Friday, April 23, 2021 |
You know the deal.
After the outlay for a new website, expert Search Engine Optimization and a market-leading content strategy, your business still feels like it is stuck in neutral.
Yes, you have way more traffic, but the conversion rates are as flat as a proverbial pancake.
With all this effort you should be in the fast lane, but you are still idling. What’s up?
If this is what your business is experiencing, you may need to inhale deeply and take a second look at your website landing pages.
Landing pages are the workhorse of any website. These static pages are designed specifically for lead capture, driving the enquiries and sales that are the bread and butter of any business.
Businesses and organizations are often adept at putting up hundreds of these pages, but many are not so great at ensuring that they are optimized for conversion. Without engineering landings pages to convert, they sit out there on the world wide web like fishing lines in the sea, without the bait needed to catch a fish.
So what can you do about landing page conversion rates?
The good news is that there is always something that you can do to improve the situation and targeted changes to your landing pages are bound to bring some welcome uplift in conversions.
Let’s take a look at six great ways in which you can boost conversions on your landing pages.
1. Set the right goals for your campaign.
The landing page concept is a great one but without clear mission objectives, they can be confusing to users, generating a high bounce rate. If you are spraying a confetti of special offers and different call to actions, you can remedy a poorly converting page by focusing it on a single goal, offer or solution. This usually requires some research and planning as well as ongoing review of your analytics to ensure that your amended landing pages are on track and doing the single thing they are purposed to do.
2. Keep it simple.
Flowery, prosaic copy just won’t cut it for a high converting landing page. You need to keep your message singular and clear, ideally using as few words as possible. Divide your message into straightforward headings and subheading that give a visitor all the information needed to evaluate your product or service and fulfil your Call To Action (CTA). Short memorable sentences keep the page content 100% focused on fulfilling that single goal.
3. Make sure that your campaign has flow.
Successful landing pages have a clear structure that should take visitors from an attention-grabbing above the fold headline and image to an easy to complete enquiry form or checkout option.
At a minimum a typical landing page should include:
- A main headline
- Supporting headline
- Your sales proposition
- Concise benefits
- Social proof
- A quick summary, or reinforcement of the headline message
- A clear CTA
You want to ensure that you achieve a smooth transition between the content elements of the page with the completion of the CTA being the logical conclusion.
4. Use well-targeted visuals.
Interspersing your landing page written content with videos and high-quality images, help to hold a visitors attention, enhancing dwell time. They also can communicate your value proposition differently. The visuals you use should be carefully selected to connect with your visitors, staying relevant to and complementing your landing page content. Long corporate videos or complex tables or diagrams are a turn-off. Visuals that reinforce the message of the content are best. Simplicity is key.
5. CTAs make or break a page.
The messaging and format of your call to action makes all the difference in getting site visitors to click on that button or fill in that form. Here are some key areas to address when creating the CTA portion of your landing page:
- Size: CTA buttons need to be anything but discrete, yet not so large that your landing page appears suspect or spammy. A clear button with well-defined margins that can be seen from a distance is great.
- Colour: Many online marketers recommend CTA buttons having bold or contrasting colours to grab the attention and motivate customers to click. Green, orange and blue are colours that are known to have high conversion rates when used in buttons.
- A single basic instruction. Use fewer than 5 words (e.g. “BUY NOW”, “BOOK NOW”, “JOIN US”, or “LEARN MORE”) should be all that is needed to get your prospect to act.
6. Make your landing page forms a no-brainer!
You need to make it very easy for visitors to your site to get in touch with your business. A well-engineered form should be quick and hassle-free to fill in. Try to limit the fields you include to the absolute minimum required for qualifying a lead. Also, having multiple tedious spam filters you are likely to frustrate potential customers who will simply go elsewhere.
Rounding up
As you can see, there are lots of ways to give your landing page conversion rates the uplift they need. Once you have settled on your improvements it is important to undertake A/B testing to ensure that your landing page is truly meeting the needs of its audience. Another quick tip is to keep an eye on the loading time of your pages as you can lose many good leads to a sluggish page.
Need help with crafting a winning landing page?
Making a success of your website can have many twists and turns. If you need assistance our team of digital marketing experts can not only provide advice and expertise but deliver real results too. Don’t be shy, simply reach out by phone or email and we will be glad to show you how we can help!