As their name demands, Salesforce clearly knows how to sell. They are so visibly good at selling that it’s easy to see many of their techniques as an outside observer. One of these is their use of excellent landing pages.
A landing page can be any page on your site that visitors initially arrive at, but of course we know that with a little thought and planning you can be more effective, by creating separate landing pages for different purposes.
Top-line analysis of their landing pages
Salesforce have a reasonably strong home page. However, over the years they have diversified and now offer a wider mix of products around this core offering. Subsequently, the home page probably wouldn’t be a great PPC landing page for someone searching for “CRM software tool” - the page now contains information about other elements such as their sales cloud, marketing cloud, services cloud etc.
In order to create a much better landing page experience, Salesforce have created a set of bespoke, ‘orphan’ pages that are optimised to convert specific segments of traffic with directly relevant content.
An ‘orphan’ landing page is one that can only be found by following the specific URL that you assign it. i.e. it is an ‘orphan’ because it doesn’t have any ‘parent’ pages on the main website.
In our view, these pages are an excellent example of how to produce a great landing page. Furthermore, we know that Salesforce use the landing page optimisation tools provided by the Adobe suite, so I’m sure they have run numerous tests to ensure this is the case.
What makes their landing pages so good?
We’ve listed some of the reasons these pages are excellent below, but take a look at a live example of one of these pages by doing a search for something like “crm software provider” yourself. Following the Ad link, consider what your own ‘user intent’ would be at this stage and see what you think of the page you arrive at.
By using our landing page scorecard criteria (which you can read more about here) we can show why we think this page is so good….
Using the landing page scorecard
To start with, let’s think about RELEVANCE. If I arrive at this page having searched for “CRM software provider” or similar does it strike me as relevant? Absolutely. It uses the phrase “salesforce CRM” or similar at least four times prominently towards the top of the page and then provides supporting content and additional similar phrases throughout the remaining content.
Next, let’s consider SIMPLICITY. Once I’ve arrived at the page, is it simple to understand the messages and what I’m expected to do next? I think so. The relevant audience arriving at this page will probably know what a CRM, is so the content doesn’t need to focus on that. Instead it needs to sell Salesforce itself, while also indicating how you get access to it. The prominent “free trial” and “contact” buttons do a great job of that. Furthermore, there is some great video content to give easy access to even more information.
Now, we'll look for the USPs (Unique Selling Points). Do Salesforce do a good job of telling a prospective customer why they should choose them over a competitor? Well contained within the two main headlines on the page they state that over 150,000 other customers have already signed up and that it’s the number one tool in the world. That’s pretty compelling!
How does this page do for CLUTTER? This is a little subjective, but I’d say the page is well laid out and key messages and content are clear and easy to read. If there is one thing we think Salesforce could improve on, it would be the layout of the mobile version of the page. The page is responsive and hence changes to a better layout for mobile users, however some of the (what we think is) key content has been hidden and the page is quite long. Room for improvement.
Does the page also provide enough REASSURANCE to prospective customers? Definitely. We’ve already mentioned the two statements above (worlds #1 and 150,000 customers) but in addition to this they also include reference to the recognition they have in the industry and show the logos of brands that use the tool - although it could be made clearer that this is what the logos are. Further to this, you have the risk free option of a 30 day FREE trial.
Finally we’re interested in any elements that give the indication of a DEADLINE. Well there doesn’t appear to be a time constraint and from what we can see, there isn’t a finite number of product available either. But this just doesn’t seem necessary in this instance. Salesforce do such a great job of providing compelling USPs and reassurance messages along with what appears to be a risk free option to trial the product, the only ‘deadline’ apparent would be the interpretation that you’d be a fool not to at least give it a try!
Of course, we don’t have access to any of the Salesforce analytics data or landing page testing results. However, having examined the page in the manner above, it certainly appears on the surface to be a great landing. Is it the best landing page ever? Who knows….. but it’s one of my favourite examples of a business trying to produce a great one.
