In this FastClass video, Flint McGlaughlin, CEO and Managing Director, MECLABS Institute teaches Four ways to improve the conversion power of your message (MECLABS is the parent organization of MarketingExperiments). He uses a lead generation landing page experiment that resulted in a 326% increase in conversion as a real-world example.
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TRANSCRIPT
Flint McGlaughlin: Marketer, one of these two lead capture devices is profoundly better than the other. It’s fascinating because they do not look that different. But remember, we do not optimize web pages, we optimize the sequence of thought. Let me show you the difference, but first, let me ask you a question.
How much better do you think one of these could possibly perform over the other? If you look just at the slight differences in appearance, you might underestimate that number. Here is what we discovered when we ran a scientific test comparing the two in a single-factorial experiment. The treatment outperformed the control by 326%. Think about that. For every 100 people that saw the control, 4 said yes. But for every 100 people that saw the treatment, 18 said yes. It is amazing.
Something profound is happening in the mind. What is the difference? There are four principles you can learn with me right now that might help you improve the performance of your own lead capture form.
The first is clarity. Let’s compare the two headlines. The first headline offers a guide. It’s a vague word, it could mean many things. The second headline offers a map, that is very precise. It’s much clearer and it’s much more powerful.
Here is another principle, imminence, notice how the treatment focuses on something you need right away because you are about to get into your car and visit a community for one of the largest homebuilders in America. You need a map, and so the imminence intensified relevance. So again, clarity, and imminence, helped to drive a result.
But there is another principle, time to value. Let’s look word for word, at the promise beneath the headline. It says “The community guide (you have learned nothing new that wasn’t already in the headline), is your (nothing new), go to (what does that mean?), resource (how is that different than guide?), for information (what are you saying? That you haven’t already said?).” Indeed, we have stacked modifiers, prepositional phrases on top of each other, and we have wasted energy. Many people will not get past this weak opening.
But look at the treatment, The time to value is much shorter, almost instant. Be prepared for your visit, now that applies the time-to-value principle, but here is another, value translation. Taking the concept, the essence of the concept map, the treatment translates it into something that is beneficial to you. Be prepared, so that it takes an extra step in the sequence of thought.
These four principles – clarity, imminence, time to value, and value translation – helped to create the hypothesis for the treatment that drove such a dramatic difference. Remember something, marketers have been taught to focus on two categories: needs and wants. In actuality, there is only one category, wants. Wants precede yeses, unless the prospect wants what the prospect needs, then what the prospect needs is practically irrelevant. It is not enough to learn what happened in this case study, you’ve got to be able to apply it in your own situation.
So think about how clarity, imminence, time to value, and value translation can help you make a difference in your own work.