When it comes to landing pages, the numbers are skewed. Landing pages do a staggeringly effective job at converting site visitors into paying customers. But directing customers to standalone landing pages is an underused tactic.
When the numbers don’t add up, it often means there’s an opportunity. Even though landing pages are slowly becoming the standard, implementing them now will still give you a significant edge over your competitors. Levelling up your landing pages can improve your conversion rate, which impacts your bottom line.
And the best part? You can do it without increasing the number of visitors to your site.
To give you an idea of how much of a difference landing pages can make, we have researched successful client campaigns where we have deployed landing pages and also pulled together some third party research from credible online sources like Marketing Experiments, Hubspot and Search Engine People.
The top 5 considerations on Why You Need To Level Up Your Landing Pages are highlighted below:
Most marketers understand that using a homepage as a landing page for marketing campaigns is a bad idea. Its like asking a customer if they prefer meat or fish and then presenting them with an al a carte menu that has all the dishes. We should use information we have learned about our customer (for example based on what they seartched for) to guide them to the correct location on our website.
Unfortunately, most businesses take this to mean they can create one landing page – a default landing page – as a catchall for every campaign they’re running. In fact, 52% of marketers don’t even create a new landing pages for different marketing campaigns.
In the same way, it’s suboptimal to send every single site visitor to your homepage, it’s a mistake to send email subscribers, social media followers and PPC traffic to the same landing page. Each of these channels have unique methods for getting visitors to click through, and different promises and goals once they do – so why would you send them to the same generic page?
Start embracing the power of landing pages by creating specific pages for each of your various traffic streams. It won’t be long before you experience more success and higher conversion rates!
The maxim “less is more” applies to many things – landing pages included. However, the fact that 48% of landing pages contain multiple offers suggests the majority of businesses haven’t yet made the connection.
When you know a page receives a lot of traffic, it is very tempting to cram more than one offer onto the page – but don’t do it. Customers don’t want to be confused or oversold and offering something other than exactly what they’re expecting actually does both.
Craft strong, confident offers and trust your landing pages to do their work! A critical component of any landing page is a call to action button – Our research shows that a single call-to-action button can increase conversions by 62%.
If you have a couple of landing pages and aren’t getting the results you want, don’t give up quite yet. As we’ve discussed, the more you connect the messaging of your landing page to the arriving audience (and the channel they used) the better results you’ll get. If this means creating more landing pages – even different ones for segments of the same audience group – then do it.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, perhaps a video is worth a million?
The goal of any landing page is to communicate the message to the page visitor as efficiently as possible. In some cases, video can be the best medium for achieving this – especially if you are communicating a difficult concept or you want to show people interacting with your product. Research shows that using videos on landing pages can actually increase conversions by 86%.
One of the biggest factors that inhibit the success of marketing campaigns is not testing vital components of your landing pages! The fact is landing pages are where the magic has to happen, so you absolutely need to be sure that every aspect of the page is contributing to a conversion! You’ve spent the money and dedicated time to funnelling visitors to a certain page with an exact message – but then you don’t test to make sure the headline or call-to-action button isn’t confusing customers?
61% of companies do less than five tests per month on their landing pages; excuse me for saying it again but – this is an opportunity! Test your landing page components, tweak based on your findings and enjoy the increased conversions with just a little bit of extra work.
Last but not least, we come to a pretty straightforward fix for an all-too-common landing page mistake: too many form fields. Yes, we live in the Information Age, which means every little detail you can pull from your potential customers can be used to your advantage. But you know what? One or two pieces of information are a lot better than zero, which is what you’ll get if you present customers with a 15-field form!
You should see the form as opportune real estate to take only the essential information you need from your customers, for example, do you really need to know their phone number? Or their full postal address? Consider what information customers are willing to give away in return for what you’re offering them, and let that dictate what goes on the form. It can be the tipping point of whether someone converts or not.
In our research we found that reducing the number of form fields to 10 or under increases conversions by 120%. I’ll go a step further and suggest you keep the number of form fields to less than 5 as I’m a firm believer in keeping things as simple as possible.
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