Envato Notes

The Savvy Marketer’s Guide to Landing Pages, High School Dances & Unbounce

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 05:11 PM PST

unbounce-envato

I remember having a crush on a girl back in high school. Let's call her Daniella. I was walking into the gym – which was decked out in all kinds of cheesy decor – knowing exactly what my mission was: to ask Daniella for the all-important first slow dance.

But as soon as I got in there, my judgement became clouded with fear and confusion. There were too many distractions, including Emma Jenson, who was rocking some crazy rock outfit.

Being a long-haired metal fan, I instantly made a connection and inevitably ended up asking her to dance instead.

The net result was that I didn't end up with the girl I had intended on dancing with when I got to the dance.

For a marketer, this scenario is a nightmare. When you're running a campaign, your success is entirely dependent on being able to corral people down, into, and through your sales funnel – without distractions taking them somewhere else.

Why landing pages have changed marketing forever

What if Emma hadn't caught my attention with her Joan Jett vibe? I would've asked Daniella as planned. We'd dance and I'd be happy. Assuming she said yes, of course.

This is what landing pages do for your marketing. They enable your visitors to get what they came for. Which in turn enables your business to be more successful.

A quick definition…

A landing page is a standalone, campaign-specific web page. It's intent is to get your visitors to complete a single action. It's not your website, and it's most certainly not your homepage.

You have to send your marketing traffic somewhere, and the difference between sending it to a landing page vs. your homepage is the difference between success and failure.

To understand how this works, you need to understand Attention Ratio.

Attention Ratio (AR) is defined as the ratio of interactive elements (links aka "leaks") on a page to the number of campaign conversion goals (which should always be 1).

Consider the two diagrams below. The first is a typical homepage, and the second is a campaign-specific landing page.

The Homepage

On this homepage, your campaign (the boy or girl you thought you wanted to dance with) is represented by "promo 2" highlighted by the red circle.

The rest of the page is comprised of a few other promotions, some features, navigation, a general brand proposition, a slider, footer navigation and many other page "leaks". These are all the other potential dance candidates.

If you send prospects to your homepage – from a paid ad, email or social media – the intended campaign conversion goal has to fight to get their attention with all of the other interactive elements on the page.

A typical homepage has approximately 40 links.

In the example opposite there is a total of 56 links, therefore:

The Attention Ratio is 56:1

In other words, the chances of your visitors making the decision you want them too will be diminished by the available choices – not to mention Emma Jenson. Boom. You're right back in high school.

#dancingwiththenewgirl

The Landing Page

On a campaign specific landing page, the entire page is focused on only one thing – your campaign.

The messaging is very tightly related to the campaign goal and has only 1 interactive element – the Call-To-Action (CTA).

The Attention Ratio is 1:1

#dancingwiththegirlofmydreams

Now, I'm not saying that landing pages will get you laid. That's just an analogy. What they will do is change how you think about marketing. And they'll make your marketing more successful.

Templates! Templates! We need more landing page templates!

As either a ThemeForest designer or someone looking for a template on ThemeForest, this should be of serious interest to you.

Marketers need landing page templates.

You should know that there are over 3,500 landing pages published every week using Unbounce. That's thousands of marketing campaigns that need templates. Getting these pages designed can be a pain in the ass for marketers. They need them fast, and they often don't have the resources available to make it happen.

What's Unbounce?

Excellent question. Unbounce is the landing page builder for marketers. It's an online platform that lets you build, publish and A/B test landing pages without IT.

Here's how it works:

Choose a template from the library inside Unbounce.
Edit and customize it as much as you like in the drag-and-drop page builder.
Publish the page in a single click and your campaign is live.
If you want, you can make a copy of the page, make some changes, and huzzah! You have a working A/B test to see if you can optimize your page for higher conversion rates.

Let's take a closer look

When you're inside Unbounce, you can choose one of the high-converting templates from the template library as shown below.

Selecting a template opens it up in the page builder where you can customize everything. It's super easy to drag 'n' drop new elements (images, video, forms, social widgets) and edit everything else on the page as you can see in the image below.

builder-magnifying-glass

After publishing the landing page with a simple button click, your campaign is live and gathering leads and data. You can see an example of the campaign dashboard below.

Are you a template designer?

Landing page templates are just a single page. That's a much simpler design effort than a full website. Although the rules of design change quite a bit when focusing on conversion.

ThemeForest now has an entire category dedicated to landing page designs for the Unbounce platform.

Check out this tutorial on how to design landing page templates for Unbounce.

Are you a marketer that needs a template?

You're in luck. Unbounce already comes with 80 fully-configurable templates, and with the new Unbounce ThemeForest category, there will be hundreds more available for you to import into Unbounce to get your marketing campaigns up and running.

Header image credit: Pressmaster

Community Superstar – Charlie4282

Posted: 24 Feb 2014 01:17 AM PST

Community Superstar Charlie4282

Congratulations to our first Community Superstar of 2014, Charlie4282! A fantastic forum contributor and a top buyer, Charlie is always there to help others within the Marketplace community.

Charlie has been a member of the Envato Marketplaces for four years. He currently lives in the UK and he spends his free time being distracted by inspiring ThemeForest items. As well as being a top buyer, he is a consistently great guy to have on our forums.

Charlie says, “With the Marketplace getting bigger and better every day, I am in awe of many of the authors work and have learnt more from being a part of ThemeForest than I did in my uni degree!”

With his helpful and positive attitude, we are so proud to have Charlie as an active member in our wonderful community.

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What does Charlie think about being 2014′s first Community Superstar?

Thank to you everyone involved in Envato [aside from the distraction of ThemeForest when I'm at work!].

I am proud to be able to be a part of the ThemeForest community and am blown away to have received the superstar title.

To celebrate his title, we have awarded him with a Community Superstar badge, $20 Marketplace credit, and a six months Tuts+ membership. If you too would like to be a Community Superstar one day, get involved on the forums and practice being generally awesome.

If you see Charlie around the forums, don’t forget to congratulate him and say ‘hi’!