Web Site Design and Development

In my last article about real estate landing pages, I talked about the two different functions of a landing page — being a traffic generator and being a lead generator. This time I want to look primarily at their lead generation function and critique a few pages, including my own.

One reasonably successful page of mine — that nevertheless could stand improvement — is a basic form and form handler combination that I use on a variety of pages. The idea is that I can gather contact information for any offer I want to provide. Here for example I use the page to offer email updates for condo buyers. In another context, the same form provides info of interest to first time buyers.

The benefit of the way I’ve set this up is ease of use, and not having to do the tedious table set up for the form over and over again. But the limitations of the current form are obvious to me:

• I’m probably collecting too much information for most purposes. For example, unless I’m writing hand written thank you notes or the like (which admittedly I sometimes do), the physical address of the user especially is definitely overkill at this point. In some contexts it may make sense to the user to provide it, but if I’m offering email updates for condos I may be losing users who otherwise would have converted by making them jump through too many hoops.
• Related to the first issue is the more general problem that the form does not offer any way to test different form elements to see if conversion can be improved. The process of gleaning what information you can about the effectiveness of an online campaign is sometimes called A/B testing (or, more ambitiously, “multi-variable testing”). If you’re unfamiliar with this approach, you might want to start with Jakob Nielsen’s excellent article on the benefits and limitations of A/B Testing, Putting A/B Testing in Its Place.

Part of the reason I haven’t implemented some kind of basic A/B testing in my own landing pages is that the necessary incentive (pain), hasn’t been there. My focus in my web sites has been primarily on the broad end of the funnel — on Search Engine Optimization. Because I’ve been somewhat successful in this, I haven’t tested my landing pages as rigourously as I would if (for example) I had a $1,000 per month Pay-Per-Click ad budget. However, it would be interesting to develop some basic A/B testing strategies for my own business and perhaps offer them to consulting clients as well, so I will start looking into that and then let you know how it goes in a later article. It’s only probably a two to eight day coding job (depending on how fancy I get).

The second landing page I’d call your attention to is the home page of TucsonProperties.net. I came across this page through a reference to Tucson real estate in the ad for Marketing Sherpa’s pricey book on landing pages. I’m not overly fond of some of the cosmetic aspects of this page (such as the textured background). Nevertheless, I think this page has a number of interesting features that bear mentioning:

• I like the idea of putting a strong call to action on the home page, since this of course is the page that typically gets the most traffic from search engines. At the same time, this isn’t a “pure” landing page, but contains links to other areas of the site, as well as a way to search the site.
• The amount of personal information required to get through the form is kept to a minimum, while at the same time doing a good job of qualifying the prospect. The form asks for first name only, not full name, and “Email or Phone”, which is a pretty user-friendly move. (Yes, I know, I know, you want the phone number, and so do I, but having read through my share of people living at “(123) 456-7890″, I don’t think a nod to the user at this point is necessarily a bad thing). The “I describe myself as” dropdown field does an excellent job, here, I think, of signalling the agent about the buyer’s motivation.
• On the “definite no-no” side, the reset button needs to go away here. It doesn’t add much, and an accidental click will annoy the visitor and possibly lose the conversion.

Overall, the Tuscon form is friendly, simple, and probably leads the user to a conversion quite well, so it could serve as the basis for a nice generic real estate contact form. It would be an interesting (and, more importantly, profitable) experiment to test a variation of this theme against my own multi-purpose form to see how they perform against one another.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 12th, 2006 at 11:26 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.