If you’re an ONTRAPORT user, you can’t have missed the announcements that came during the Ontrapalooza conference.
What are ONTRApages, ONTRAforms, ONTRAmail?
The new ONTRApages and ONTRAmail were announced in September but updated now with some cool new features. If you’re not familiar with them yet, they are new way of designing landing pages, smart forms and email messages, that follow a block-building structure. You select a content block and customize it with your text, images, etc. You can choose from a lot of preselected sets of fonts and colors, or just create a color/font palette that reflects your brand’s identity.
Another new feature is the option to host your ONTRApages on your WordPress website – something that was almost impossible before. The new ONTRApages plugin is a dream come true for a lot of us – no need to take your visitor to a new domain and think about the conversion rates plummeting due to that. It’s fast, efficient and does exactly what you’d expect – quite similar to the plugin by LeadPages.
The Marketplace is something else you need to be excited about. Here is how ONTRAPORT present it:
“A searchable hub in the ONTRAPORT app, the ONTRAPORT Marketplace puts the creative genius of esteemed marketers and designers on display while providing the ONTRAPORT community with a library of email, web page, and form templates designed to convert — by ONTRAPORT users, for ONTRAPORT users.”
What you might miss from this explanation is that you will be able to purchase not only design, but the copy for the pages and emails. A welcome sequence that works and you just need to customize? A nurture or re-engagement sequence? A long-sales page? Check, check, check!
Why it’s important?
Yes, those new features are great for all ONTRAPORT users and consultants. They save us time, make it much easier (and fun!) to build a campaign and to provide mobile-responsive mail, forms, and pages. But that’s not what the ONTRApages/forms/mails is all about. It’s about your customers and prospects.
Apart from the incredible ease of use, this means following the same design from the smart form, through the thank-you page, and the email the new contact will receive. To me it means consistent user experience, less confusion, and better conversions.
Imagine this – you have an ONTRAform inside a blog post. When the new prospect fills it in, you take him to a Thank-you page that has the exact same colors, fonts, structure even. The user is confident that he has indeed signed up for the right thing. Then she receives an email – the leadgen requested or a simple welcome message. And that email looks and feels just like the form and page before that.
Now imagine each one of your funnels has a separate design template you follow for all landing pages, opt-in forms, messages. Congrats, you’ve just taken a step to minimizing confusion for your contacts. That’s called consistent cross-channel user experience.
Branding value
Think of this as branding your funnels – by following the same design, you get noticed by the prospect. And every time you send them a new message – boom! Top of mind brand awareness. They can connect the design to the first time they saw it – consciously or unconsciously.
My call is that this will evoke the same feelings that the contact had the first time they filled in the form. Or the first time they noticed the perfect design flow between those different elements and experiences.
Research supported
A research from 2013 supports my call:
The 4 key elements of a usable cross-channel experience:
We all know that from experience – we expect the same branding on an official website, Facebook page, Twitter profile, etc.
What’s next
A complete redesign on all your forms, email messages and landing pages doesn’t sound time and cost efficient. I’d start with a small upcoming campaign and follow the results from there. I think some A/B testing would also provide interesting result – start by split testing your standard thank-you page and one that follows the opt-in form design by the dots.
