Important Lessons from the 2015 Call to Action Conference in Vancouver

Strathcom Media was very lucky to be able to attend the Call to Action Conference hosted by Unbounce in Vancouver, B.C. With over 400 attendees from around the globe, this conference brings 20+ online marketing experts who shared important information and advice about successful conversion, testing, content, and more. We got tons of useful tidbits and techniques that we can’t wait to start implementing into our sites, and we’ve summarized those key takeaways for you below. We hope you find them as helpful and insightful as we did!

Avoid Landing Page Overload

Don’t overload landing pages with useless information, images, or links. Everything that you include on your landing pages should have a good reason for being there, so don’t get caught up in creating an attractive design and forgetting about the most important parts of a page. If you’re not sure what, if anything, needs to be removed, then start testing! It’s the best way to determine how positive the user’s experience is.

Another simple, yet important aspect of an effective landing page (and website) is to ensure everything loads quickly. As one of the speakers noted, when websites loaded just one second slower, there was a 7% reduction in conversion rates. Who knew one second could make such a huge difference? To create a quick and efficient landing page optimized for conversion, you should make sure you have good hosting, use fewer images that aren’t too big in size along with caching and compression, and remove any unnecessary elements that could be slowing things down.

Don’t forget that unnecessary elements can also include links. A recent Unbounce survey of almost 8,000 companies found that those companies could increase their conversion rate by 50% just by doing one astonishingly simple thing: removing three links from their landing pages.

Test & Research

Testing is so important, yet over 60% of companies test their content and statistics less than five times a month. Testing helps you understand your customers, measure your success, and improve your strategies by not only allowing you to determine what techniques have been successful, but also by giving you priceless information about your failures so you can pinpoint what didn’t work and improve it for next time.

Don’t confuse testing with research, though. While testing helps you determine what’s working and what isn’t, researching helps you understand why something was a success or failure. Research can also help you anticipate and remove any potential issues or give you the knowledge to resolve them as they arise. After all, how can you resolve an issue if you don’t first understand it?

Focus on the Feelings

Effective marketing touches people’s emotions. People are subconsciously moved to purchase products when you show them how good it’ll make them feel or how it’ll improve their lives, not just by telling the customers about a product’s features. Appealing to the emotions of your customers becomes easier when you remember that you’re a customer too. If something doesn’t work for you, chances are good that it’s not going to appeal to other customers either.

Other Important Takeaways

• Personalize emails beyond just adding a customer’s name by addressing their behaviour (e.g. signing up for a newsletter vs. an expiring subscription).
• Don’t be fooled into ignoring email in favour of social media. Social media helps spread the word, but email is better at keeping a customer’s attention, while offering faster conversion rates and more revenue.
• Mobile devices are being used now more than ever, so you should create a dedicated mobile site.
• Continually work to identify customer friction points on your landing pages.
• Overall success is achieved when the customer’s experience is a positive one.

Thank you to the Call to Action organizers, speakers, and attendees! It was a great conference and we can’t wait to attend CTACONF 2016!