The Human Web [Video]

During a panel discussion at Inman’s Real Estate Connect 2012, Placester CTO Frederick Townes talks about maximizing your lead conversion through landing page design tweaks and a human touch.

Transcript:

Frederick Townes: Well, the headline matters, the field labels matter, usually even like, let’s say, the form is an actual box, the direction if you will, that you put that one or two lines of copy above the fields, that makes a difference to say, hey, we’re not going to spam here. Just fill this out if you just want us to follow up with you immediately. Set expectations, just be human, right?

Because, not to be esoteric but the underlying message behind everything that we’re saying is, people use the web today to safely explore it, right? To do discovery on their own, like it’s an independence thing. And what we want to do as real estate professionals is allow them to do that, facilitate and empower them to do that but ultimately at the end of the day they still need a human relationship. And so, the experience that we create through the website and though how we follow up and interact developing that relationship is what is going to make the difference with billions of websites and all of these different variables that we have to tweak and knobs we have to turn all the time.

So, not to go off and not to try to avoid answering your question but yeah, above the fold, think about your messaging, reduce the number of fields if you can get away with it, unless you’re getting lots of unqualified leads which is a different problem, right? And then, think about once you’ve got lots of leads flowing through from the traffic you have got, think about how many of those people are actually qualified, right?

So, that’s when you might want to increase the number of fields or maybe if there is lots of spam, maybe use Captcha or whatever it is called these days to try to fend off the bots or whatever is driving you crazy. If you are getting too many leads, there is a whole different set of optimizations. Does that answer your question?

Gahlord Dewald: There’s one other thing I wanted to add to that to that, because especially people talk about above the fold and below the fold. For those people who are not familiar with above the fold, there is like whatever first shows up on the screen, and it gets its name from the old newspaper industry, whatever was above the fold was lying on the table. Looking at the news industry for good examples of stuff is the best idea, I think.

But I wanted to add that sometimes below the fold works really well. I wouldn’t say that everyone should go out and change to below the fold forms and definitely not for your main landing page kind of stuff but the [inaudible] below the fold, they get to the bottom of your content, and they don’t know what to do next. Sometimes, having a contact form down at the bottom works.

Frederick Townes: That’s a really good point. So, he is talking about short form versus long form.

Gahlord Dewald: Yeah.

Frederick Townes: So, it’s just two different styles but most people have a short form page. Because listings, let’s face it, unless you’re [inaudible] you don’t have a lot of data about your listings, or maybe you do? Maybe, you have a few listings that you really know well and you’ve done a great job making those rich. You might have a longer form page, it might do well at the bottom. So, explore that.

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