In 2007 Amnesty International, a nonprofit organization, ran a campaign to raise awareness and donations for one of their humanitarian efforts. The campaign led their target audience to a relevant landing page, which was tested in a variety of ways to see what sort of impact different buttons, colours, and messaging, had on boosting their signups and donations.
In essence, what they found out was that just like any other marketing campaign, testing does matter, and leads to better results all round. In the case of Amnesty International, they found out that
- First of all, the bigger the ‘donate’ buttons were, the more people focused on that area of the landing page, and clicked. Of course, don’t go overboard – an entire landing page devoted to a button may be a bit exaggerated.
- Second, colours matter. When the button blended in with the landing page, fewer people clicked it. A contrasted button made the difference, and ensured that more people would click.
- Thirdly, yes, less is more. If you have a form to fill out before your visitors can donate, Amnesty discovered that removing unnecessary fields, such as suffixes, increased conversion rates. No one likes filling out forms, right?
- And lastly, you don’t have to be pushy. Changing the button text to ‘Donate Now!’ had no impact on conversion rates. A simple ‘Submit’ did the trick, and was far less demanding.
I have to admit, none of these results were very surprising. Bigger and more colourful buttons, simpler forms – all these have been covered on our blog before. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. What I DID want to talk to you about was the fact that this nonprofit organization also tested their landing page.
That’s right, even though it may not seem like it at times, a nonprofit’s marketing campaign is just that – a campaign. So what can we learn from the Amnesty landing page case study?
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Nonprofits Need To Test Landing Pages Too
You may think that all the people who land in your landing page are interested in what you have to say (‘Save the Marmots!’), and will donate no matter what.
But they won’t.
If they don’t understand the message (they may be wondering what are marmots), or what you will be doing to save them, they won’t convert. So yes, you need to test different things.
You need to see if specific messaging is more effective (‘Prevent Marmots’ Extinction’), or whether you need to add a different call to action, or use a different image.
Even people who want to donate to your cause need to be motivated. Testing the landing page helps you see how to improve that motivation.
There Are Free Tools That Help With Your Landing Page
Nonprofit organizations have tons of free tools to use with your landing page. Here are just a few examples:
- Wordle – Ever wanted to create a word cloud to get your point across? Wordle is just the tool that you’ve been looking for.
- PicMonkey – Need to touch up your images, add text or filters? PicMonkey has you covered with their online tool.
- Iconspedia – Need a new icon? Check out Iconspedia for an awesome collection of icons that you can use on our landing page.
Each Campaign Needs a Landing Page
As I said before, nonprofit campaigns are no different to any other marketing campaign. This means that you need a number of landing pages, each suited to the specific channel or target audience that you have in mind.
Want to bring traffic from YouTube? Perhaps your landing page should have striking video (of a marmot, what else), along with a welcome to YouTube comers.
Traffic from Facebook? Make sure you have a like and share button there.
Traffic from Google Adwords? Make sure that your messaging is tailored to your ads. The more personalized a landing page, with consistent messaging and aimed at specific audiences, the higher chance of it succeeding.
Test The Unusual Stuff
It’s always worthwhile testing unusual stuff. What do I mean by that? Well, we all know that we need to test the size and colour of the button. But how about JUST a button? One big one, which says ‘Save the Marmot, Donate Now!’? Will it work? Maybe, give it a try. Sometimes the more unusual things are the ones to get noticed, and are definitely worth a try.
Avi Kaye is a social media marketing consultant for software startups. In addition to PageWiz, he also writes for himself on his own blog, in between numerous cups of coffee.
