With summer so close I can taste it, I spent the day thinking about vacation destinations. The thought of a plane landing in a tropical oasis filled my heart with happiness and excitement. So I did what everyone else does, I began searching for my dream vacation. During my experience, I realized a common problem with many sites. The problem: Their landing pages sucked. Some took too long to load, some contained far too much information and some left me endlessly searching for the information I wanted. In today’s world, it doesn’t matter how pretty your page is if no one lands there and is not instantly excited.
It is the best designed and well thought out landing page that increases conversion for your PPC or email marketing campaigns. Why send visitors on an exploration mission to find exactly what they are looking for when you can just as easily put them on a direct path? A great landing page automatically gives you the opportunity to grab your target audience with focused information they are looking for.
Sounds easy; but more-than-likely, you are reading this because you know that the creation of an effective landing page isn’t the same as designing a fantastic website or an amazing newsletter. According to a report from Econsultancy, only 22% of brands are satisfied with their landing page conversion rates. To help you better understand what you are doing wrong, we have a few tips to gets you back on the track for success.
Know the goal of your landing page
The best way to approach this is to look at all the work you put into designing your site, creating marketing campaigns and providing outstanding customer service. It was all done through setting specific goals. Without a clear goal, you will continue to struggle with conversions.
Know your expectations
Once you have a specific set of goals, you need to set up concrete expectations for those goals. Otherwise, you will not have a way to measure success. Our best advice is to incorporate a combination of hard evidence and wishful thinking. You need to give things time and also perform A/B testing to measure true performance. It often helps to have an actual number to compare your results with such as the total number of conversions, or the number of visitors who make it past your landing page.
A clear CTA
Every landing page needs a clear and concise call to action. You can’t assume that your visitors are going to reach the conclusion you want without specifically asking them to follow through with a particular action.
Don’t confuse your visitors
Today’s Internet savvy consumers already know what a landing page is for. Do not confuse them by trying to sell them with sale’s copy. This is the time to validate your product through social proof.
Reduce clutter
The landing page is not where you place every single detail about your product. The landing page should immediately persuade visitors with the most important and critical information. This invites them to learn more. It is much better to keep landing page content to a minimum and further push visitors to investigate more.
Speed things up
A slow loading landing page is equivalent to the kiss of death. According to KISSmetrics, 67 percent of website visitors will abandon a page if it takes longer than 6-10 seconds to load. Furthermore, for each one-second delay in page response, there is a seven percent reduction in conversions. To get the conversions your landing pages have to be fast and responsive.
Capture a higher percentage of converting ‘long tail' traffic
Stop being distracted by the high volume head and middle keyword terms. This traps you into ignoring the basics such as attention to the crucial keywords pertaining to the long tail. Remember that long tail traffic converts to better head term traffic.
To learn more about converting long tail traffic and other enhancements to your product pages check out our Product Page Optimization White Paper.
Ultimately, successful landing pages
- Offer relevant, useful, and original content,
- Provide a clear CTA
- Foster trustworthiness and validate products
- Load quickly and are easy to navigate
- Invite visitors to spend time on your site (if the landing page loads quickly visitors won’t give up and leave).
Whenever someone is searching for a destination, you want to be there to help them find it. You don’t want to sit back and make them do all the work. If you have something someone wants lead them to you and satisfy their needs. If you are successful and the visitor is happy both parties benefit and enjoy the benefits!
Contact us today to let us give you the destination you’ve been searching for.