Narrowing Your Message With Adaptive Design

Ever go to a website that just “Spoke” to you? You connected with the message because the wording on the page was written the way you write, the problems it addressed were the problems you have, the imagery on the page was a person like you, and the solution to the problem was what you needed.

But if you visited the site from your friend’s computer, the messaging was different, the imagery was different, even the way the solution was presented was different! What the heck is going on?!

This is a adaptive design.

It is a way of presenting information to users specifically based on their personas, aspects of their persona, and where they are in the buying cycle.

If they are at a point where they don’t realize they have a problem, the information on the page presents education about the problem, symptoms of the problem, and what happens if the problem isn’t addressed. If the user is at a consideration point, the information on the page is about what the system does for that persona to solve their specific problems in the way they need it solved. It focuses on the issues they have and the features that solve those problems.

The difference in conversion rates with an adaptive design can be huge. At the last conference I attended, Brennan Dunn from RightMessage.com presented an increased conversion rate from 5% to 23% based on a strong adaptive design implementation.

Got to know your personas!

If you don’t know very specifically who you’re selling to, how will you provide the right message? Once you bring together pricing, sales, and now marketing, it becomes so clear that if you don’t understand exactly who you are reaching and how you’re reaching them, you won’t be able to get users. So really work on that system pricing and your personas, because you can’t build a landing page or design for everyone, you have to pick the your top marketing and market to them.

Landing Pages & Conditional Views

Let’s take a look at some examples of how to do this. There are a number of ways to get your marketing platform to target the right users in the right ways, but some of my favorites are to use Leadpages.net and Unless.com or Rightmessage.com.

Like so many landing page builders, Leadpages.net allows you to build custom landing pages for particular campaigns or markets quickly and test your messaging. There are a lot of different systems out there for this, but I’ve used Leadpages a lot over the years and it’s always been solid.

Unless.com and Rightmessage.com are a bit different. They allows you to show different data based on conditions. Conditions can vary a lot and include everything from your local weather to market segments. This way, you can show different people coming from different places different messages on either landing pages or on your home page. If that last sentence didn’t quite sound right, you read it correctly. You can set up your home page, or other pages, to show different content to different people based on a number of different factors. So your home page will look different based on who, what, and where! This can be a super powerful tool for improving conversions throughout the buying cycle.