes to this sale, but it’s not uncommon for brands to think it’s a good idea to revise their exclusivity: “Our once-a-year sale is now once-a-month! Get hyped!” Counterintuitively, this can work against you.

According to Lianna Patch of Punchline Conversion Copywriting, it’ll puncture any urgency you’ve been trying to create:

Your discounting will always be more effective when your brand itself is more trustworthy—so if you tend to extend “one-day-only” sales often, or by multiple days, or you run promotions frequently, you’re likely dis-incentivizing your customers and ruining your own appeals to urgency and scarcity. On the contrary, if you can say “Hey, we run just one sale a year, it ends when we say it ends, and you’ll never get a better deal than this,” you’re going to strike a chord with even your most reluctant prospects.

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Of course, that doesn’t mean your campaign will be a short one. An accompanying ad or email campaign can create anticipation, while a landing page with a sign-up for reminders builds your nurture lists. (There’s more on this anticipation strategy below.)

Post-Click Upselling

A frequently neglected (but still very effective) tactic is to make an additional offer after your visitor has converted. The principle is actually very simple: you’ve already done the hard part of overcoming their resistance. Now they’re in the mood to buy.

The psychological phenomenon of loss aversion can play a role here too, since an offer made on a Thank You page or a well-timed popup feels more limited: “Get an additional 10% off your next purchase today.” This special shouldn’t be mentioned until this step in the process, of course. If customers feel like they could get it at any time, it’ll be less effective.

2. Write Copy For Gift Givers

Most of the year, the people you target purchase for themselves or their immediate family. And much of your existing content is (understandably) attuned to their self-interest. That’s why good copywriting is typically you-oriented: it focuses on the wants and needs of the reader. 

During the holidays, however, this is often less true. Homer Simpson aside, people aren’t buying only for themselves. Many will shop with loved ones, friends, and colleagues in mind.

In other words, the purchase intent of visitors to your holiday landing page will be different. Your headline, call-to-action, and supporting copy all need to be different too. As you sit down to write for your landing pages, try to think about common gifting considerations:

• Will mommy lurve this sweater?
• Can the wife and I experience this gift together?
• Will this make my BFF lol? Will it make her ?
• Does this present have any special meaning?
• What will my coworker think if I give him this present?

These all have an especially strong emotional core as visitors search for the right gift. Like the examples from Starbucks and Joyce Mayne above, the best promos for holiday shoppers don’t just slap the words “Black Friday Sale – Get 10% Off” at the top of an existing page and call it a day. They use both copy and visuals to tap into these emotions.

And, yes, it can be easy to sink into cliches. But hitting those warm feels or helping someone find the perfect gift for their loved one satisfies the intent more than an appeal to self-interest.

According to Naccache, Webistry create “dedicated landing pages for different sets of audiences” for this purpose. This pre-Christmas landing page from Country Chic Paint is a killer example of copy tailored to indecisive gift buyers.

While a 40% limited discount is nice, the copy below is also very specific in communicating a gifting context: this product is perfect for buyers who are “blanking on gift ideas” for a creative someone in their life. A mystery box takes an awful lot of the pressure off visitors looking for a meaningful gift.

Lianna Patch agrees the challenge lies in “effectively changing your approach from ‘Buy this, it’ll make you feel good’ to ‘Buy the feeling of giving a great gift.'” (She and Val Geisler recently teamed up for a webinar on writing copy for holiday emails, so she has a lot to say on the subject.) 

But Patch also cautions that your buyers will have more practical considerations in mind:

It’s also important, when appealing to gift-buyers, to address objections around shipping/logistics (Will it arrive in time?), presentability (Does it come gift-wrapped? Do I have to remove the price tag?), and returns and exchanges (Will it be a pain to exchange shirt sizes? If my mom doesn’t like the mug I got her, can I return it?).

Lianna Patch, Punchline Conversion Copywriting

Ecomm landing pages are particularly bad at answering these kinds of questions. If you’re equipped to tackle any them, make it as explicit as you can in your copy. Shipping guarantees, for instance, should probably never be buried in your FAQ at this time of year.

3. Learn from the Ghost of Deals Past

Look at your previous campaigns. You may have conducted a routine post-mortem already, but remind yourself now of what worked—and what didn’t—before you start to plan.

Review the key performance metrics for your campaigns. For landing pages, your conversion rate should tell you whether or not your page performed to your expectations. (If you’re just starting out, you can use Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report or a variety of other resources to get a sense of where you should be hitting.) 

But I’d also recommend pulling other traffic and engagement metrics from Google Analytics. Your page’s bounce rate and session time are important. Plus, any relevant info about visitors (like geolocation, device type, etc.) that might give you a clue to who’s being naughty or nice. A lower than expected conversion rate might indicate that something went wrong, but engagement stats like these ones can help you sniff out the cause. 

Let’s say, for instance, you see that your holiday landing page had few conversions but Google Analytics also shows people are spending a long time on the page.

Why is this happening?

It could be visitors are actually very interested in your product, but they’re confused or turned off by something they see (or don’t see) on the landing page. Take steps to simplify the layout, add more impact to your copy, and make your call-to-action more prominent. (Perhaps, as mentioned above, you need to re-write it with specific gifting contexts in mind.)

Another possibility is that your product already compels, but your visitors hesitate to actually buy it. Maybe it’s an idea so ahead of its time that they remain locked in the consideration phase. Or maybe you’re selling something that’s a big investment. Assuming your prospects may be sitting on the fence, you might want to throw in an incentive (by way of a timed popup or sticky bar) to give ’em a nudge. 

Of course, you may have other ideas. In any case, diving into engagement metrics lets you formulate a hypothesis and plan your next move. 

4. Use the Holiday Rush to Your Advantage

Unless you’re just starting out, you already know about the persuasive power of adding a little urgency to your promotions. Countdown timers, announcing (realistic) product scarcity, running limited-time offers—these old hat strategies boost your conversions at any time during the year, as long as you don’t overdo ’em. 

Around the holidays, though, there’s already a sense of urgency built into the holiday shopping experience. Your customers are racing to get the best deals and check off every name on their list before Christmas.

Yeah, you could take advantage of this rush by ratcheting up the misery with big black numbers (counting down the remaining shopping days until the kids are forever disappointed, let’s say).

But there’s a much better approach.

Instead, offer your visitors a little something more…

Offer a Little Relief from the Rush

Think about your campaign like a pleasing piece of music: you need tension, sure, but also release. (Otherwise, it’s just noise.) Instead of relying on purely negative types of urgency, then, you can promote a sense of trust and reliability by relieving your visitors’ anxieties. It may lead to fewer impulse buys, but it’ll also help your brand in the long run.

As always, Amazon offers a pretty sharp example of this practice.

Sure, around the holidays they’ll up the ante with a countdown timer or two. (They also never miss an opportunity to indicate low stock.) But their bread and butter lies in relieving the anxiety associated with shipping. 

By including “Want it delivered by… order by…” messages on product pages, they promise their customers an almost impossible level of control. The effect of seeing that you need to “order it in the next 6 hours and 10 minutes” to receive the package by December 23 amplifies the urgency, sure, but it also empowers the customer:

Needless to say, if you want to go this same route, your expedited shipping solution should be up to the task. If your customers aren’t going to get those fancy new boots until mid-March, you’ll need to find another approach.

Anticipation and Excitement

Anticipation is another more positive expression of urgency worth exploring with your holiday campaigns. Amazon does this too.

As this analysis of their Black Friday promotions points out, over the past decade the company has slowly extended the sales period into “one torturously long stretch of spending lasting from Nov. 1 to Dec. 22.” But this period is also punctuated by flash sales and specials meant to keep the customer excited. Since 2011, in fact, they’ve made the countdown to the sale itself into an event with “Countdown to Black Friday Deals Week.”

Why are anticipation and excitement so effective? This may seem obvious, but they encourage repeated visits to their storefront in the quest for new deals, generate excitement about upcoming sales, and stretch the holiday shopping season across longer periods of time.

Is Amazon worth imitating, even on a smaller scale? You betcha.

And, according to Aaron Orendorff, there’s another major benefit to creating campaigns around anticipation: it can be much cheaper.

Ad costs are far lower in the lead up to the holidays. So, buy your traffic early by previewing your upcoming event across paid social. Collect your best deals—built around product categories or specific audiences—onto landing pages with one goal: to get visitors’ email addresses in exchange for early access (or something similarly enticing).

Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent

(I think Aaron just dropped the mic on us.)

Don’t Let the “Christmas Creep” Sneak Up on You

Here’s a final question for you: when will people start their Christmas shopping this year? The answer: they already have.

Sure, the received wisdom is that the holiday season starts after American Thanksgiving. But the National Retail Federation says brick-and-mortar retailers start to see shoppers before Halloween, which is why some stores have started setting up displays in September.

That’s nothing compared to the ecommerce world though. According to a consumer survey from Valassis, there’s a strong interest in early shopping online: “40 percent completing a portion of their gift purchase on Amazon Prime Day.” (That’s mid-July Christmas shopping!) Why not devise some clever ways to target these buyers longer before your competitors get there?

Let’s face it. For today’s ecommerce marketer, the holiday season feels like it’s always just around the corner.

Thankfully, the enemies you face when planning these campaigns aren’t different from any other part of the year. How do you overcome them? Planning well in advance is a must. And finding workable shortcuts that don’t cut short on the quality of your campaigns is another approach. (That’s one of the big reasons we think landing pages are a killer alternative to web pages. You can drag and drop a campaign together without involving your web developer.)

And there are plenty of other times throughout the year to apply these tips. Depending on your perspective, the Christmas shopping season stretches across Halloween, two Thanksgivings (American and Canuck), Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, and even New Years. But then you might see other opportunities around Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, July 4th, Arbor Day… you name it, there’s a promo you can run (and run early).

But if you want to have a real impact, the real meaning of Christmas in July is that you need to get started today.

The sixth annual Unbounce Call to Action Conference (CTAConf) is coming up fast (September 25 to 26!), and we’re super excited to share all the details of this year’s “Raise Your Marketing IQ” agenda. Learn from 20 incredible speakers sharing their tips, insights, and hard-earned marketing know-how while tucking into delicious food, making great connections, and taking in the beauty Vancouver has to offer.

We know there are a lot of marketing conferences out there. But CTAConf is the only one with a thorough roadmap for high IQ marketing—the kind of marketing your competitors will wish they’d done.

We’ll dive into six core elements of marketing IQ: design (spatial ability), copywriting (language ability), data and analytics (mathematical ability), process (memory), human aspects and personalization (emotional intelligence), and how to bring these all together (strategic thinking).

Each session reflects one or several of these aspects—a framework inspired by the facets of traditional IQ. And if you’re interested in rolling up your sleeves for some hands-on learning, we’re also hosting an optional day of marketing workshops the day before CTAConf kicks off (more on those below)!

What to Expect

• Twenty extraordinary speakers who are not just thought leaders but practicing marketers who really know their stuff. No fluff, no panels, and no recycled content.
• A one-track, “all-inclusive” experience from the cushy seats and world-class venue of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre to gourmet food trucks, healthy snacks, parties, and more.
• Over 1,000 fellow marketers ready to mix, mingle, and learn with you in beautiful Vancouver, BC!

The CTAConf 2019 Agenda

This year’s speakers have been selected for expertise in one (or several) of the six elements of high-IQ marketing, innovative approaches to their craft, and practical experience. Have we mentioned they’re all awesome speakers and overall great people, too?

Plus, one stage means one track. You won’t have to choose between sessions and miss out on half the insights you paid for—just grab a snack, take a seat, and eat up every morsel of information.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn. For the full agenda (and to grab your tickets now for 15% off), head to the CTAConf site and use the promo code “CTAConfMarketingIQ” upon checkout.

Machine Learning for Marketers with Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist at Moz

The biggest bottleneck in Machine Learning/AI is people like you with domain expertise and great ideas! Help your industry innovate by attending this Machine Learning (ML) crash course. You’ll walk away with a foundational understanding of ML, the tools necessary to implement ML models, and the confidence to consider ways in which it can be applied to help you with everyday work.

What you’ll learn in Britney’s session:

• How machine learning is becoming more accessible to marketers.
• How to use machine learning to free up more time for strategic planning.
• Basic machine learning understanding to allow you to think of the next genius application.

The Top 7 Chatbot Marketing Hacks of All Time with Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey

Messaging is the primary communication channel for billions of daily active users, offering enormous selling potential to marketers who can master conversational marketing tactics and strategies at scale.

Larry will cover how to activate chatbots in the sales and marketing funnel in exciting new ways, including how to automatically qualify leads while simulating person-to-person salesmanship and leveraging crazy-effective psychological influence principles to increase conversion rates from chat marketing.

What you’ll learn in Larry’s session:

• How to leverage chatbots in the sales and marketing funnel to engage and qualify leads.
• How to increase conversion rates from chat marketing using conversational influence principles.
• How to drive tons of traffic into your chat marketing funnels.

How to Build Buyer Personas That Help You Win More Loyal Customers with Sonia Thompson, CEO of Thompson Media Group

Business is about belonging. The stronger your buyer personas are, the easier it is to deliver products, services, and experiences that make your customers feel like they belong with you. But too often, buyer personas unintentionally exclude customers who don’t neatly fit into the “mainstream,” causing them to go off in search of another brand that serves them better. This problem grows more prevalent as consumers become more diverse across many areas.

What you’ll learn in Sonia’s session:

• How to intentionally build inclusive buyer personas.
• How to get more customers, particularly diverse ones, to love your brand.

Data-Driven Empathy: 7 Hidden Sources of Your Visitors’ Hopes and Fears with Andy Crestodina, Co-Founder and CMO at Orbit Media Studios

Marketing is empathy. Digital marketing is about data-driven empathy. The job is to use clues, reports, and tests to find what our audience needs and serve it to them quickly. But the problem is that there’s just too much data out there. So the trick is to use the right data to find the best insights fast.

What you’ll learn in Andy’s session:

• How to learn what people think of your brand and what they want to know about it.
• Which of your site’s pages are least satisfying to your visitors and why.
• Which information needs you may be ignoring.

The Marketing IQ Manifesto with Oli Gardner, Co-Founder of Unbounce

Great marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. But much of what we experience favors a low-IQ approach: emails asking for a 15-minute call, followed by five more emails “bumping” it to the top of your inbox because you might have missed it. We didn’t miss it; we simply don’t want it.

The Marketing IQ Manifesto is a new methodology for creating marketing that matters. It embraces diversity, choosing extra, and being real, resulting in high-converting experiences that respect our audience’s needs and who they are.

What you’ll learn in Oli’s session:

• The ten guiding principles of a high-IQ marketer.
• The six elements of marketing IQ and how they come together.
• The MIQ Checklist, an actionable guide to intelligent growth for your business.

Plus an Optional Day of Marketing Workshops

Before CTAConf even starts, we’re hosting a full day of hands-on workshops with Unbounce Experts. You’ll walk away with frameworks, models, worksheets, mastery of the Unbounce platform, and other specialized, in-depth information to raise the bar in these (totally optional) workshops.

Workshops are only available for conference attendees—upon registration, you’ll receive a special URL to reserve your workshop spot. Be sure to act quickly as seats are limited and have filled up super fast in years prior.

The workshops are an affordable $99 CDN, taking place on Tuesday, September 24 at The Sheraton Vancouver City Centre (which is also our preferred hotel option just minutes from the main CTAConf venue).

Build Your CTAConf Experience

Do you get a little nervous before conferences? (I do.) Do you wonder who you might meet, how the venue’s laid out, what and when you’ll be fed, and what to expect besides amazing speakers? (Also same.)

When we call CTAConf an immersive experience, we aren’t kidding. We want you to feel totally comfortable, taken care of, and excited to soak up everything the conference has to offer—both on and off stage.

A concert-style venue

The Queen Elizabeth Theatre hosts the Vancouver Opera, Ballet, and Broadway Across Canada. That’s right, this stage has seen everything from multiple CTAConfs to full productions of Hamilton. Expect super-comfy seats, an expansive stage with crystal-clear presentation screens, and world-class production value.

Breakfast, snacks, and Vancouver’s favorite food trucks

Nothing is worse than trying to learn and network when you’re hangry. So we’ve made sure your tummy stays full—and it won’t be with a dry ham sandwich or depressingly weak coffee. 

Adventure out into the Vancouver sunshine (yup, September is still sunshine season!) and hit up one of seven food trucks. Or go ahead and try all seven—they’re on the house, after all.

Relax, unwind, and connect with great people

From our casual welcome reception to (seriously) fun after-party, you’ll have more than enough opportunity to meet fellow attendees, make new connections, or catch up with old ones over drinks (of the cocktail and mocktail variety) and tasty apps.

Meet our awesome sponsors

The CTAConf experience extends through our sponsors. Each sponsor is planning a secret, unique experience just for you—which means we encourage you to venture to each of their booths.

Would you like to see your own company on this list? Learn about our sponsorship packages here.

Explore gorgeous Vancouver

If you’re coming to Vancouver for the first time—or one of many trips—you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to explore the city. From top restaurants and museums to outdoor parks and city sights, there’s a ton to see and do.

Check out last year’s roundup of local and visitor recommendations to help make the most of your time in our little slice of the Pacific Northwest.

Join Us!

On behalf of the Unbounce team, we can’t wait to meet you and hope you’ll join us this September! And if you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at ctaconf@unbounce.com.

But what if you’re working with a client who gets way more phone calls than online conversions? Businesses like plumbers, roadside assistance, healthcare, emergency services, construction, and locksmiths all have prospects who would rather click to call. A lot of their customers can’t be bothered to “sign up for a free consultation”—after all, they might be up to their ankles in toilet water.

Take, for example, a personal injury law firm like Geoff McDonald & Associates. When injured people are searching for an attorney, they need to speak with somebody straight away. They might be on-site after a workplace injury, at the hospital, or on the side of the road following a car accident. This is an emergency situation—they’re not going to take the time to fill out a form and just hope that somebody follows up with them. They need help now.

Visitors Want to Convert on Their Terms. Not Yours.

In any industry, there will always be leads who prefer to pick up the phone and call a business directly. And if you’re not taking these leads into account when you track conversions on your landing pages, then you run the risk of optimizing based on an incomplete picture. This is especially important for marketing agencies, because if you’re not tracking calls as conversions then your clients will be completely in the dark on the true ROI you’re driving for them.

When Geoff McDonald & Associates brought on Workshop Digital as their agency, the team identified this exact problem. They were getting a ton of phone calls, but they couldn’t attribute them back to specific landing pages. Here’s how they took immediate steps to track all the visitors who were converting:

• Workshop Digital set up 20 rotating phone numbers to feature on their landing pages using CallRail. CallRail is an awesome service that provides both call tracking and form tracking for data-driven marketers. These trackable numbers helped Workshop Digital attribute where phone calls were coming from (and how well each landing page was really converting).
• They used this new call-tracking data to inform their A/B Testing, helping them to optimize their pages. This helped drive 33% more leads on organic channels, year-over-year.
• On paid and remarketing channels, the results were even better. The agency was able to drive a whopping 219% more leads, year-over-year, thanks to the one-two combo of Unbounce and CallRail.

To get the full story, we spoke with Andrew Miller, Co-Founder of the agency that made it all happen. In this post, we’ll cover exactly how Andrew and his team used call tracking to achieve these award-winning results, and how you can replicate their success at your agency, too.

The Challenge: Tracking Phone Calls Like Clicks

When Geoff McDonald & Associates first reached out to Workshop Digital, they were looking for an opportunity to shake things up with their digital marketing. At the time, the law firm was working with an agency that was directing all of their paid traffic towards a single, low-converting location: their website homepage. As Andrew, the co-founder of the agency, notes:

[The law firm] wasn’t getting the level of detail and reporting that they wanted … the strategies weren’t evolving. It was just what they’d always done, and how they’d always done it. They came to us looking for something fresh.

When they signed on with Workshop Digital, Andrew’s team began redirecting all that juicy paid traffic towards custom, targeted landing pages built in Unbounce. Working closely with the law firm, the team set up multiple variants to strategically target high-converting keywords and locations. 

Each page included a simple form for visitors to convert, as well as a phone number that potential clients could call if they needed immediate assistance.

But that’s when they discovered a problem: only a small margin of the new clients coming in from the landing pages were actually filling out the forms. Visitors had very specific and time-sensitive questions about their potential cases, and the majority of them were choosing the click-to-call option—especially on mobile devices.

So while it was great news that the landing pages were bringing in new clients, this made it difficult for Andrew and his team to figure out which landing pages were actually inspiring visitors to pick up the phone. Even worse, it made the A/B Testing process much slower—several months slower, in some cases—because they were missing out on so much valuable data.

We saw a ton of leads coming in as phone calls. So if we were only relying on email submissions as conversions, we’d be basing our decisions on less accurate, less complete data. And we’re likely to make misinformed decisions that could just be totally wrong for the client.

For the team at Workshop Digital to start A/B Testing and optimizing with reliable and accurate data, Andrew first needed to set up call tracking so they could attribute which landing pages were responsible for driving the calls.

The Solution: Building Landing Pages with Dynamic Phone Numbers

Turns out, there’s an easy way for agencies to track phone calls: CallRail. This handy piece of software integrates seamlessly with Unbounce, so you can make sure every phone number you use on your landing pages is connected, tracked, and counting towards your conversion rates.

The implementation only takes a few minutes. It’s a matter of taking the tracking script from CallRail and adding it as a custom script in Unbounce. Then, the information is married in the back end … and when a phone call occurs it gets pushed into Unbounce as a conversion.

Using the dynamic keywords pool in CallRail, the agency was able to set up 20 different phone numbers for Geoff McDonald & Associates. Each number would automatically rotate to track individual visitors to make call tracking possible—even if they left a landing page and came back to it later, or visited another page to contact the law firm.

We rented a pool of phone numbers. And those numbers rotated through [the CallRail] system so we could see which particular search terms and landing pages were driving those phone calls.

By placing a bit of custom code around each phone number, Workshop Digital was also able to “follow” each visitor as they interacted with the law firm, and push new phone leads directly into the client CRM. 

This is super helpful because it automates the process. We now know which variant of a page a phone call originated from, and we can then use that additional data to speed up our A/B Testing.

But what about phone calls that came in late at night or on weekends? Usually, Geoff McDonald & Associates partnered with an after-hours call service to answer these calls when their team wasn’t in the office. 

To account for these leads, Andrew had another trick up his sleeve…

We built a script that, depending on the time of day, would funnel the lead to the appropriate inbox or appropriate phone number. Meaning if [the call] came in after business hours, the phone number gets automatically routed to an after-hours call service that will call that person back immediately. It’s all time-based so we don’t lose that call.

The Results: Tracking 75% More Conversions on Client Landing Pages

Once the call tracking was up and running, Andrew and his team made a shocking discovery. Over 75% of visitors were converting over the phone, versus using the forms on their landing pages. That was a huge number of leads that they just hadn’t been able to track or attribute back to their highly-successful landing pages previously.

With Unbounce and CallRail together, we get faster and more accurate results for our clients because we’re taking into account all the conversions that take place on a landing page—not just the form submissions.

Now, the agency had a much more complete set of data to A/B Test these landing pages and bring them to their full potential.

Our goal was to increase leads by 25%, year-over-year. But we ended up driving 33% more leads from organic channels, and 219% more leads from our paid and remarketing channels.

The results have far exceeded the expectations of Geoff McDonald & Associates. Last year, the law firm was awarded the M&L Silver Award for “Best Overall Digital Marketing,” thanks in large part to the work done by Workshop Digital.

He’s absolutely thrilled. [Geoff] took these results to one of his legal marketing conferences and won an award for the work. So he gets to be an industry leader in his field.

We’re honored to receive the 2018 M&L Silver Award for Best Overall Digital Marketing! Thanks for a great conference! pic.twitter.com/QuebqiaAgR

— McDonald Injury Law (@McDonaldInjury) January 23, 2019

For the team at Workshop Digital, CallRail has helped to empower them with more data and transparency. Andrew says that now more than ever, these are the types of innovative strategies that clients—and visitors—are looking for.

We need to get the complete picture of how people arrive, experience, and interact with a landing page. Visitors need the option to convert on their terms—not on ours. As marketers, I think we have to really understand where consumer expectations are going. It’s all about convenience.

Now, It’s Time for You to Answer the Call

Get all the nitty-gritty details on how to set up call tracking for your clients, including a custom script you can use to redirect visitor calls based on time of day or location.

You can take the same approach as Andrew at your agency to track more conversions for your clients and get them better results. Save your spot today for the free CallRail webinar on July 31st, 2019.

While growth is excellent news, it also means that your competition is getting stronger. SaaS companies need to keep up if they want to stand out, and one of the best ways to stay ahead is to tap into marketing practices that are sometimes overlooked by your competition.

Surprisingly, content marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies in the wider world, but it often gets disregarded or—worse—is done haphazardly in the SaaS space. This shouldn’t be the case.

Given its efficiency at attracting new leads and nurturing existing ones, content marketing is a perfect opportunity for you to respond to your prospects’ needs in a unique way.

In this article, I’ll suggest a few types of content that are efficient in different stages of the customer journey, starting with interactive content. We’ll also focus on one SaaS marketing technique that has been somewhat forgotten in the digital sphere: direct sales.

Let’s dive in.

1. Use Interactive Content to Offer Personalized Solutions

Creating interactive content (like quizzes, surveys, polls, and calculators) is one of the best ways to attract new customers and engage them in a conversation. According to Kapost, interactive content generates twice as many conversions as passive content. And around 88% of marketers who use it say that interactive content helps them stand out from competitors.

Why? Interactive content is solution-oriented. It taps into the primary need of an average SaaS customer.

And this, in turn, enables you to learn more about your customers (about, for instance, any problems and issues they might be facing or goals they’re looking to achieve). Then you can offer them a personalized solution that will cater to their specific individual needs. After all, your software already solves a particular problem—be it organizing employees, setting up an accounting system, or helping someone lose weight.

Put simply, when you start off creating interactive content, you’ll want to think about the following questions:

• Who is my customer?
• What problem am I trying to solve?
• Which solutions and features do I offer?

An Example of Interactive SaaS Marketing

LeadQuizzes is marketing automation software that started off as a marketing agency. After repeated success with using quizzes to build our clients’ email lists, we decided to turn quizzes into a business in its own right. And what better way to advertise quiz software than to use it to reach potential customers among the target group of professional marketers and small business owners.

With this in mind, we created a quiz that sought to address one of the most common challenges in the digital marketing world: generating leads and sales. The quiz targeted marketers and small business owners in the form of the Facebook quiz ad.

The questions we asked focused on the potential client’s existing website traffic, budget, and marketing objectives. Here are a few examples:

How much website traffic do you receive per month?

• 0 – 5,000 visitors per month
• 5,001 – 10,000 visitors per month
• 10,001+ visitors per month

How many leads are you getting each month?

• 0 – 500 leads per month
• 501 – 1,000 leads per month
• 1,001+ leads per month

Do you offer a discount as an opt-in on your website?

• Yes
• No

Before they got the answers, they had to fill out an opt-in form asking for their name, email, and number. And based on the respondent’s answers, we offered personalized solutions in the form of the quiz results.

In the first quiz, results led to a Calendly page where a potential customer could schedule a consultation because the goal was to acquire as many early adopters as possible. (Today, a similar quiz on the website leads customers to the landing page that includes useful marketing tips, an industry leader’s testimonial, and an offer to sign up.)  

This is what worked for us, but if you feel that personalized results aren’t enough of an incentive for people to share their contact info, you can always use a lead magnet, such as a free ebook or discount, in combination with the quiz.

What’s the lesson here?

Based on the buyer’s needs and readiness, as well as your ultimate goal, the results can differ greatly. That’s why your landing page is a crucial detail that can make or break your user’s interactive experience. This is where your goal and their need should ideally meet.

Median conversion rates for classic PPC ads are between 3-6%, according to Unbounce’s Conversion Benchmark Report. Interactive content can double this percentage, while an effective landing page can boost it to 27%.

Using interactive content along with optimized landing pages, LeadQuizzes went on to close 189 clients in 2 years and generate $720,000 in annual revenue. But the road to that number took more than two steps.

Inevitably, however, some people who engage with your interactive content and landing page simply won’t sign up for your software. That’s life. The reasons may vary: they don’t need it at the moment, or it doesn’t entirely meet their requirements. So how do you keep them coming back?

2. Use “Passive” Content to Nurture Leads

Around 70% of people who leave your website will never come back. Collecting their email addresses using interactive content is an insurance policy against this problem—and a way to stay in touch. If they’re not interested in your product, of course, they’re likely to unsubscribe. As long as they remain on your list, though, you keep the opportunity to offer them the right answer at the right time.

Having access to your potential and existing customer’s inbox is a perfect opportunity to build and nurture a good relationship. High-quality, personalized blog content enables you to assert yourself as an industry authority and a friendly partner to your customers.

But what does make a high-quality blog content? According to Single Grain, some of the most important lead nurturing content practices include:

• Adjusting content to your sales funnel
• Personalizing your content
• Using marketing automation
• Doing follow-ups

Let’s look at how each one of these practices builds upon the data you can gather using interactive content.

Adjusting content to your sales funnel

Using interactive content allows you to understand the level of customer’s buyer readiness, which dictates how “sales-y” your content should be. For example, if you sparked a customer’s interest but they didn’t purchase your product yet, you may want to use content to educate them. You can start with basic guides and 101-themed posts, and slowly build up their knowledge to more specific topics.

For example, this is the welcome email I got after I subscribed for the lead generation tool. In it, the Oxyleads team outlines our future communication:

It’s a good example because they’re setting the expectations in terms of the follow-up emails that are to come (so they won’t seem too spammy), while the content of those emails is expected to educate you about the tool and convince you it’s valuable enough to make a purchase.

Personalizing content

Personalization comes in different forms. It starts with basic things, like using a personalized subject line that addresses the person by name. This small detail increases your open rate by as much as 50%. It’s also important to email your leads according to their time zone and location.

But personalization also means crafting content that responds to the person’s specific needs. A small business owner and manager in a large corporation may use your software. But they probably use it differently, face separate challenges, and have different goals and benchmarks.

Here’s an example of an email I got from a content aggregation platform Zest. One of their projects is creating an algorithm that will display super personalized content for each user inside the browser. This is one part of the experiment.

Social Media Lab (from social media management software Agorapulse) provides another good example of SaaS marketing at work. They seek to educate their customers through engaging experiments. While this email is fairly rudimentary (and lacks a simple personalization tweak: my name!) its content manages to be straightforward while arousing curiosity.

Finally, here’s an amazing example from Grammarly of personalizing content in a less formal way. Every week, they inform me about my writing stats:

But apart from inspiring a sense of accomplishment with personalized insights, this email also sneaks in a call to action to upgrade my plan:

The great thing about generating leads using interactive content is that it allows you to take the guesswork out of this personalization. By asking the right questions, you can understand your target customer’s varying needs and problems, and write content accordingly.

Using marketing automation

Once your email list grows to a certain point, using automation becomes a must. Marketing automation allows you to analyze your leads’ interaction with emails and your content, and optimize them for maximum effect.

Most importantly, automation enables you to forward the right messages to the right people at the desired time, without having to waste a lot of time doing everything manually. There’s a wide variety of available marketing automation tools that can help you scale your lead qualification and nurturing efforts.

Doing follow-ups

How often you’re going to follow-up depends on your customer’s current position in the sales funnel. The “hotter” the lead, the more information they need.

For example, here’s the follow-up email I got from Oxyleads a few days after I spent my free credits:

3. Gain Credibility with White Papers and Case Studies

While white papers and case studies are one type of classical passive content, they deserve special attention in SaaS marketing. In B2B SaaS, in particular, you’re going to engage with people who are professionals in their industry. And wowing them takes more than a good ad copy or engaging blog post. They want to see credibility and authority.

White papers

White papers are used in numerous fields, but the general definition is an authoritative report that addresses certain issues and offers solutions for them. In terms of SaaS marketing, a white paper represents a theory behind your product or technology. Just like with blog posts, its main purpose is to educate customers and help them make a decision. 

A high-quality white paper typically includes:

• Structure and length. While a white paper is longer than a blog post, it’s still shorter than an ebook. It has at least six pages and can take between a few weeks and a few months to write. 
• Format and style. A white paper is formal, detailed, and informative, often written in an “academic” style (i.e., it shouldn’t sound like marketing, even if it is).
• Good design. Even though the tone might be academic, that doesn’t mean your white paper should look like a college essay. Compelling design is a must!

The white paper’s main purpose is to assert yourself as a credible, authoritative solution and source of guidance. More than half of business-to-business marketers consider white papers effective marketing tools, and we agree. (Check out this sample of Google’s white paper for a little inspiration.)

Case studies

Case studies can also take a long time, although they are easier to assemble than a white paper. While they can be written in an informal style, and require only essential information, they still demand serious research. 

But it’s worth the hard work: case studies help convert and accelerate leads, according to Marketing Charts. A case study can give a huge boost to your credibility—people automatically feel more confident about your software if they see you are working with big brands they already know and trust.

The case study requires your client or customer to be ready to reveal their specific, detailed business strategy, show you and the rest of the world their numbers, and prove that it was your software that helped them reach great results.

But how can you produce case studies if you’re just a beginner in the industry? Apart from approaching your existing customers, it’s also possible to approach the industry leaders with fine-tuned cold outreach. But these users have to be incentivized to share their business secrets with you—whether it’s going to be a discount, free subscription, mutual marketing arrangement, etc.

4. Use Traditional Sales (No, Really)

It’s all too easy to forget the power of 1-on-1 conversation in the world of digital solutions. But sales are a marketing technique in their own right and doing them like in “the good old days” may be just what makes your SaaS business stand out.

Of course, we’re not talking about the annoying telemarketer calls. We are talking about reaching out to the customers who are ready and highly likely to buy your product. Engaging them with each type of content we’ve mentioned so far will give you a fairly clear picture of their readiness over time.

Remember that we mentioned in the first section that LeadQuizzes led some quiz takers directly to a Calendly page? Alternatively, some were contacted after a lead nurturing email sequence. But in both cases, the phone calls were incredibly successful and the investment paid off.

Why are traditional sales so effective in SaaS?

They help you close a mutually satisfying deal. Sure, you can list all of your software’s features on the landing page. But presenting them to a client personally, explaining how each feature plays into their specific goals, is much more effective. It enables you to improve retention and reduce churn early on because you are making sure the customers get everything they need in their subscription plan.

Don’t worry that this technique will come across as aggressive—remember, this is the sales part reserved for leads who are genuinely interested in your software.

Conclusion

Making your name in the crowded SaaS world isn’t easy, but it becomes easier when you realize that your marketing strategy stems from the specific nature of your product. As you’re building software, build it with the user in mind. You want to make things simpler and more effective for them. SaaS marketing is all about communicating these thoughts to the customers.

Content marketing and direct sales are a fantastic way to truly empathize and connect with your customer. Once that happens, you build a mutually beneficial relationship in which enables you to develop your product and stay ahead.

When it comes to marketing, this can mean a lot of things. Strategy, analytics, design, copywriting, sales, customer success—they all have nuances in how they’re done intelligently and all require really smart people to do them. People who, like us, know you can never learn enough in an industry that’s evolving quicker than ever.

Which is why we’re dedicating the sixth annual Call to Action Conference to “Raising Your Marketing IQ.” Taking place September 25-26 and featuring 20 expertly-curated—and bona fide brilliant—speakers, CTAConf 2019 will break marketing smarts down into six core elements (cue extremely subtle nod to our Rubik’s Cube theme). So together we can raise our marketing IQ, explore each aspect of marketing in detail, and raise a little roof while we’re at it.

First, what’s Call to Action Conference?

CTAConf has been one of the top digital marketing conferences in North America since 2014. It’s designed to bring you insights as well as information, diverse perspectives over singular opinions, and real, actionable takeaways you can put to use as soon as you’re back in the office. It’s also a helluva time—check out last year’s recap to get a glimpse.

This year, we’re once again welcoming over 1,000 marketers from around the world to our beautiful hometown of Vancouver, B.C. (and hope you’ll be one of them).

What’s on deck for CTAConf 2019

This year, 20 speakers and professional marketers will take the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage for a single-track masterclass in marketing intelligence. Each session will fall under one of six facets of “Marketing IQ,” inspired by the traditional IQ framework:

• Spatial ability: How to use design to focus your visitors’ attention and create usable, high-converting experiences.
• Language ability: Copywriting for conversion and creating meaningful segmentation in marketing communications.
• Mathematical ability: Using data and analytics to inform decision making and understand which metrics matter.
• Memory ability: Establishing repeatable processes to create better workflows and a culture of optimization.
• Emotional intelligence: Emphasizing the human aspects of conversion and motivation behind every transaction in an age of automation and artificial intelligence.
• Strategic thinking: Bringing all of these elements together to create a roadmap for intelligent marketing.

Who’s Speaking?

There aren’t any purchased or sponsored talks at CTAConf—each speaker has been carefully selected for their expertise on their topic, speaking experience, and general awesomeness. We’ve made sure the time you’re taking away from work is spent wisely, soaking up truly valuable learnings you can apply the very next day (in one track, so you don’t have to miss anything). Here’s a peek at who’s on deck, or check out the full list here.

What’s the Agenda?

We’re still working on nailing down the play-by-play detailed agenda, but the most important detail is that it’s taking place September 25-26 in Vancouver. There will also be a full day of hands-on marketing workshops on September 24 that are optional for attendees.

To stay in the loop on hotel blocks, the full agenda, parties, workshop signups, and more, sign up for updates on the CTAConf site. That’s also where you can get your tickets (Pssst…the earlier you get ‘em, the cheaper they’ll be)! Tickets are available for general admission, as well as customer and group discounts.

We hope you’ll join us this year and can’t wait to welcome you to our little bit of paradise here in the Pacific Northwest. And if you have any questions at all, feel free to fire them off to ctaconf@unbounce.com.

See you in September!