If you are a small business lender who uses Google Ads for lead generation, Conversational Landing Pages are a great way to increase your conversion rate, drop the cost per lead and maximize ROI on your ad spend. Of course, like with any other technology, seeing any of these benefits is wholly contingent on your implementation. If you make a subpar Conversational Landing Page, you will necessarily see subpar results. We have found this out the hard way. Some of our conversational design experiments have, in the past, achieved the dubious honor of a 0% conversion rate. This presents marketers with a unique hurdle to overcome. Conversational Design requires a unique skill set that is unprecedented in the world of digital marketing. Designing a conversational lead generation experience is something most people have never done in their entire marketing career. This is why we created this guide. If you watch the video below or read the best practices attached at the end of this post, you will be prepared to create an effective Conversational Landing Page that improves your conversion rate and takes your marketing campaign to the next level.

Check out the ACG conversational landing page: http://bit.ly/2InmwS1

And the ACG landing page: http://bit.ly/2IrIsvo

Hook

The notoriously distracted goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. Your digital marketing prospects are even worse. A 2015 study by Microsoft found that human beings have a minuscule attention span of just 8 seconds! This means that within the first 7 seconds of a prospect landing on your Conversational Landing Page, you need to grab their attention. Thankfully for you, chat as a medium naturally lends itself to this. Unlike traditional landing pages which tend to be covered in information (text blocks, images, CTAs etc), chats deliver information in bite-sized chunks consisting of a few messages (each no longer than a tweet) and maybe an image at a time. That being said there are specific considerations you can make when phrasing a hook that you should be aware of. Here are the five most important ones:

Send 2-3 messages at max

This should go without saying but you should not inundate prospects with a flood of messages as soon as they land on your Conversational Landing Page. This defeats the whole purpose of using chat, which is optimized for back-and-forth interaction of short messages.

Use an Image

Human beings are visual creatures and giving them an image to consume in the first few messages is a great way to convey information to them as quickly as possible. A good option is usually to add your company logo in the first message, but we’ll get to this later in this guide.

Keep your messages short

Again, there is no sense in using a medium of communication that is optimized for small pieces of information is you inundate prospects with long messages with an essay in when they land on your Conversational Landing Page.

Capture your main value prop

This is especially applicable when you are running Google Ads. When a user lands on your Conversational Landing Page, you want to maintain continuity from the ad itself. This is true for traditional landing pages as well, but prospects appreciate an experience that feels personalized and having copy that is optimized for the search term that brought them to the page does just that.

Make an uncontroversial ask

The easiest way to keep the hook under the 7-second threshold is by making it as easy as possible for them to progress the conversation. In practice this means first, asking them a relatively uncontroversial question that can usually be answered with a yes or a no, and second, providing single-tap buttons for users to respond with.

So for example, a lot of bot creators think it is polite to ask users to share their name when they first land on the page, but users are apprehensive to share personal info before they understand the value they are getting (i.e. the ask is controversial) and typing out a name requires multiple taps and takes time (i.e. it isn’t a single-tap response).

The end result of such a gaffe is that it takes longer than 7 seconds to proceed with the conversation and many prospects are likely to drop.

Lead Generation Flow

Unlike in a form where a prospect can see all the fields at once, Conversational Landing Pages ask for a single piece of information at a time. This lends itself to two optimizations that a marketer wouldn’t otherwise have to make if they were using a traditional landing page:

Don’t ask for personal information at the start

This is actually a discovery one of our clients made empirically. They found that prospects, in general, are apprehensive to share their personal information before they feel like they are receiving any value. In practice, this means that if you are giving people small business loans, ask them for the basic details your team needs to start the approval process and attach the contact detail at the end as a minor detail that is merely incidental.

Acknowledge user input at every stage

Asking for lead information through a conversation has the same end result as a form but it is perceived in a completely different right by prospects. Forms are impersonal so it is fine if you label fields with terms like “Name,” “Email.” The etiquette of a conversational lead generation process, however, is bound by the way we chat with our family and friends every day and the expectations we have of human customer service reps. If a Conversational Landing Page sends a message that says “Name:” it not only looks weird but it feels downright rude. This is why we encourage marketers to not only phrase each lead generation ask as a full question but also acknowledge each detail a prospect does send.

Design

When a prospect first lands on your Conversational Landing Page, having consistent branding through the conversational experience is important because branding builds legitimacy. Personally speaking, if I click on an ad and end up on a landing page which doesn’t have a logo, and uses an inconsistent color palette, the spam alarm bells go off in my mind and I close out immediately. For this reason, we recommend that marketers use the primary brand colors when theming the message bubbles in their Conversational Landing Page and we recommend sending the company logo in the very first message of the conversation to establish legitimacy.