The adage “less is more” has been proven with a study by the Journal of Consumer Research.

The study demonstrated that ads containing lots of white space lead customers to perceive the brand as:

• More prestigious
• More sophisticated
• Trustworthy
• Higher in product quality and leadership
• Lower in risk than the same ad without white space

Researchers noted that these associations go back to the 1960’s minimalist movement when people were moving away from artwork they felt was deception or full of illusion. The removal of excessive imagery and language makes the information in the ad appear more truthful, and makes the advertiser appear more truthful.

A note about white space: If you want to create a sophisticated and trustworthy brand, say less – not more – in the ads you create. Also, “white space” doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of color.  It just “simplified” — remove the unnecessary and enjoy the simplicity of the message (see Apple’s ad).

Source: “How Nothing Became Something: White Space, Rhetoric, History, and Meaning“ John W. Pracejus, G. Douglas Olsen, and Thomas C. O’Guinn. Journal of Consumer Research, 2006. Click here for a PDF of the report.

Your website may actually have several landing pages.  It will only have one home page, but there are advantages in having landing pages and even testing alternative versions of those landing pages.  A landing page is a webpage that link from any marketing campaign, like an advertisement, email, Pay-per-click campaign or a web page listed naturally in the search engines.  For example, when you click from an email, you should be directed to a page that is specific to the offer or product addressed in the email.

The hazard of linking to a “catch-all” homepage is that the customer has to do too much work to find what was advertised in an email — or worse, they get lost. Every time you make someone click, you lose 50% of your visitors.  The point is to have prospective customers taken directly to where you want them to be without having to depend on the customer to carry out another step on their own unattended.  Either way, you lose the prospect along the way.  It is important not to let that happen.  A web designer such as Thrive Marketing can show you how.

Tip #1

Keep the copy on the landing page short and to the point.  This page is designed to be a specific payback for the email from which the transfer is made.  The payback needs to be quick and to the point.  Be clear about what conversion activity you want to have happen (for example, is it a contact form submission, a sale, email newsletter subscription, membership?) through the landing page and write the copy accordingly.

Tip #2

Don’t expect your prospect to do too much.  It isn’t their job to weed their way through your website to your goal; it is your job to serve them as directly as possible, in two clicks or fewer.  Ask for only the information you need from them with the objective of conversion in mind.  If you ask them to do too much at the outset, you run the risk of turning off a customer who will then seek out your competitor to complete their purchase.  No one will ever complain that your website is too easy to navigation or utilize.  Also, warm them up with finesse; don’t be pushy.

Tip #3

If you are testing different offers, or even different versions of a product, use separate landing pages to measure the effectiveness of the items being tested and compared.  Landing pages are not usually used as a testing medium for marketing nearly as often as it could be.  You can measure and learn a lot from checking the click-through rates of different versions of the landing pages using A/B split testing or multi-variate testing.

Tip #4

Remember to follow-up those leads.  The entire point of generating leads is to achieve a sales conversion or new customer.  You are missing the manna falling from the sky if you fail to follow-up with leads.  Prepare in advance follow-up emails and be ready to respond automatically from a leads data base.  Infusionsoft is a wonderful tool for doing that and you can customize the letters any way you want and self-manage the mailing criteria.  We can tell you a lot more about automating Infusionsoft follow-up but, in a nutshell, it is not unusual to double your catch through automated lead follow-up mailing programs.

Tip #5

Conversion is the name of the game.  Typically, conversion rates are extremely low ranging from about 6% for catalog shopping down to about 1% for electronics.  Most conversion rates for most ecommerce website range from 1% to 2%.  In other words, for every 100 potential customers (on average) you will make only one or two sales.  Can that be improved?  You bet it can!  If you know what you are doing and plan your process well, you should be able to do two to four times those averages.  It is fairly easy to attract the traffic to your site but converting a portion of that traffic takes planning and expertise on what turns a buyer on and what turns a buyer off.  You do not have a successful site until the site provides you with the desired customer action.

It is great to know which of your marketing efforts are the most productive, but the real payback to intelligent use of landing pages is in the rate of conversions for your product or service sales.  Just as with your home page, it takes good planning, knowledge of how the customer’s eyes track the page, and making it easy to bring your customer through the process to complete a sale.  Give your selling efforts a new home on a specially designed landing page.

AZ Marketing Companies Have 3 Areas of Concern

AZ marketing companies should know three major areas that need scrutiny:  first, the overall usability of your site is of paramount importance; second, the landing page is probably the single most important page to motivate visitors to become your customers; and third, search engine optimization puts you in front of the customer.

#1: Website Usability

It is essential to redesign based on usability because website design success requires an understanding of customer behavior and makes customers take action—the action you want them to take.

• Research suggests that fully, one-third of all online transactions may be aborted due to usability problems.

• According to website usability expert, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, website redesign based on a usability analysis, on average increases traffic (hits) by 150% and increases online sales by 100%.

• Consequently, an investment in usability typically provides a return on investment between a 10-fold and 100-fold return in sales.

#2: Landing Pages

The landing page is your one-time, first-impression opportunity.  The landing page acts as the doorway to your website business and it can either be inviting or inhibiting.  Thrive Marketing, one of many AZ marketing companies, has done a lot of study on what makes landing pages successful.  In a recent article about landing page optimization, we published what we have seen (“Boost Your Website Conversions: Landing Pages”).

The landing page must convince the visitor to stay in the first two or three seconds before he or she quickly moves on.  A landing page should be designed not only for first impression, but specifically for lead generation, branding and education and, ultimately, to generate sales for your company.  The landing page must focus on the benefits to the reader, not the features of the presenter.  This often-forgotten element is necessary to accommodate the point of view of the customer who is seeking to fulfill a need.  That is a pretty tall order to communicate in just those few seconds, but that is what must be done.

#3: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the art and science of taking your company directly into the view of your potential customer.  SEO allows you to leverage the search engines, such as Google, for the benefit of your marketing efforts by raising your company name higher in the search results list—optimally to the number one position.  This practice is called search engine optimization.  Without the SEO efforts, all the great work done on your website may be invisible to the very person you need to present it to.  A rather complicated process briefly described, SEO efforts concentrate on the search terms your potential customer is likely to use and optimizes your site for those terms.  Strong SEO skills require good creativity coupled with high attention to detail.  It is an area of web marketing that Thrive Marketing has developed into a specialty.

In The Company of Creative Expertise

Thrive Marketing is staffed with people who are award-winning in their fields and have decades of experience in all facets of web management, web design, copy development, and SEO enhancements.  Learn more about Thrive Marketing We strive to make our clients’ businesses thrive.  We would love a chance to sit with you, show you the results of our web design and marketing efforts, and give you specifics on just how we can do that for you.

To request a proposal or even to talk over what you would like to do with your website and marketing efforts, fill out the information on the request a proposal page and we will contact you as quickly as we can.

Website Review and/or Interview Us for Your Project

ThriveMarketing would like an opportunity to do an analysis of your website design and show you what can be done to make it a more effective selling tool.  You can request a proposal online.  We would love to show you how we can make your online efforts at marketing thrive!

• Call Toll-Free: 1 (866) 521-0827
• Call Locally:    1 (480) 704-4563

Arizona marketing companies number almost like the stars in the sky.  However, not all those Arizona marketing companies are really all about marketing.  Good marketing is something everyone thinks they can do but for you, it is not too long before new ideas can run out.  What do you do when your promotion efforts start to get a little stale?  Arizona marketing companies like ThriveMarketing, LLC know what to do.

Keeping a Website Fresh is a Necessity

Arizona marketing companies like ThriveMarketing know how important it is to conduct an occasional website analysis and makeover for several reasons:

• First, internet search engines, such as Google, recognize websites that become stale and unchanging, and they move them down the results list and away from any hard-earned SEO work you have accomplished in the past.
• Second, websites become visibly dated.  Dancing babies and waving flags were the cutting edge ten years ago, but today, they simply date a website.  Maybe that isn’t as obvious as putting classic Roman architecture next to art deco, but the astute marketer or any business that keeps up-to-date notices things like that.  You can train your eye to notice them too as you look through websites.
• Third, particularly now, it is important to keep up-to-date with an occasional website makeover to demonstrate the strength and innovation of your company in uncertain times.

All Arizona Marketing Companies Are Not Alike

When you are looking for a company to help you with your website marketing, you will find that a good online marketing company can make adjustments to your website that can dramatically increase its effectiveness as a selling tool and make your website significantly easier to locate.  There are a few basic rules we have identified that will help you make sure you are getting everything you want out of your website

Getting Bids: Is the lowest bid the right choice?

Instinctively, you will want to do some shopping around, as you should, and then possibly ask for bids to see who can work on your website with the least investment.  The results are often surprising because there is such a surprising range of costs.  You have to remember that in internet marketing, creativity is the key product and the level of creativity is not synonymous with cost.  In effective internet marketing, cheaper is not better.  In fact, sacrificing quality can be very expensive to your bottom line. Learn all you can about what you are asking to do if you are thinking of making modifications and improvements to your website business.

So, how do you tell the difference between marketing companies?

The differences become more evident as you meet with the people leading the marketing companies.  Simple tweaks and simple solutions are sometimes enough, but not usually.  Crossing the threshold from spending a little for a little, to spending a little more for a lot, can mean the difference in your website producing great results.

In the next article, we will discuss the three most important areas for focus when redesigning a website.

Website Review and/or Interview Us for Your Project

ThriveMarketing would like an opportunity to do an analysis of your website design and show you what can be done to make it a more effective selling tool.  You can request a proposal online.  We would love to show you how we can make your online efforts at marketing thrive!

• Call Toll-Free: 1 (866) 521-0827
• Call Locally:    1 (480) 704-4563

With a web design expert like ThriveMarketing helping you with your Internet marketing, you are in good hands. And, we have plenty of amazing results and happy clients to prove it…

Using too many colors or the wrong combination of colors on your website could alienate or turn off customers completely. Out of any form of non-verbal communication, color is the quickest way to communicate a message and meaning. And, marketers spend oodles of time and money determining the colors to best market their product: the colors that will prove the highest amount of return on investment.

Choose Colors with Care

The right colors can mean bigger profits for your website. You may even want to hire a professional web designer to help you. Make sure the web designer you hire is not just a programmer, but also a graphic designer and/or marketer. After all, the reason why 99% of all websites fail is because it was created by a technician and not a marketing expert.

So, What Colors are Best for Your Website?

That is hard to say. Again, you may want to hire a professional to help you. We do suggest the following quick tips:

• Choose a white or light gray background color as it will be the best backdrop for your text and has been shown to be the easiest way for people to read your website. (The worst is probably a blue background with red type – talk about hard to focus).
• Try to keep your main body text font a black or dark gray. You may choose one other color for your headers and subheaders such as red, blue, orange or what ever compliments your logo or website colors the best. Too many colors on a page will be prove confusing and uninviting to a visitor.
• Choose three main colors for your design: primary, secondary and an accent color.

Colors are Symbolic of Emotion

We all know from what studies have told us that most of consumer behavior is emotionally driven. That’s why marketers spend so much time on determining what colors eminate the proper emotions. The following tips will help you understand the underlying meaning behind color so you may be guided to make the right choice.

Key Tip: Keep in mind that depending on its value or intensity, one color can give very different emotions.

Red – Stimulating. Exciting. Energizing. Appetizing. When you eye sees red, chemical responses in your body cause your blood pressure, pulse rate, and adrenaline to increase. Fire engine red is more energetic than a more traditional burgundy.

Pink – Happy. Romantic. Spirited. Youthful. Best used for less expensive and trendy products. Vibrant pinks are common in the cosmetic industry. Bubble gum pink can be considered immature, but fuchsia or magenta are considered more sophisticated.

Orange – Friendly. Adventurous. Energizing. Inviting. Of all the colors, orange is the hottest. Similar to red’s arousing effect, orange is often associated with bright sunsets or fall foliage. Orange contains the drama of red with the cheeriness of yellow. Neon orange tends to be load and is the most disliked color, but a more tempered vivid orange is highly effective for point-of-purchase graphics and specials.

Yellow – Warm. Sunny. Cheerful. Vibrant. Yellow is equivalent to enlightenment and imagination. This color is especially effective for food service industries because of the association to bananas, custards and lemons. Pale yellow is an excellent choice for point-of-purchase materials (materials at the cash register or reception area) because the eye sees the highly reflective yellow before it notices any other color.

Brown – Rich. Sheltering. Durable. Sensible. Brown is an earth tone and is related to the earth’s nurturing qualities and stability. Generally speaking, brown provokes a positive response, but the wrong shade could lead to customers relating it to dirty, which could be detrimental for a product in the fashion industry, for example. Brown works well with food products since customers also relate it to root beer, coffee and chocolate.

Blue – Cool. Trusting. Serene. Consistent. Similar to the earthy color brown, blue is related to the sky and water, both dependable constants in our lives. Blue is an ideal color for websites, especially e-commerce websites. Many banks and financial institutions use blue in their marketing because it makes customers feel more trusting. Blue also can generate a cold, distant, corporate feeling, the opposite of generating a personal relationship with the customer.

Green – Refreshing. Healing. Fresh. Soothing. Green offers the most variety of choices out of all the colors of the rainbow. Green works well for personal hygiene or beauty products because of its soothing and flattering tones. Most people link green to nature; they think of foliage or grass. Mint green is seen as fresh while bright greens are associated with grass. Emerald greens are elegant and deep greens are linked to money and prestige. Green is also combined nicely with many other colors and can also work as a neutral.

Purple – Elegant. Sensual. Regal. Mysterious. Purple is seen as sensual and spiritual as it combines the sensuality of red and the sereneness of blue. It is best used with creative products, new products, or cutting edge products. Deep purple is associated with regal sophistication and lavender has a more subtle nostalgic appeal.

Neutrals – Classic. Quality. Natural. Timeless. The neutral tones of beige, gray and taupe emulate the psychological message of dependability and timelessness. They are regarded as safe and non-offensive and will not go out-of-date as they are always in style.

White – Pure. Bright. Pristine. Simple. While white can signify clean elegance, it can also be considered generic and stark, unless you have stylish graphics to compliment the white.

Black – Strong. Classic. Mysterious. Powerful. Black is most closely associated with the night. Black is seen as powerful, dramatic, elegant and expensive. In food packaging, a customer will actually pay more for a gourmet image. Although black is associated with mourning, its positive associations far outweigh its negative. Warning: too much black can be overkill.