Landing Pages are a primary Marketing online tool. Most of the time they are the first visual element that a visitor experiences of your brand. While landing pages are usually designed to be informative, they must also focus on the action expected – completing a form, signing up to a mailing list or purchasing a product, for example.

The biggest challenge faced by the designer is to create a landing page that looks good, but also converts well.

The Mautic marketing automation platform provides the perfect technology platform to convert an anonymous visitor into a potential lead, but the designer is the person who has the power to make that happen.

• Design for the technology platform

Landing pages may be short and to the point, or they may be long-form, engaging the visitor and providing various sources of information to help the visitor come to a decision.

Whether short or long form, navigation plays a critical role in focusing the user on completing the action for which the page is intended. If your visitors will only be spending a few seconds on the page, the design elements must help them to find their way to the relevant information and action points.

As a designer, we try to convey a story through the elements we place on the page, using structure to guide the flow between different chapters in the story, and explaining points which may not be obvious to the reader.

• Design

At Virya Group our focus is on keeping things simple. Our main goal is to create theme which are clean, functional and with minimal distraction.

All our theme designs adhere to research-driven best practices related to landing pages. By dispensing with the fluff and keeping only the essential requirements, we focus on directing visitors’ attention to the appropriate page elements.

In most cases, this will be a call to action such as a button, special offer, lead capture form or video.

It is also important to cater for any eventuality. Each theme we design comes with a library of elements to choose from. This includes design guidance on everything from the weight of fonts to the styling of a table and the dimensions of images on a photo slider.

We try to ensure that we design everything with a focus on the experience of the visitor to the landing page and the flexibility that our end-users might require when customising the ‘off-the-shelf’ or bespoke themes that we provide.

• The Form

No matter what the goal of your campaign is, a great landing page needs to push your visitor to take a specific action and in many cases, this will be through a lead capture form.

The most important element of the landing page; the lead capture form presents a trigger. By this point (thanks to your awesome design work!) visitors are highly motivated to do something (complete the form) and the task now is to make sure that it is super easy, clear, and a nice experience to complete that action.

Sometimes we might add an extra convincer reminding them what they are getting when completing the form, but we always make sure the process is smooth, easy to understand and seamless.

It’s easy to forget the importance of the button on the form – but this is a vital ‘call to action’ – and an opportunity to remind the visitor what they will receive on completing the form.

From the designers perspective a good colour contrast with the background and a careful choice of wording are the two ingredients that will communicate clearly your goal and ensure the conversion takes place. Don’t just leave it at ‘submit’!

• The Language

Here we shift our attention from pixels to people. In Mautic landing pages we want to focus on using a certain language, which builds trust between the brand, product or service and the visitors.

As a designer, we need to think like the potential customers, determining what they need to see and what we want to communicate so that they fully engage with the value proposition on this landing page. We try to keep the language simple, describing why the product or service meets their needs or solves their pain-point, with no use of complex language.

Headers, sub-headers and text are structured to highlight for the reader any important messages.

Well designed Mautic landing pages allow you to communicate your value proposition clearly, without burying the visitor under piles of irrelevant information.

• Mobile First

Mautic landing pages should be designed with mobile in mind – if they are going to be used to target a mobile audience. As this segment is growing rapidly, it is an important factor when preparing visuals for a landing page.

Mobile visitors need to have the same kind of guidance throughout the page, be able to access the same resources, and have the same compulsion to complete the action as their desktop counterparts.

Designing for mobile devices is not simply about moving blocks around to fit a smaller screen, but must focus on a deep awareness of the behaviour differences on mobile as opposed to desktop devices.

• Test

With the growing importance of fast-loading web pages and a need to do everything possible to ensure a conversion when a visitor lands on your page, the overall page size is an important consideration.

Multiple studies have shown that landing pages which take a long time to load result in less conversions.

Optimisation in this regard involves a lot of testing, but also close communication between the designer and the developer to ensure that visuals are delivered in the most efficient way – for example using a single SVG image and applying CSS to select the relevant image, or making sure that the images are rendered and provided in the resolution that is required, rather than in maximum resolution.

Testing does not stop with page speed, however. Full testing should also include running A/B tests to determine the best button placement, applying design knowledge to identify the best colour choice, icons and photos, making sure that the typography is appropriate for the purpose of the page, and of course once the page is developed, ensuring legibility, navigation flows and of course interaction on any device or browser.

When the needs of the visitor are combined with the designer’s qualitative understanding of them, and a thorough understanding of the market, the results can be spectacular.

Are there other elements to landing page design that you include in your process? Please comment below! Thank you again to Betty Chatzisavvidou for allowing us to share this valuable content. For a look at the original post, click here.

When it comes to rolling up our sleeves and getting to the business of marketing, we certainly know how to execute. We are trained to ask probing questions to understand our audience, where they are in the buying journey and capturing their attention. This is now becoming true of marketing automation.

“What does the data say?”
“What were the results of the A/B test?”
“Did our content strategy work in the last campaign?”

The list goes on. While we are becoming great inquisitors, are we truly solving for the big why? When we consider marketing automation and its role in our business, we should first reflect on it’s purpose. It’s only then that we can fully tap into it’s full potential, lest we relegate it to an auto email responder.

We believe that marketing automation should be more than a bolt on solution. It should be an integrated part of your overall business strategy. Our latest release continues to equip your business with the tools you need to bring that strategy to life.

Enhancements

• Mail is Owner: Emails can now be sent from different senders who are owners of the contact, creating a more personalized experience for your audience. This means if a sales rep is the contact owner, a single email send can appear as though it came from that individual.
• Tweet Entity: Not all tweets are created equal. Recognizing the vital role of social media, it would be simple to create a generic interaction via Twitter. However this doesn’t support an integrated way of thinking. A new channel called ‘tweet’ is available to create tweets to send as part of campaigns. Unique tweets can be created, modified and managed from this new channel.
• Campaign Reporting: Channel and component reports can now be filtered for a campaign. A column called campaign has been added to email asset, landing page and form reports to enable the user to analyze these in the context of a campaign. Powerful flexibility that gives you greater clarity in your marketing.
• Custom Fields: Customizing Mautic to meet the needs of your business is important. And measuring them is even more important. Now you can include your custom fields into your reports giving you more valuable insights.
• Summary Columns: But it doesn’t stop there. Now you can summarize data in reports using the “group by” feature and calculated fields. What does this mean? This enables the user to create relevant summaries for your detailed reports.
• Editor Enhancements: The editor continues to grow. We’ve added two new slots to provide even more customization. The code mode slot lets you put in raw html into the builder giving you needed flexibility. In addition, the dynamic content slot can now be created and edited right from the builder.
• GoToWebinar confirmation link: The GoToWebinar integration has added capability. You can now insert the personalized confirmation link as part of followup emails, creating a seamless user experience.

Integrations

• Salesforce
  • Campaigns: Mautic now supports a bi-directional integration with Salesforce Campaigns! You can create a segment in Mautic and trigger a campaign based on campaign members from a Salesforce Campaign. You can also add contacts as campaign members in a Salesforce Campaign from a Mautic campaign or form action. Extending the integration far beyond sharing of contact, account, and lead detail.
  • Contact link: More Salesforce integration support! Now you can map the Mautic timeline link to a custom field in Salesforce to allow users (like your sales team) view that contact’s activities timeline directly from Salesforce. More data at your fingertips to encourage personalized conversations throughout the buying process!
• One Signal
  • Web Notifications: You can now user your own OneSignal account with Mautic to send Web notifications as part of campaigns.
  • Mobile Push Notifications: Mobile app push notifications are here! Use the One Signal plugin to send mobile push notifications to your iOS or Android app. Now you can create, send and track mobile notifications in Mautic.
• Twilio for SMS: Mautic can now connect to your Twilio account. If your contacts would like to receive communications via SMS, you can connect your Twilio account with Mautic and send SMS messages as part of campaigns. More integrations mean more relevance and personalization.

Whether you are moving prospects through a meaningful buying journey, or adding value at each stage, each area of execution requires a thoughtful consideration of the larger problem you are solving. That makes the tactics of marketing more significant.

We trust that these features, improvements and bug fixes will enable you and your entire business to respond to to each problem statement with clear focus and attention.

Release 2.8 encourages big picture thinking, while taking incredible strides to bring that picture to life for marketers. This release is now available for download to our open source community. For more detailed information, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions or find new challenges that arise, join our feedback team and reach out to us on the Community Forums, Slack, or social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will respond as soon as we are able.

Github

Are you a developer? Continue making Mautic an industry disruptor by contributing to the fastest growing marketing automation project in open source today. Join us on Github!

The goal of marketing remains the same

My first takeaway was that the end goal of what marketing as a function is trying to achieve  has not changed at all. People want to buy from companies they trust. The goal of marketing is to build trust with potential customers and maintain that feeling of trust with existing customers.

Before the dawn of the digital age, word of mouth was the most popular method that people used to decide what to buy and from whom. Existing customers served as trusted advisors for potential new customers.  Building trust is the way that companies sell to and keep their customers today as well.

Then what has changed?

What is different today, is that now there is so much information and so many ways to get that information, that it becomes hard for the customer to figure out what is true and who to trust. An interesting statistic that was shared at the event was that 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 12 months.

In addition, the buyer could search for information on the Internet or receive information from companies in the forms of emails, SMS messages, notifications through the website, messages on Facebook, Twitter and many other ways. They could also search or receive these messages on their desktops, laptops, iPads, mobile phones or smart watches.

It is the responsibility of companies today to help the buyer cut through the noise and consume the information that is relevant to them and helps them figure out what product or service will best meet their need. The challenge or opportunity, depending on how you look at it, is how do companies leverage all this data and these different technologies to deliver relevant messages to people through their preferred way of receiving them? The focus should be to begin building this trust with potential buyers and existing customers by making them feel like they have a 1 on 1 relationship with the company.

What technology trends can help you do this?

The 5 key technology trends that were the underlying theme of most sessions at the event were:

• Cloud – In the State Of The Cloud report by RightScale, 95% of the enterprise organizations that were surveyed used cloud technologies. What that tells me is that IT organizations are moving away from managing hardware to managing software. The availability of applications in the the cloud has raised the bar for performance, stability and time to market for new functionality. This has leveled the playing field to some extent as similar capabilities could be available to companies to use as they try to sell to, service and keep their customers.
• Mobile – Technology companies have been talking about making their tools available on a mobile device for some time now. What is new is that they are now talking about mobile first and mobile only. Techcrunch predicts that by 2020 there will be 6.1B smart phones in the world. Compare this to the projected population in the world in 2020 at 7.7B people. A large number of the smart phones will be the only devices people use to run their lives and their business. This makes it all the more important to figure out how to build products that are easy to use on a mobile device and also build those relationships with potential buyers and existing customers using this device.
• Social – Human beings are social and want to be part of a community.  Though communities have been around forever – the difference now is that they are online. Social is nothing but an online community – the size of which is controlled by the individual. Social is both an outbound messaging channel so companies can deliver targeted messages using Facebook or Twitter; and it is also a data source to get to better know your buyer. Social is no longer just a marketing channel but it has also become a place where companies can service their customers and sell additional products to existing customers.
• Data Science – Vcloudnews states that every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created online. What does that even mean? The challenge is making sense of this data so that companies can use the data to better understand their buyers.  This  is in fact a science, because if analyzed and leveraged correctly companies can create superior, personalized experiences for their potential buyers and existing customers which will undoubtedly lead to more business for the company.
• IoT – My definition of IoT or the Internet of things is the ability for a device to record an activity and trigger a communication when a certain condition is met. Companies have only started to scratch the surface on the use cases for this. The concept of devices triggering actions has been around for a long time – e.g. a thermostat that turns off the heat when a certain temperature is reached; but what is different about IoT is the ability for the device to trigger a communication that can be accessed on a variety of devices when something happens.

Some companies get excited about the potential that these new technologies offer, others are overwhelmed and not sure how to best leverage these. What is important to keep in mind is the end goal – building trust through a personalized and superior experience. Use only those technologies that help you  achieve that objective. Remember, at the end of the day, these technology trends simply equip us, and it’s really the relationship with your customer that matters.