Part of our marketing philosophy is to ask people to do something in our communications, usually with the website as the call to action. It is therefore extremely important to create effective landing pages where people can follow through. A percentage point increase in task completion can make a huge difference in the overall results of a campaign.

A landing page needs to follow through on a call to action, should be relevant to the message, re-enforce it, be credible, desirable and usable. Some of this you can test easily, others not so much within the time and budget available. I’ve stated once in a meeting that I prefer a blank landing page over a aesthetically pleasing landing page if it produced better results. OK, I was a little fictitious but the point is that what matters are results, not personal opinion or preference.

Multi-variance (or A/B) testing is something we have employed for a while now with good results. Try two or more different options to a design, measure the results and roll out the one with the best results. Then use that design as the starting point for further iteration. If you have the traffic, and the right (agile) people and processes, this can be very effective. What you end up with is a design that very much driven by analytics, not personal opinion.

Last spring we used Google’s Website Optimizer to automate the process with great results. Joel, Eric and the rest of the team did a great job and Google wrote up a case study and published it on their website.