Split Test Your Way to More Leads

Keeping your funnel full with new leads and opportunities is crucial to running a successful real estate investing business. Marketing and sales are both numbers games, and without a consistent flow of motivated seller leads, your pipeline can dry and sales can become inconsistent.

Most online marketing and lead generation campaigns will require the use of a landing page. If you're running paid ads like Google Ads, campaign performance is largely based on two components: your ad campaign and the landing page(s) you send the traffic to.

Most marketers know ongoing optimizations of your ad campaigns are necessary to increase performance. But, how many are putting the same amount of attention and effort towards optimizing their landing page(s)?

Why Split Test?

Split testing is a great way to optimize your landing pages. Ongoing split testing will give you the opportunity to increase your visit-to-lead conversion rate over time by testing various versions of your landing page. What this means in a nutshell is giving yourself the opportunity to generate more leads from your existing advertising budget.

What is Split Testing?

For a landing page split test, you'll need to form a testing hypothesis. Meaning, you'll need to find elements of your page you want to change and test to learn which converts better. For example, you could create two variations of the same page, making small edits to one of your pages; For example: testing different headlines, copy, design or call-to-action.

What to Test

The options to test are nearly limitless. However, there are some best practices to point you in the right direction.

You'll want to begin by creating two landing pages. Here are some of the common elements to use in your split testing:

• Test two different designs, with the same copy and call-to-action. This places the test solely on the design itself, as other elements would be the same.
• Different headlines and or page copy
• Test alternate call-to-action verbiage. You may see a big difference in the numbers when testing your call-to-action copy such as the text on your button. "Get My Offer" vs "Submit" for example.
• Layout of page elements. For example, trust factors such as testimonials, call-to-action placement, copy etc. Test the order of various page elements.
• Form versus pop-up. We've been testing this for a while and have often seen substantial differences in conversion rate for pages that have the web form embedded on the page versus clicking a call-to-action button that throws the form in a pop-up window.

Always be Testing

Split testing your landing pages should be an ongoing exercise. A new test each month is a good rule of thumb. Just because you found early success from initial tests doesn't mean you should stop.

Make it a practice to crown the winner each month and put a new landing page variation to challenge the previous winning page. This could lead to ongoing improvements in your conversion rate and overall lead volume.

Goals and Results

One thing to note is paying attention to lead quality. Sometimes you may try things that increase conversion rate like gangbusters, but the quality of your leads may suffer. You want to keep enough barrier on your pages to filter out low quality leads, but make it as easy as possible to convert.

Many marketers and business owners often only focus optimizing their ad campaigns. It's important to put just as much emphasis on optimizing your landing pages as you do on the back end of your campaign.

Optimizing both can lead to dramatic increases in lead flow, which could mean more profitable deals for you!

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Author Bio:

Zack Hanebrink is a new real estate investor and co-founder of HookLead, a digital marketing agency located in Charleston, SC. Want more information on generating motivated home seller leads? Download our free investor lead generation checklist!