Joanna Wiebe's Copyhackers publishes advice on conversion copywriting, landing pages, A/B testing and marketing copy aimed at startups and software makers.
Commenters repeatedly recommend it, especially its ebooks, as a good way for technical people to learn to write persuasive copy and improve landing pages.
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
> 1. Not too sure about the title "Kiss Your Complicated Help Desk Software Goodbye!" as well as the statement below it. Big words, which can easily be replaced by smaller words and more images of the product.
I used to think that way too but experimenting with some tips in the CopyHacker book - http://www.copyhackers.com/. Will post back results here in sometime.
> 2. Not a fan of Serif and fantasy fonts either. Try some Sans-Serif fonts instead. Will make the copy more legible.
Did you feel that way for headings or body copy?
3. The boxes which show product features look like blobs of text. use images. Keep the feature boxes less and instead give a link to a separate "Features" page.
We will work on a features page as well. I wanted to pick some icons/images but the problem was finding icons/images for some features like No-ugly case IDs or Realtime Email Importing. Any suggestions you have on that or examples from other sites would be very useful.
4. The "play" button image on the video looks odd. Doesn't gel with anything else on the page.
Cool. I'll try to find a better one.
5. More testimonials and put shorter ones on homepage. Shorter ones tend to have more punch. Make a separate page for testimonials where can allocate the bigger ones.
Thanks. Will work on a separate customers page and incorporate the feedback there.
> Really dig your product by the way. All the best.
Thanks. Very encouraging for us :)
My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment. In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page and sales page design.
The copy itself is going to need to change to reflect the pivot from inventory to ERP, so happily "Inventory management without the suck" is going away.
> The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and announces that you expect people to not be interested.
Curiously, I thought this myself when I put it up. To this day, I can't fathom why I thought that was a good choice of words (or why I never changed it).
> Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.
I had been experimenting with the "hybrid copy"[1] sales page that Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers has been a proponent of. It's worked incredibly well for my actual landing pages, where a user knows what the product is about when they click whatever link or ad brought them there. However, I took it way too far by doing "hybrid copy" on the home page.
The new design I'm working on is going to be the classic home page with a brief overview of the product and a CTA linking to the "hybrid copy" features/tour page.
Edit: I neglected to mention that the "hybrid page" experiment resulted in a noticeable increase in new trials.
[1] http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/
I like the overall design of the app, but I don't think the stock images fit well in there. It's just generic people, nothing I can relate to your app.
A little bit more text to explain what your product does would have helped me. I had to watch half of the video to really get it. I still don't know how your product is better than traditional monitoring, though. Unfortunately the tour does not really help me here (but I am a devops-noob): For example, what does this mean: "Snooze tries to fill the gap between cron mailing you and setting up and Icinga stack to monitor all the scheduled tasks in your network." I had to google "Icinga" to even understand what you mean. And the scenario you use before is very technical - Might be hard to read for a non-programmer.
If you did not know it yet, have a look at this post (and the linked info graphic): http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/ - I would take this route for adding more text to the home page, if I were you.
Don't get me wrong, overall I like what you did here. I think this product would be useful for me if I ran a SAAS application. But you have not totally convinced me yet...
To answer your question, for me it really depends on the site and the product/service. I usually will dig around on the site to make sure it is what I am looking for and then click a get started button if I like what I see. As someone else pointed out if the individual viewing the page is your target audience and they are hesitant to click a "get started" button, the page and/or site failed in conveying the value of the product/service.
There is a lot of psychology that goes into the wording of buttons, and while you may tell yourself "oh that would never work for me", the truth is that subconsciously it probably does work and you just don't realize it sometimes.
I have always found these two articles informative (actually the whole CopyHackers site is a pretty good resource in general):
http://copyhackers.com/2012/11/how-to-find-and-eliminate-friction-words-in-your-web-copy/
http://copyhackers.com/optimize-your-business-online-training/calls-to-action/
I love the story here.
While the PR is strong Leo should put on his conversion hat to generate actual downloads and turn this from a story into a success.
1) On the landing page, http://www.treesforcars.com, he needs as strong of a brief headline as they have in the article eg:
"Trees for Cars is a mobile application that aims to save the environment by helping users carpool to their destination."
2) Ditto on the app store description which, instead of the description, starts with a 3-liner clarifying Leo coded this himself.
More pictures / longer description on the description will also help.
Great primer @ Copyhackers on writing effective App Store copy http://copyhackers.com/2012/06/how-to-write-an-app-store-description-for-itunes/
I just finished re-writing all the copy for www.facet.net, so copy writing is fresh on my mind.
Here's some feedback:
- It wasn't clear to me what your company does after reading your home page.
- When I saw the "Courses" section it clicked. But I only read that far because you asked for feedback.
- You should lead with what you do or what benefit the customer will receive.
- For example, the main title on your home page should be something like "Learn computer science by playing games" or "Fun, self-guided computer science courses"
I would highly recommend https://copyhackers.com/.