Two Weeks To Lift-off: Rapid Landing Page Design

Approach

Context

We at KlientBoost pride ourselves on our ability to produce high converting landing pages and PPC campaigns in only two weeks. Amazing. We can do this because they’ve had hundreds of clients over the years and have developed best practices for building both successful landing pages and PPC campaigns. But best practices can only get you so far and that’s when we turn to the data to continually optimize.

What initially attracted me to KlientBoost was its software development approach to agency work and its fixation on listening to the data to make more informed decisions.

Week 1: Kickoff Meeting

For every new client, we start every process off with a kickoff meeting over the phone. This meeting includes the client (obviously) and the KlientBoost team members which include the designer (me), the PPC account manager, and usually the sales associate responsible for signing the client on to our services.

This meeting covers the very top-level basics of what the client can expect during their time with KlientBoost and the general responsibilities of each role of the team members involved. These calls don’t last more than 30 minutes and more often than not outline “next steps” in the process. This meeting is essentially a meet and greets with a gunshot at the end signaling the race has begun.

Week 1: Outline

To keep our clients informed about what’s happening on our end, we like to send them an outline of what to expect for each landing page. Since this is a higher-level outline we don’t focus on the specifics but rather what elements they can expect to see. A typical outline would include the following:

1. A hero section with the appropriate unique value proposition (UVP) and supporting background image.
2. A clear CTA that articulates the offer.
3. [If lead generation is the goal] A form above the fold so that we maximize the number of conversions.
4. Social proof or brand recognition.
5. “How it works” section that supports the initial UVP and CTA.
6. Frequently asked questions section to answer the most common questions potential customers have.
7. Lastly, a final CTA that reiterates the UVP.

Once the outline is complete and sent-out and approved, it’s time to start on the landing page design.

Week 1: Initial Design (based on best practices)

Over its four year history, KlientBoost has been fortunate enough to have had many clients come through their doors, and with every client, we get to learn and improve our processes and landing pages. Designers at KlientBoost have access to a library of information when it comes to building landing pages that convert and even more information from the other designers on the team.

What’s truly amazing at KlientBoost is that each client doesn’t just get the mind of one designer, they get the minds of eight or more designers when we come together for design review before sending the landing pages off to the client.

Week 1: Client Approval

Typically when our clients get their pages, we tend to stress the importance of testing the pages before making substantial changes to the designs. Since at KlientBoost we value data-driven decisions we try to limit changes that contradict the best practices that we’ve developed. But that being said, we try to focus on developing a good relationship with our clients by making sure they feel listened to and try to accommodate as much as possible. And after the client approves the designs, we send them on over to be built.

Week 2: Build

Our production and development team at KlientBoost is amazing. Though we try to give their team about a week’s buffer, they usually have a turnaround time of about two days but that gives us plenty of time to build anything that is more complex than usual.

Once everything is looking good, the production team shoots the pages back over to the designers so that we can implement Hotjar and Google Analytics tracking.

Week 2: Tracking

At Klientboost, we use several services to help us track what’s happening on each landing page. Those services include:

1. Google Analytics
2. Hotjar (mainly utilizing the heatmaps and recordings)
3. The native conversion tracking in Unbounce

Week 2: Checklist & Launch

Before hitting the go button on our pages, each landing page at KlientBoost goes through a robust set of checklist items that confirm each page meets the requirements we set at the beginning of this process. When each item is met, we inform the client, the account manager links the landing pages to the campaign and in two weeks we regroup, look at the data, and run another test utilizing that data for two weeks, and on and on we go.

Takeaways

Collaborative Design Review

Working in such a rapid environment is both exhilarating and invigorating but all of that is for not if there aren’t any checks and balances built in that catch the errors. At KlientBoost, we pride ourselves on our collaborative review sessions with the design team. Each time we create a landing page, we send a review link to the team to get feedback before sending it to the client for review. Having an additional eight designer’s eyes on a page isn’t just helpful but necessary for delivering a high-quality page to the client.

Not only do reviews help with the initial release of a page but also in determining future tests for the pages. “Try testing this headline…” or “let’s test this CTA…” are some of my favorite comments because I get to access the experience of others’ successes and potentially add them to my own when it comes to getting a higher conversion rate for a page. As designers, we can be very prideful sometimes but I think that this process of iterative design review helps to combat pride that could potentially get in the way of performance enhancements.

Client Communications and Transparency

Along with review sessions, we take pride in our level of transparency with our clients. Clients take a big risk when working with an agency. They lose direct control of the visibility of project progression and that can cause immense amounts of stress. At KlientBoost we do a lot to try and mitigate these anxieties by implementing systems like Asana to include the client at the same level our managers have. However, not every client is willing to learn a new project management system and prefer email correspondence.

But that’s where the beauty of Asana comes in because we can both keep track of our tasks and send our notification emails to clients all from one location. What I’ve noticed is the client’s mood towards the team almost always directly corresponds with how in-the-loop they have been kept. Again, this isn’t always the case but I’ve found that a pillar to a successful landing page and happy client resides in the ability to keep the client as informed as possible.

Organization Is Key

When you are managing 12 plus clients organization isn’t just a “nice to have” but rather a necessity. KlientBoost has taught me many things but the most profound lesson it has taught me is the importance of creating and maintaining an organizational system. Having such a system hasn’t just saved me time but valuable information that I can both give to my clients and to my managers who want to know the status of any given project.

The biggest proponent for the speed at which I got set up with my system in Asana came from the designers I worked with. It was amazing to me that though everyone worked at the same agency, each designer had their own workflow when it came to organizing their Asana tasks while being able to maintain the same level of awareness when it came to clients and managers. All I had to do was pick the way I wanted to work, and if it wasn’t working for me, I’d try something different suggested by another designer until I found what worked for me. What I loved about this whole process was that it had echoes of how we worked as an agency, testing out if something works and iterating on it until it does.