Effective landing pages help visitors into customers.
It becomes vital to make landing pages work. A bad landing page will end in fewer leads and customers.
We have put together some ideas that give insight into some of the reasons why landing pages tend to fail. Here is a list of tips that you could apply to optimize your landing page.
First, let’s understand why landing pages fail. Generally, web and graphic designers create landing pages for clients. They look great and appealing, but, sometimes they fail to deliver on the goal of the page. It takes years of deliberate practice and learning to understand human psychology. Clients also approve work on the surface level and like ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’ designs.
When in reality, there is a long list of elements that complement each other in a perfect landing page. Right messaging, trust signals, copy, and design are all crucial factors in conversion-focused landing pages. These elements persuade the visitor to take action. A useful landing page has an engaging design, a clear offer, and a great user experience.
Analyze your website visitors with qualitative and quantitative research. Identity elements to improve. Make iterative changes and keep testing; we will cover this in the next section.
Landing page optimization is an iterative process of improving landing pages over time. Data collection becomes the basis of what you should change.
You can then apply these changes and test whether they pass or fail.
When the visitor lands on your page, they should feel inspired to use your product or service.
Your value proposition should be clear and evoke positive emotions.
The use of expressive wording in headings can be a powerful tool to achieve this.
As a marketer, you aim to have your visitor focus on specific elements of your page.
By decluttering your landing page, you ensure that the visitor checks out the core offer.
Remove carousels or animating text as they distract the visitor from the main goal.
Using contrasting colors draw the visitor’s attention to the most important content. Call to action buttons should have a different contrast to make them stand out from the rest of the page.
Newspapers have the most exciting information above the page fold. The above the fold area is where you find the main headlines.
The same principle applies to your landing page. Keep the most important information above the digital fold.
This area includes all the visible screen size without needing the visitor to scroll.
Promoting scarcity can lead the visitor to “act now” on the offer due to limited time or quantity.
You can create scarcity by adding a countdown timer or showing remaining stock.
Add these scarcity elements next to your call to action buttons to create urgency. Scarcity and urgency increase conversions. size without needing the visitor to scroll.
Call-to-action buttons should be clear and visible. Include action words as part of your CTA text, here are some examples:
“Sign up today.”
“Download my Free Ebook”
“Get Access Now”
“Join now.”
“Sign up to download.”
Add your phone number and contact details on the landing page. Even if you don’t want to receive calls, its a tremendous trust-building addition to the page.
Attention spans have decreased since the birth of the internet. Visitors now skim through web pages. Research shows headlines and bullets are the elements which get read the most.
Use conversion-focused copy in your headlines, bullets and keep testing variations of it.
When running PPC ads use consistent text and images. Visitors bounce off the landing page if the ads and landing pages are inconsistent.
As the proverbial saying goes, “the proof is in the pudding”. Showcase client testimonials to increase trust. You can post written or video testimonials to exhibit ‘social proof’.
The length of the form elements directly impacts conversion rates. We recommend using fewer form elements to capture leads. When generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), you can ask for more info, e.g. budget, company size, etc.
Qualifying leads early on in your pipeline could reduce follow-up costs.
Exit pop-ups act as a last attempt to convert visitors into leads. These pop-ups appear when the visitor is about to leave.
Exit pop-ups have strong visuals, catchy headlines, and a short, concise call-to-action. Perfect for showing those ‘One time only’ (OTO) offers to entice the visitor to convert.
A/B testing is an iterative process of improving your landing pages for conversion. Each test focusses on changing a single element at a time so you can analyse the impact of the component.
Gather user behaviour data and come up with significant improvements.
Although there are a plethora of tools out there, we recommend only a handful. Heat mapping tool such as HotJar shows the areas of high engagement. On analysis, you can hone down to low engaging elements and create a set of hypothesis to test.
Once you launch, it is important to test the page to verify its effectiveness. There are some guidelines we recommend:
Create a checklist - Create a checklist and go through it once the page is live. At Apexure, we use a 34 point checklist to ensure all our pages have the right elements for conversion. We include things like checking for spelling mistakes, favicon, validation rules etc. Be specific and feel free to add your own rules and maintain a template, so its easy to share with the team.
The five-second rule - Use a website like the UsabilityHub.com to gather feedback online.
One of the tests in Usability Hub is showing random people a web page for 5 seconds. Based on their experience, you can ask various questions. e.g. Do you understand the product/service we are trying to sell? Or what’s the page about. You can get some recipes on what to ask from Usability Hub’s help website.
You can also gather a group of friends and family and ask them to test the usability of the page. Give them each five seconds to scroll through your page. Once the five-second have lapsed, hide the page from them and ask them to tell you what the purpose of the page is. The degree of clarity should state how you can make your landing page’s purpose clearer.
We recommend HotJar’s framework based on:
Drivers: what drives users to your website?
Barriers: what prevents some users from converting?
Hooks: what hooks persuade other users to convert? Get the full question list from HotJar
The quality of a landing page can have an immense impact on your conversion rates and, your ROI. We have many years of experience and knowledge in CRO.
We can help you increase conversion rates and grow your business.
Contact us today and let us generate you more leads
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Founder & CEO of Apexure, Waseem worked in London’s Financial Industry. He has worked on trading floors in BNP Paribas and Trafigura, developing complex business systems. Waseem loves working with Startups and combines data and design to create improved User Experiences. Read more
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