Around the time we released the new version of Uncover at the end of April 2014, I knew it was time to refocus our work around sales and increasing customers. We'd been focused on product for months, but now it was time to scratch and claw our way to more customers. There are many effective ways to do that: you can build email lists, hit the phones, and lots more, but before all that, you need something to show these people. If you're a B2B business, then that's a landing page.
The Features of our Landing Page
As we set out to build a landing page for Uncover, we wanted to keep it simple, clean and to the point. We'd focus on our copy, the logos of our perks, and the logos of our customers to get our message across.
The features broke down as follows:
- We'd show a select number of perks.
- We'd show a select number of our more famous customers.
- We'd have a sign up form that we could later A/B test vs. requesting a demo.
- We'd have a footer with our contact information.
While our feature set was straightforward, we wanted to focus on our copy. We wanted it to be short, as people don't read big blocks of text. We wanted it to be to the point: this is what Uncover is and this is what offering employee perks through Uncover will be. Lastly, we wanted it to emphasize that you can offer employees both perks and rewards: our two features.
Writing copy has always been difficult for us, as we're fighting an established "perks" industry. All of our competitors deal in discounts, whereas we're real perks. We have to work hard to change the conversation, because giving employees a 10% discount to Six Flags is not a perk. Giving them a monthly subscription to their favorite music service is. It's difficult, and it's where we focused most of our time and effort when building our landing page.
Implementing our Landing Page
Once we had our feature set and copy ready for our landing page, we went to work on designing, coding and deploying it all in one day. We skipped wire-framing and went straight into Photoshop. We looked at going in two directions with the design: (1) a more traditional, flat and clean page and (2) a more hip and photograph heavy page.
We settled on the more traditional, flat and clean design, as it gave more focus to the copy, perks and customers that we were trying to emphasize. While the more hip design might have been perfect for a consumer startup, we're B2B and our potential customers don't have time for fancy frills.
After deciding that we'd go with the more traditional design, we started implementing it in code. When the first pass was coded, we began playing around with it to see what felt right and what didn't. We adjusted the size of the text, the size of the logos, the padding and more. When we finally settled on something that we were happy with, we deployed it to our live servers.
The Results
While it's only been a few weeks since we started sending all of our sales emails, sales calls and advertising links to our landing page, we have seen a much greater percentage of signups: sign ups are up about 30% for all visitors who view our landing page. Oftentimes, you can get caught up in making a homepage that gets too much across, whereas you might do better with a simpler product offering: a landing page for people who are actively looking for a product like yours or clicking through on a sales email.
Our next step is going to be a simple A/B test. We look forward to seeing how it goes when we serve half the visitors to our landing page with a "request a demo" form instead of a "sign up" form, something that will give us their email and phone number for a follow up.