As an agency owner, growing your revenue per account has a significant impact on your bottom line. The challenge is doing this while also producing considerable ROI upgrades for your clients. You want to knock their socks off and extend client lifetimes, sure, but that means you need to make every dollar they spend do twice the work.
That’s a tough ask. After all, a lot of agency time (and energy) gets spent optimizing traffic to the top of the funnel, but you can squeeze only so much out of it. So where’s the next best place to capture some low hanging fruit for the client?
By offering landing page and conversion optimization services, you can create wicked new growth opportunities for both you and your clients.
According to Jonathan Nacchache of Montreal’s Webistry, offering landing page services let them accelerate client success:
It was a very natural decision that was born out of necessity. Optimizing on the ad/campaign level just isn’t enough these days, especially when you’re managing large ad spends. We simply needed to push the boundaries for our customers’ success, and this was the best thing.
As Webistry know well, landing pages let you deliver more mileage out of your existing campaigns and ad spend, something that the client may not have previously considered to be even possible.
Why Landing Page Services Are Your Next Win
A 2017 study from SoDA and Forrester asked agencies which strategies would have the most significant impact over the next 2-3 years. Though talent took the top spot, a whopping 47% said that “developing new services/capabilities” is key to their evolution.
And, more importantly, their clients agree. This year, Hanapin Marketing’s State of PPC report asked brands what they wished agencies did better. 41% of them said “Innovative Techniques” (as in, “is my agency using the right tools or platforms?”) as their answer:
In short, your clients want you to be identifying new tools and techniques that can take their ROI into the stratosphere. That’s why offering landing pages and conversion optimization is such a killer opportunity for digital agencies.
The Benefits of Landing Pages
While you’re responsible for managing high impact campaigns, most often you’re handcuffed to using pages that don’t convert well, limiting campaign performance. Website traffic ends up exploring, not converting.
Instead, all of that hard earned—and, let’s face it, increasingly expensive—traffic should be sent to a dedicated landing page focused on one thing and one thing only: conversion.
Andrew Miller of Workshop Digital puts it this way:
If you’re not converting traffic into leads, then you’re just spending more and more money and you’re not getting better and better results. You’re not getting that compounding effect that landing pages provide.
When you offer landing pages and conversion optimization as a service to your clients, you gain control over campaign assets. You can quickly test, optimize, and iterate on campaigns. And, most importantly, you can build and manage pages without relying on the client, scoring higher conversion rates with a lower cost-per-lead.
This earns you account growth, client loyalty, and shared ROI.
(Is win-win-win a thing? Because it should be.)
What to Offer with Landing Page Services
There are two components to this new service: building high-converting landing pages and conversion optimization.
The first is landing page creation. This is the primary service, complementary to the top of funnel campaigns that you’re already running. You’ll be offering the ability to get more leads and sales from the same campaigns—and the same spend—because landing pages convert better than a website.
Landing pages allow you to better match your content and call to action to the ads you’re running, and they eliminate extraneous links and other distractions that confuse your prospective customers. With a drag-and-drop builder like Unbounce, you can also create them much more quickly than pages on a traditional website.
But do they work? You betcha. Unbounce’s latest analysis found that landing pages convert on average 65% better than websites.
The second service you’ll offer is conversion optimization. This is a value-add or upsell to landing page creation that provides ongoing gains. A/B testing is the basic function here, allowing you to continue testing different variants of the landing page to produce better and better conversion rates for your clients.
Try out different headlines or copy, swap out the hero image, tweak the offer, strip down lead gen forms, and more. You can use Unbounce’s Test Centre to gather all the information you need to make smart decisions based on data instead of your gut (or your clients’ whims).
If a landing page creates immediate results, conversion optimization lets you show your clients a delightful ROI graph that trends ever upward.
It’s an essential tool in capturing and keeping clients.
How to Prove the Value of This Service
Keep in mind that your clients may not even be aware you can do all this for them. (It can seem a little like magic that way.) So, despite the value, the pitch on these new services can come with a common objection:
“What about the website I already spent thousands of dollars on? Why would you build a new page and test that when I already have a website?”
To which the reply might be, “Do you know how well your website is converting compared to your competitors? Are you able to easily update your website and that conversion rate without dedicating developer or IT resources?”
But telling them about these services is not enough. You need to show them where they have a problem and what you can do about it. Here are two tips to help you do just that:
- Use our landing page analyzer to show them how that website or current traffic destination is performing across nine categories. The report will give them personalized, actionable tactics to increase conversion. (Send the report to yourself first, then write them a separate email including the report to show you’ve done your homework and offer the recommendations as a service.)
- Include one A/B test free with the first landing page you build them. At the end of the first reporting period, show them that you ran traffic to two landing page variants (A and B), show them the winner, and tell them why that variant converted better. Offer to continue conversion optimization services equipped with these results.
Online Marketing Agency Growth Accelerator Summit on May 16, 2019
Join Ty Lingley and learn everything about adding landing page and conversion optimization services to your agency’s offerings. Grab your free ticket to this online event.
What Kind of Agencies Should Consider Doing This, Specifically?
This sounds great and all, but is it right for my agency?
If you’re a PPC, SEO, or social shop, you’re well positioned to offer landing page and conversion optimization services. Your clients trust you to help them get better campaign performance, and a huge part of that equation is improving conversion.
Landing page services fit that goal beautifully because they help you get more out of that targeted top of funnel traffic you’re producing—without increasing ad spend.
If you cater to ecommerce clients, landing pages help you quickly test new product or business ideas pre-launch, offer limited time or seasonal campaigns, target particular locations, demographics, or social channels, and build pages fast without relying on a developer or the restrictions of their online store builder.
Well, who should be performing these services at my agency?
That depends on the size of your agency and how you’re structured, but Unbounce was founded on the principle that marketers should be able to build and test custom landing pages without the need for IT or devs.
Using Unbounce, you can easily match your clients’ brand and get their landing page up and running without running into developer roadblocks. In an ideal world, the person (or people) at your agency closest to the client’s business and value proposition should ideally create the landing page. We’ve built our tool with that in mind.
How Should I Charge for Landing Page Services?
We’ve seen our agency customers come at this in a variety of ways, each with successful results, but there are two common ways to charge your clients. To decide, you’ll want to understand the extent of the services you want to offer. The model you use will also be dependent on the types of clients you’re working with, and whether you wish to consider landing page management a staple service retainer or an add-on.
Charge on a per landing page basis
If your client is new to the landing page game (or doesn’t require more than a few landing pages) charging on a per page basis makes sense.
However, not all landing pages are created equal.
If your client wants to run custom forms, integrate with other tools like a CRM or marketing automation, or add custom scripts, that’s going to take time. As such, we’ve seen agencies charge anywhere from $200-2,000 per landing page depending on the complexity, time to build, and add ons.
Include Unbounce service in your retainer fee
For agencies that work on a retainer model, a common practice is to incorporate the agency fees for Unbounce into your initial retainer. In order to do this effectively, you’ll need to determine the level of service that you can build into your flat rate. But do this without undervaluing any custom work you might have to do. You may or may not choose to add Unbounce as a line item.
Webistry, for instance, charges flat rates for their landing pages that varies based on whether it’s for lead generation or ecomm, the length of the page, and any additional functionality needed. For conversion optimization, it varies depending on the A/B testing requirements, monthly traffic, and the number of campaigns.
Get your client their own Unbounce account
If your client expresses a desire to have control and ownership over the assets you’re creating for them or runs into internal security issues that require them to be the account owners, then getting them their own account makes the most sense. This option is also smart if your client decides to leave you and wants to transfer their landing pages to a new account.
If you’re part of our Partner Program, you can offer your client a free trial as well as 20% off their first three months with Unbounce. In turn, you’ll earn 20% of the recurring revenue for the lifetime of the client, as long as they’re a customer of Unbounce. You can read more about becoming a Partner here. We’ve made it easy.
Capture New Opportunities with Landing Pages
When it comes to your agency business, increasing retention—and growing your revenue—is earned through delivering better campaign performance to your clients.
This is hard to do well when their website doesn’t convert well, but landing pages let you drive traffic to a place designed specifically for conversion. And when you add Unbounce landing pages to your menu of services, you’re also adding conversion optimization, page design, user experience, campaign analytics, and development capabilities—all without needing a designer or developer.
Naccache agrees:
We were able to showcase without a doubt the lift in performance for our customers. It happened immediately and with data to back it all up. This lead to better retention rates and stronger retainers. More so, it differentiated us from our competitors.
We were equipped to talk about optimizing the entire customer journey and brought up points/strategies that piqued the prospect customer’s interest. Doing so also meant an additional stream of revenue, which can’t be ignored.
For your clients, these services are a compelling new opportunity to increase the ROI on the campaigns you’re already running for them. And for you, it’s a chance to impress, retain clients longer, and grow your business.
Feel free to ask me any questions you have in the comments, or chat with an Unbounce agency specialist to learn more about how we can help you make it happen.
