Picture this: You’ve worked with your marketing team to perfect every aspect of your website design, edited landing page optimization, tailored pages to contain important information that website visitors are looking for, and craft relevant blog post content…But your conversion rates are still lower than expected, and your visitors aren’t moving down the sales funnel very easily. What’s going wrong?
Oftentimes, businesses are doing everything right – from perfectly formatted FAQ pages to web pages to optimized feature designs for mobile devices. However, many people tend to skip out on best practices for optimizing their landing pages, not realizing the crucial role they play in the grand scheme of the overall marketing design.
What are landing pages?
Landing pages are key components of a marketing structure that exist specifically to convert visitors or potential customers into qualified leads. Naturally, landing pages are a facet of conversion rate optimization (CRO), since successful landing pages can increase the number of conversions for a business.
They typically present forms that gather contact information from visitors, such as a phone number or email address, in exchange for something of value from a business like informational resources (e-book) or access to products and services (free trial period). By converting visitors into leads, a good landing page is one of the best ways to increase revenue and help businesses reach their goals.
Creating high-quality landing pages and investing in landing page optimization can take a lot of time and effort that most people may not have the desire or capacity for. Because of this, many business owners can make the mistake of not investing in landing page optimization, and therefore lose out on potential qualified leads as a result.
Remember, it’s always important to consider every aspect of your marketing structure, as each part has a role in the greater picture. If you skip out on a small aspect thinking it won’t have much of an effect on your overall marketing strategy, you might be faced with a hard truth later down the line.
What kind of landing pages are there?
Before we dive into how to execute landing page optimization, let’s first discuss the many types of landing pages that businesses can use to optimize their conversion rates.
1) Click Landing Pages – Also known as “click-through” pages, these landing pages exist to inform your visitors about the services and products you offer in effort to move them further down the sales funnel. This page acts as the bridge between your ad that the visitor clicked on and the checkout page, so the content you include here has the potential to make or break a sale.
2) Post-Click Landing Pages – A post-click landing page is separate from your home page and serves as an extension of your ad that visitors click on. The content on your post-click landing page should be optimized to trigger specific actions, such as downloading an ebook or starting a week-long free trial. While both the page copy and page design are important elements of a post-click landing page, it’s also imperative to showcase a clear and persuasive CTA to get your visitors to take desired actions. We’ll talk more about how to create a simple yet effective CTA in a minute.
3) Mobile Landing Pages – Mobile landing pages also have a primary goal of driving visitors to take singular and specific actions, triggered by an effective CTA. The only difference of mobile landing pages from others is that instead of taking on a desktop format, the landing page is optimized to adhere to the structure and function of a mobile device. This means you should experiment with your web page and make sure everything is the right size for various device types.
4) Lead Capture Landing Pages – A lead capture landing page is one that is designed to collect information from visitors so that your marketing team can gain access to their details. The list of contacts that submit their information on lead capture landing pages will be stored for marketing and sales teams to use for targeted messages later down the line to try and convert them into leads.
5) Viral Landing Pages – Viral landing pages have the primary goal of spreading the word of a business or campaign through word-of-mouth marketing, which happens when visitors or customers tell their friends, family, or others about a certain platform, service, or product. With viral landing pages, the brand or business behind it are often subtly mentioned, either through a small logo or a “Sponsored by” note, and often bear social icons to make things more easily shareable or likeable.
What steps can you take to optimize your landing pages?
Now that you know more about the different types of landing pages, it’s time to start thinking about how you can use them to maximize results.
To get “the most bang for your buck”, you’ll want to consider a few optimization tactics for your landing pages so that users and visitors who come across your site are more likely to convert and become customers. Here are some best practices that you can implement to convert people from your target audience into qualified leads. Optimizing landing pages to drive conversions is key to getting qualified leads.
1) Check Your Loading Speed – A factor that can prevent many landing page visitors from becoming leads is the time it takes for your page to load, so it’s always a good idea to optimize your web page speeds. People can become frustrated or dissatisfied when the information they want to see on your landing page is delayed in loading fully.
In fact, research from Portent reveals that with each second of additional loading time, website conversions decrease by an average of 4.42%. Don’t be the business that has a great landing page but drives people away before they can see it!
2) Create SEO-Rich Copy – Creating SEO-rich content for your landing pages is one of the best things you can do to optimize them. Most of the time, visitors who find your landing page through organic traffic will have found you by typing keywords or keyword phrases on a search engine like Google or Bing. The better your content is tailored to commonly searched key terms, the higher chance you’ll have of ranking well and being found through search engines.
3) Make your CTA loud and clear – in more ways than one! While creating a well-worded and clear yet concise CTA is important, crafting the visual aspects of your CTA is equally crucial. For example, to make your CTA button stand out on your page, use contrasting colors from the rest of the landing page design. This way, visitors are first drawn to your CTA button visually and can then be persuaded to take action based on the language you used.
A pro tip for creating an effective CTA is to tie a sense of urgency into the action you want visitors to take. For example, using phrases like “Offer ends soon”, or “Only 3 left!” or even including a countdown for the number of days or hours left for a certain offer, can make visitors feel like they should take advantage of the offer right then and there, especially if it’s exclusive or limited time.
4) Use customer reviews and testimonials to your benefit. It’s no secret how much of an impact reviews can have on our perception of certain services or products. If you’ve ever scanned reviews on a product before hitting “Add to Cart”, you know exactly what we’re talking about.
Using customer case studies and social proof to showcase your product or service’s use value is a best practice to nudge interested visitors into leads. If you have good examples of the times your products or services have brought much value to those who have used them, it’s time to show off.
5) Evaluate your landing page design. Looks aren’t everything, but they can be a significant determinant of whether visitors will take action on your page or not. WebFX found that an unattractive website layout will cause about 38% of people to stop engaging.
If you don’t have a web or UX designer, you can always use a landing page builder to help you set up your landing pages. Additionally, you can utilize certain website design principles such as knowing where to place certain aspects of your page (CTA, copy, navigation bar) for best results or utilizing white space to make important content readily available and visible to users who land on your page.
6) Make them scroll! The last thing you want is for potential customers to reach your landing page, and immediately leave. This phenomenon is otherwise known as a bounce rate, and a high one can affect the deliverability of your /landing pages. Keep your audience interested and make them scroll through more of your page for the information they’re looking for. In the press industry, this is often called keeping information “above the fold”.
Now it’s your turn! We’ve equipped you with some basic fundamentals necessary to create optimized landing pages. All that’s left is for you to go and do it!
Need help? Check out our conversion rate optimization services or contact us today for all your landing page optimization needs.
