Landing page optimization is simply the process of creating well-designed landing pages for you to maximize the number of visitors that will complete the desired goal. More than improving a landing page’s aesthetics, you also need to make use of data and anecdotal evidence. This means that you have to collect information, such as what the audience expects and likes, and understand how you can use it to better understand what to offer them.
Suffice to say, a good landing page can help convert visitors into leads while entertaining them. Its ultimate goal is to create a page that gains more conversions while engaging the target audience better and driving more leads. Unfortunately, the landing page optimization process is both time-consuming and resource-hungry. It is typical to get help from a graphic designer, a web developer, and other IT resources.
Read along and learn about the landing page design best practices for you to attract more prospects and convert them into customers.
What is a Landing Page?
To begin this dive into the world of landing pages, let us tackle the simplest task in this journey and it is to know what a landing page is.
In a nutshell, it is any web page that a customer may land on while browsing through the internet. In marketing, this page is distinct from the webpage or any pages on the website and only serves a single purpose. It serves as a follow-up to what you promised the user in your content. Essentially, customers are given a sort of an offer in exchange for providing personal information like an email address. Free trials, eBooks, contest entries, or webinar registration are the usual offers and these are given once the user submits contact information. A successful landing page design can convince a potential customer that providing personal details will be worth it to get the offer.
Customers may get their hands on landing pages through a general search or upon visiting the company website. Marketing experts also suggest having more than one landing page to target the segmented customer populations.
Why Is My Landing Page Not Converting?
A quick search would give you plenty of tips about how to do landing page optimization. You need to know, however, that not all strategies work, especially when you do not know what exactly the problem is. The first step that you should do before changing everything in the landing page design is to identify what contributes to low conversion rates.
Visitors take only about 0.05 seconds to form a general impression on a landing page. It is important, therefore, that you can use to communicate your brand’s worth during that time or risk losing out on potential customers. In one study, it was found out that only 22% of companies are actually satisfied with their landing pages’ conversion rates. Since a landing page is considered an indispensable tool in marketing, you have to make sure that you can increase your current conversion rates by knowing what is wrong.
One of the most effective ways to do this is by using a heat map. Some customers may ignore stock photos and would focus on an unimportant page element. This tool can show where visitors are clicking on the landing page. See where the greatest activity is happening and put the most important element on that part. You should check later on whether this solves the problem and it gets more clicks.
Another way is to gather visual data reports, like scroll maps, overlay reports, list reports, and confetti maps. These are great indicators to track website visitor behavior. They will show which areas visitors usually linger on to read or look at and which parts of the pages they quickly scroll or leave the page. The problem might be is that you failed to place the important information on the right areas of the landing page.
Another common problem is a mismatched offer. You need to know what offers will appeal to your target customers and make them sign up. Be straightforward in presenting the benefits of having the offer so that it will become more compelling.
You also need to be consistent in the language, design, and tone that you use in your landing pages. This will help maintain the same context that you have on your marketing strategy and give it a cohesive feel. Conversions sometimes get impeded because visitors feel weird about inconsistent messages or visuals.
One of the biggest contributors to an inadequately performing landing page is poor design. First impressions matter and visitors will not stay if the page looks off-putting. You have to add highly visual elements, such as an animated masthead to make them interested. According to Shopify, doing this will increase the conversion rates by up to 86 percent.
Landing pages also have to load fast or you risk having the customers leave before seeing the page completely. 40% of consumers do not like to wait for a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Many factors can affect page load speeds but one of the ways to make it faster is to have a well-designed landing page.
Ultimately, the reason why you do not convert much is because of a poor user experience. Take care of a stellar UX by having a simple, honest, and concise landing page. Have consistent page elements and again, page speed is a crucial factor This means that a professionally-designed landing page should be a priority if you want to make people stay and get the chance to convert.
What Is A Good Conversion Rate For Landing Pages?
Conversion is a vital element in any marketing strategy, including landing pages. If you are not able to turn lookers into buyers at a good rate, then you are failing at your advertising method. But what is a good conversion rate? How do you know when you have an effective landing page?
Generally, according to Wordstream, the average conversion rate across industries is 2.35%. Notice, however, that those at the top 25% can convert even higher than 5.31%. The top 10%, on the other hand, converts as much as 11.45% and higher.
Now the ability to convert visitors into leads and customers are affected by a lot of factors. You have to be aware that the industry you are in, the products and services you offer, and the target audience has a huge impact on your goal of converting more. As you can see on the numbers, attaining an amazing conversion rate is possible. The real question is how to do it.
Transform your conversion rates from average to awesome with the help of landing page optimization.
12 Steps to Optimize Your Landing Pages
A landing page design is usually directed towards establishing contact points and collecting information to create many leads or prospects for your business. In practice, however, the landing page should be there to help maximize interactions with visitors and establish contact. Sad to say, however, that not all websites can pay more attention to their landing pages. This results in their inability to attract and take action on new leads.
Landing page optimization should be considered a critical element in web design. A landing page is comparable to a pop-up shop on trade fairs where potential customers can take a look and try your products or services. The catch is that you need to convince them to look and try. It is specifically made to boost an existing marketing campaign for you to achieve the marketing goals.
If you are having problems with increasing your leads and converting leads, these landing page optimization tips might be the solutions that you are looking for:
1. Mind the design
A poorly designed landing page does not spark confidence and will never attract prospects. Generally, you need to focus your attention on making the design attractive while still being relevant, clear, and understandable. You need an impactful design that can be achieved by having a harmonious color theme, symmetrical elements, and easy-to-read texts.
2. Improve your Calls to Action
CTAs are essential in triggering an action that you wish the customers to do. Some of the common actions are subscribing to email newsletters, signing up for a registration form, reserving a service, or buying a product. Take note, though, that you can only make them do these things, and more, if you have an effective CTA. One thing you can do is highlight the CTA. You may use colors or use a bold font. You have to also incorporate the use of imperative, like “Sign Up” and the presence of an argument “it’s free!”. Adding these two elements makes for a personal approach that sounds more encouraging compared to a traditional “Registration” button.
3. Optimize the content length
There’s no correct length for a content length. What is important is that you know when to make it longer or shorter. A short copy will be effective with offers that are intended to make the viewer buy on an impulse. The reason is that it reduces the time spent by the reader to ponder on the offer, hence making a purchase right away. A longer copy is specifically made for expensive or complex products. The viewer tends to contemplate first so you have to explain or provide proof to make your offer more compelling.
4. Have a minimum number of form fields
In a study by Baymard Institute, a complicated checkout process is one of the reasons why customers abandon carts by up to 28%. This applies to any process where you ask visitors to fill out forms, like in landing pages. Longer forms will only create more friction, thereby pushing them away. When creating a form, ask yourself first if such information is really necessary? If not, then you can probably ask for such information later on. Ideally, you can just ask for minimum information, like an email address where you can send the current offers or a phone number where you can do a callback.
5. Improve the page load time
As you already know, customers will abandon any page that loads very slowly. According to studies, pages that take more than three seconds to load are abandoned by up to 40 percent. This number goes higher as load times increases. You need to include in your landing page design a plan to optimize image sizes, have a reliable and faster hosting server and troubleshoot any web page problems. Doing these things will allow you to find solutions that will help make your page load faster.
6. Have a relevant and clear content
One of the most essential elements in landing page optimization is the content. It should be able to give what the customers want or need so you have to provide enough information and craft content that is in line with their needs. You also have to ensure that you sound reliable and use words that prospects use or search for. The content must make them think that they have found exactly what they need on your page.
7. Establish credibility and trustworthiness
Customers are very particular about how legitimate businesses are. Any social proof, like partner logos, customer quotes, or customer logos, should be added to the landing page. You may also provide contact numbers or have a VeriSign badge. Every time that you ask for personal information, assure the customer that you will keep their data protected.
8. Keep it simple
Avoid having fancy themes that look loud and distracting. A customer has to have laser-focused attention towards your landing page content for you to achieve your goals. Instead of having too many elements on the page, choose to have a simple template that has only the essential ones. Make sure it includes the landing page name, eye-catching imagery, an appropriate domain name, active links and CTAs, and a Meta description. You may publish your landing page when you have all of these elements.
9. Have a clear and concise headline
One way to grab attention is having a catchy headline on your landing pages. The customers should get the gist of your content right after reading the headline. It is vital that you capture their attention right away because it will help make them interested in what you have to offer them.
10. Use contrasting colors
Study the color theory if you want to have a more effective landing page design. It is basically about the different approaches that you can use to communicate with the audience using colors. Meaningful and attractive color contrasts help maximize traffic because it improves readability. The color associations are also proven to be effective in persuading people because of its effect on psychology.
11. Use testimonials
You can’t expect everyone to be easily convinced with your landing pages. There will always be undecided individuals who will need some pushing to do what you want them to do. Testimonials from past customers can be used to stop their hesitancy. These are proofs of your credibility and the authenticity of your products and services.
12. Employ scarcity strategies
Sometimes, all you need is to initiate a sense of urgency to motivate the customers into taking action. Make them want to purchase immediately by letting them aware that such an offer is limited. You can add a counter that shows how many slots are left or how many stocks are available. These limitations will surely make them scramble towards your desired purposes.
By now you should be fully aware that you need to learn how to convert visitors into customers if you want to achieve optimal business results. Doing these landing page optimization tips are necessary if you want to increase conversions, generate a lot of leads, and keep your prospects engaged.
Take away...
Building an incredible brand does not stop at creating an amazing website. You also have to make sure that your hard work will translate into sales. Landing page optimization can be an effective method of helping you achieve such goal. Improving your landing pages is a good strategy because it leads the customers to discover a specific product or service. It is some kind of encouragement for them to take action on an incredible offer from you. Of course, you also have to take it as an opportunity to build your customer base while creating conversions.
Look at your landing page as your company and the customer’s first date in the marketing relationship. The purpose of getting a date---or clicking on a landing page, is to make them ready for you and encourage them to try your brand You have to make sure that you make a good first impression or it will be over sooner than you think. Just like on a real first date, you do not open up about your entire life story right away. You need to establish a level of trust before asking for any personal information.
Forget about misconceptions that landing pages are difficult to create and maintain. It simply isn’t true as building an effective landing page is all about knowing what the customers want and incorporating that information into your landing page design. By sending them to a page where they can take advantage of something they specifically are interested in, you increase your chances of capturing their attention and hold it enough to see your brand’s worth.
At the end of the day, you need to fully understand your customers to have an effective landing page design that converts. A relevant landing page that is relevant becomes more memorable. It will then be easier for customers to sign up for your offers and you will be much happier with higher conversion rates.
Do you have more tips about landing page optimization that we failed to mention? Share them in the comments below!
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