Seth Godin wrote a post not long ago called, Just Looking. In it he writes, “The prospect who walks up to the salesperson and says, ‘I’m looking for a pinstripe suit in size 38’ is a lot more likely to walk out with a suit than the one who mutters, ‘No thanks, just looking.’” However, a good salesperson and a good landing page can turn the “no thanks, just looking” prospect into a “pinstripe suite, size 38 please.” 

The salesperson would do this through a series of friendly questions, and the landing page does it much the same way.

Choose your own adventure

It’s not uncommon for people to make generic searches that lead to generic ads that send them to generic landing pages.

These generic visitors are the people who initially say to the salesperson, “no thanks, just looking” but actually have an idea of what they want in the back of their minds. The salesperson or the landing page just needs to help the visitor realize what it is he or she wants. This can be easily done through segmentation, or a series of quick choices.

Perhaps your landing page visitors don’t yet know they want a pinstripe suit in size 38, but you can help them get there by asking:

Solid Color | Pinstriped

I know my size | I don’t know my size

and so on.

Then, by the time you ask for the conversion, the visitor feels invested enough to want to make the purchase.

Think of it like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. The reader got to choose what would happen next to the characters in the book as they went along the journey; the series of choices made by the reader led to a number of different endings all within the confines of one narrative.

Segmentation on the landing page works the same way. For example, in the iomega Choose Your Own Adventure, the visitor is making choices about what kind of storage solution to buy. The first choice he must make is: home or office?

 

He chooses office and clicks through to a page specifically created to talk about office storage options. Now the viewer must decide: 1TB or 2TBs?

 

What will he choose? What choices do your visitors need to make to find the right product on your landing pages?