CRO Minidegree Review — Week 6

This is the sixth post in the series of twelve posts where I am reviewing CXL Institute’s Conversion Rate Optimization Mini-degree, once every week. This post is in continuation of the previous post where we will be covering the remaining aspects of Landing Page Optimization.

We will be covering the research process for Landing Page Optimization in detail. After setting up the GA report (as discussed in the last post), the next step in the process is doing qualitative research starting with the heuristic analysis of the page we aim to optimize.

Heuristic analysis is meant to give us a perspective into the following areas:

What to clarify in the Heuristic Analysis of your Landing page?

Here’s a template and a set of questions that helps you to evaluate your Landing page. Answering these questions for your LP serves as a starting point for further research and helps in forming the initial hypothesis.

The next part of the research is reviewing the customer review sites like Yelp, Google Reviews, Mouth Shut, Trustpilot, etc. This process is covered in detail in the copywriting post here.

A very important part of the qualitative research process is doing interviews with:

1. Customers
2. Customer Success Team
3. Sales Team

Questions for Customers:

Customer Interview Questions

Questions for Customer Success Team:

Customer Success Team Questions

Questions for Sales Team:

Sales Team Questions

Once done with heuristic analysis & interviews, we should refer to the following sources for more qualitative analysis data points:

1. Sessions Recordings — useful for troubleshooting & finding bugs.
2. Feedback Polls — useful for fiding week spots in the funnel and understanding why users are having trouble or are exiting
3. Usability testing — 5 second tests are used for understanding the emotional responses, Preference tests & Click Tests are used for “sanity-checking” your designs, ads, and ideas for copy.

The next step in the LPO process is copywriting. The main objectives of the copy are to take care of the following:

The details of doing copywriting for Landing pages are covered here & here.

In addition to the process mentioned on the posts linked above, here’s how to do CTA copies right. Ideally:

A good way to draft CTA copies is:

When I click the button, I’d like to (insert phrase). This becomes your CTA copy. For example, When I click the button, I’d like to see plans and pricing. So, the CTA copy becomes “See Plans & Pricing”

Next comes the design elements. 6 most important design elements are:

1. Headline
2. Image/Video
3. Features/Benefits
4. Credibility
5. Expectation Manager
6. Call-to-Action

Ideally, each scroll of the page should have these design elements covered. See an example from Unbounce:

Scroll 2

Scroll 5

Next comes the Visual Hierarchy of the page. Visual Hierarchy answers 2 important questions:

1. What elements are most important?
2. Where should I look first?

5 important principles of Visual Hierarchy are:

1. Size — Elements with bigger size are deemed more important
2. Space — Whitespace around the elements helps readability
3. Font — Simple fonts without “feet” (San Serif) have better readability
4. Color & Contrast — Important elements like CTA buttons need to be in contrasting colors. It also helps to define a color hierarchy.
5. Direction — Directional cues, pointers, the direction in which humans are looking, etc. help in getting attention to the right places.

A very important aspect of Landing Page Design is the form design. It should be seen as a landing page inside of a landing page. This means the form has to make sense of it’s own — independent of the landing page.

An example of a good form having all the important design elements

To summarize the process, here are the various aspects discussed in this and the last post:

Summary of Landing Page Optimization Process

I hope this was useful. It certainly helped me structure my thought process well. And yes, got the credentials as well:

Happy Learning!

Yatin