How I Am Going To Be Testing Landing Pages This Year

Good morning, hope you're ready for a doozy today. My last newsletter was about what I learned going viral on TikTok. This week, I'm going to switch things up and talk about my plan for testing landing pages in 2022.

I wrote about landing page testing briefly in my previous post on our plans for 2022, and got quite a few requests to talk about our landing page testing strategy.

We haven't done a ton of it, but here's what we have done so far, what I'm planning to test, and a few ways I'm looking at it that might differ.

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Why Landing Pages

First, why landing pages? Why not just send traffic to the PDP or homepage? There are a few reasons why. Primarily, the home page and PDPs don't necessarily take into account where someone is in their customer journey. Sure your PDP should have all the relevant information about the features and benefits of your product, but it doesn't really educate a prospect on why they need it, or get them emotionally invested in your brand. If you just want to acquire a customer or sell a product, PDPs can work. If you want to use paid media to help build your brand and acquire lifelong customers, there might be a better way. If you can't tell by now, that's my goal and I want to do it by providing our customers with an unbeatable experience, not just optimize off a CPA.

We have one physical store, and when running paid traffic, I like to visualize it IRL. How would you greet a brand new customer to your store? Well the first thing is, you should adjust your approach once you learn a bit about them. That's harder to do online, but maybe it's smart to have a few different landers in the mix and let FB figure it out. But once they step in, you'll probably give them a warm greeting, ask a few questions about them, build some rapport, and then introduce them to the brand and products first. That would be a pretty good experience for the new customer, don't you think? (Sounds like a quiz funnel, no?)

What you wouldn't do is grab them by the shoulders before they walk in, don't say hi or ask them any questions, and steer them straight to one product. That would be awkward, and even if the customer bought that product, they probably wouldn't look too fondly of their experience, they might not return, and they're certainly not going to rave to their friends. We agree we shouldn't do this, right?

Then why the heck are we doing this online? That's exactly what sending cold traffic straight to a PDP is. It doesn't make a lot of sense. Now there are differences to IRL vs online, so it's not a perfect analogy. But I do think there's a lot of value in thinking like this. So the first reason to use dedicated landing pages for paid media is to control the customer journey by providing the right information, education, and context as a very warm welcome to your brand. Quizzes, advertorials, and third party editorials can do this very well. I'll show some examples later on.

Secondly, there are a the optimization aspects of not sending traffic straight to the homepage or pdp. You should be optimizing your site speed, but even if you are, a dedicated landing page is always going to be faster than a Shopify site.

In addition, great things happen when you remove the Navigation and guide your customers through what journey you want them to take. One caveat though, I actually like friction. Many people love landing pages because you can go straight from landing page to checkout, and skip all the unnecessary steps. I agree that's great, but can sometimes come at the expense of AOV, or just providing a great customer experience. It's counterintuitive, but sometimes I find that adding in a little friction can go a long ways.

Landing Page Types

I'm a principles guy. I need to always compartmentalize tactical things together based on principal. So here are some of the popular, and less popular, landing page types I plan to test this year, combined with why I like them.

The Standard Product Lander

You've probably seen this kind the most. It's just a standard, single product landing page. It should have a great headline, be modest in length, list all the features and benefits of your product, and answer any objections.

Honestly, this is probably the type of page I will test the least, or that I'm least excited about. But it's definitely going to be in the arsenal, so I'll get working on a few tests for our hero products.

Here are a few solid exampes:

Eightsleep

MindBodyGreen

Ritual (This one is more of a category page, but very similar)

The Faux Homepage/ The Trojan Horse

I'm debating if I want to call this style the Faux Homepage or The Trojan Horse. I think I like The Trojan Horse. Here's why...

I've actually only seen one brand do this, so that being said I don't know how well it performs. But I'm very intrigued. The Faux Homepage/ Trojan Horse is a landing page that looks like a regular homepage to the casual observer. However, on closer inspection you realize it's actually different.

It looks like a homepage, but the copy and sections are curated perfectly to be relevant for somebody coming from Paid Social specifically. It has all the elements of a proper direct response style landing page:

Strong, Attention Grabbing Headline

Social Proof From Customers And Third Party Press

Answers "What Makes You Different And Why Should I Care?"

Introduces The Problem And Solution

But it does it while looking like a very on brand homepage.

This is a very brand first style of performance marketing, which if you follow me you know I'm all about. This is probably the style I'm most excited to test.

A few notes here:

1. This is probably the easiest to pull off if you're on OS 2.0, which we just switched to.

2. One reason landers do well is because they don't have a navigation, as I alluded to before. I plan to create a new nav/ header here but remove all the unnecessary links and only include what is necessary, in addition to being another place to show the primary CTA.

Like I said, I've only seen this style once and it is from Caraway.

The Listicle/ Advertorial

I'm a huge fan of this one. All of our TikTok traffic is currently running to a Listicle. I'm going to keep testing and testing.

Why do I love it? It's also a Trojan Horse strategy. Prospects get handheld and get to discover what makes your product and brand unique without feeling like they're being hard sold, but also while getting all the necessary value props and objections out of the way. You can weave in your brand pillars and story here, which I love.

Here's our main one.

I have a lot I want to test on it, but it's working great for now.

Here is a good one from Harry's.

These can also be used really well in retargeting. You could write a few for the most common objections you get and put them in re-targeting only. For example, one of the most common objections we get is "How do I know my shade?" so we could write one on "How To Pick Your Miracle Balm Shade" and it would crush. We could also link our quiz as the CTA from there.

Speaking of, I should mention that ALL of our traffic from that listice leads to an Octane AI quiz. So while the lander works well, I also think it's working really well because of the quiz funnel. I am going to find a way to link to our quiz from every type of landing page, even if it's not the primary CTA.

The Quiz

Speaking of the quiz funnel. You can also drive straight to the quiz itself. We're doing this in retargeting and it's working amazingly.

You can go straight to the quiz, or create a short landing page about the quiz to drive to like this Glossier one.

Third Party

I'm also bullish on testing and using third party landing pages. We've been running tons of retargeting traffic to one, and it's doing so well. We're in talks with a few publishers about working with them to get some together.

I'm so bullish on this that I recently launched a side hustle to help brands get access to a quality performance publisher at a fair price. We're already full, but if you'd like our deck and to join the waitlist please let me know.

The Influencer LP

This is another one I haven't seen a ton of, but I want to try it. It's more common in organic/ pay to post influencer marketing, where brands will create landing pages with an Influencer's info on it. But they usually just use a stock template, and only put in their name. I'm talking about creating a very on brand, visually appealing page.

I don't know what I'm thinking in terms of layout yet, but here's a really good example. I saw it after clicking through a whitelisted ad from him.

I don't necessarily think it's a great page, but it got me thinking. It's a great experience, seamless experience after clicking through from a whitelisted ad. We have some cool collabs with influencers coming up, and I will be testing these from their whitelisted ads for sure.

The Logistics

The best strategy in the world doesn't matter if you don't have the proper resources, team, and operation to carry it out. Here's our plan for testing, building, and iterating.

The Tech Stack

We just switched to OS2.0. I think that will really help us create beautiful, on brand pages quickly. We'll have our in house designer design them based on input from me, and hand the designs to our dev partners. Our dev parters will code the templates, and then hopefully we can build and test easily using those. Still early to 2.0, but I'm optimistic.

We're currently using Builder.io and we will continue using it. It's what I built the live listicle on, and it's super easy to use and test. I highly reccomend it.

Webflow and Unbounce are two other options for building simple landing pages.

You already how how big of an Octane AI quiz fan I am, so that goes without saying. I think nearly every store should have a quiz, and it's going to be a huge part of our landing page strategy.

The People

We're very lean, and right now I'm the only person on the growth team so I built that listicle myself. But my design skills are limited. We're currently hiring for a Growth Marketing role or two, and my hope is we can get someone that can manage the creative process as well as build landing pages. If you know someone, please connect us!

Testing Process

I plan to test these very similarly to how I go about testing creative. We will lunch them in a broad campaign with our best performing ads. We'll change 1 variable at a time to know what's making a difference. I'm all about testing directionally first. So instead of making 3 versions of the Trojan Horse to start, when I don't even know if that strategy works, I'll test The Trojan Horse versus a Listicle and a Product Lander to see which has more legs. Then I'll narrow down and test smaller variations on the same style of page in a systematic matter, while logging all learnings for future use. I will meet with the person building the pages bi-weekly to share and review test data, brainstorm and hypothesize future tests, and put the plan into action.

Wrap Up

Hope you enjoyed this one. Landing pages are a hot topic, and for good reason. It's one of the most important things you can do to improve your paid results.

Btw this is the first issue I'm sending from Beehiv instead of Revue, so please bare with me as I figure out how to make this email look decent. Like I said, I suck at design.

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Until next week,

Cody