Whether you’re looking for newsletter subscriptions, white paper downloads, or donations, a landing page can help meet your goals. Landing pages are meant to influence action, and for that to happen they have to be designed and developed it correctly. In this blog post, we discuss easy ways to create landing pages that drive conversions.
Here are several ways to optimize your landing pages for better conversions.
Craft your landing page with these key ingredients.
- Headline and sub-headline
- A brief description that offers value
- At least one image or video
- Testimonials
- Call to action
- A form to capture a visitor’s information
Write a compelling, value-added description.
There’s a fine balance of copy needed for a landing page to go from good to great. First, you need an attention-grabbing headline and your body copy needs to be clear and concise. No one wants to dig through text to figure out what you want him or her to do.
At the same time, you need to offer value-added information. Your customers and clients want to know what differentiates your product/service from what’s out there. Identify your audience’s pain point, offer your product/service as the solution, and list additional benefits. Selling a product or service? Offer a free trial or give discount codes to further influence conversions.
Here’s an example of how Microsoft does it right by addressing a common concern and identifying how their product can help.
Delete distractions or risk limiting conversions.
You have approximately five seconds to capture your audience’s attention, so you have no room for distractions. Customers often abandon landing pages because there’s too much text, multiple calls to action, or too many links. You want your customers to breeze through the page and understand the action needed from them. Flooding the page with too many links is not only overwhelming, it increases the chance of a user leaving the page and never returning. Additionally, multiple calls to action are confusing. At the end of the day, you want your audience to perform one action and one action only.
Hubspot also suggests to remove the main navigation from your landing pages. Remember what we said about having too many links? The same goes for displaying the navigation. It increases the chance for abandoning the page in order to venture elsewhere. Keep the layout simple and focused to help optimize conversions.
Make sure the page works correctly.
79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from that site. This means you need to make sure your landing page loads properly and is responsive.
Hobo has a great illustration of how page load time contributes to page abandonment.
If your pages have a good balance of image and text, your page load time should only be a few seconds. Here are a few ways to speed up your website load time.
And because half of all traffic is mobile, landing pages should be responsive. Text shouldn’t require zooming in on mobile. Buttons and fields should translate clearly across platforms, so even someone on-the-go is able to make a successful conversion.
Show off your credibility.
If you’re a new business, it’s going to take more than great content and visuals to get your audience to take action. You need to win their trust and you can do this by showing off your credibility. Add testimonials, reviews, or client logos to your landing page. This helps alleviate any hesitation customers may have with taking the next step in the buying process. Are you asking customers to make a purchase or make a donation? Include security certifications and disclaimers. Are you asking them to subscribe to a newsletter? Include email privacy notices.
Make it simple.
We’re living in an age where customers are becoming more and more conservative when giving out their information. Keep this in mind when creating forms for a landing page, and keep them as simple and easy as possible. Because studies show that the shorter the form, the higher the conversions. There are some exceptions, however, like government affiliations or event registrations that merit having 11 or more fields. Should your white paper download have 11 fields? Probably not.
Test your landing pages often.
A/B testing your landing pages will ensure you get better results. You can test almost anything from headlines and copy to images and calls to action. Not sure how many of those form fields to use? Test them. Create one page with 11 fields and one with five and see how they do.
Know that results will not happen overnight, so test over a few weeks at a time to get a good read on results. When you get the results you need to make an educated decision, don’t select one, only to set it and forget it. You’ll want to monitor results week after week and always periodically test landing pages. What worked on week three may not produce the same results in week 16.
Optimize Landing Pages and Increase Conversions
It’s time to stop setting up your landing pages for failure. There’s no perfect formula for success, but if you follow best practices, research what’s working in the industry, and run a couple of tests, you should see results nonetheless.
If a couple months go by and you’re still not seeing results that wow, consider how your audience is getting to your landing page. Are you promoting it enough? Chances are no one’s stumbling across your page on their own. Be sure to take advantage of your social channels and paid ads to get traffic to your landing pages. It may take some time to see an uptick, but you’ll get there eventually. And when you do, you’ll know your efforts were well worth it.
Need extra help optimizing your landing pages? Contact us.
