As a digital marketer, you’ll understand the satisfaction that comes with tweaking and optimizing your landing pages and then seeing the best results come from this. After all, it’s your job and your purpose, to find out what works and what does, and to help to ensure your landing pages are as successful as possible.
Right off the bat, it’s important to note that there’s no hard-and-fast rule to boosting your landing page conversion rates, and what works for one business, may not necessarily work for yours, and vice versa, so it’s vital that you keep an open mind and are ready to try new things.
That being said, there are plenty of tried-and-tested approaches you can take to help you boost those figures and help ensure your business is becoming increasingly popular. In today’s definitive guide, we’re going to detail everything you need to know.
In this article
Create for Your Customer
The first, and perhaps most important, point you’re going to want to consider is that every landing page you create, no matter who your audience or target market is, needs to be personalised, enhanced, and geared towards these people. The people who are coming to your landing pages need to feel as though the content is relevant. Otherwise, they’re not going to connect with it, and they’re not going to convert.
“Take a moment to think about the different people who you’re sending to your landing pages, let’s take an example of running trainers. You may have a very diverse target market and plenty of different landing pages. Still, if you’re using one page to try and attract the attention of everyone, this simply isn’t going to work” explains Ben Harper, a marketing writer at Writinity and Researchpapersuk.
“On the other hand, if you take a demographic such as age, it’s obvious when you think about it that you’d market to an 18-year-old girl who’s just starting a running hobby than you would a 60-year-old man who’s been running for several years. While both could be within your target market, you’d present your pages in different ways.”
Within this point, you’ll need to think about things like what images and media you’re using, what language you’re writing your copy in, and even what your landing page looks like in terms of simplicity, functionality, and aesthetics.
There are plenty of ways you can approach this, but the most important thing to remember is that you’re creating your landing pages to give your customers and target markets the most connected and most streamlined experience you possibly can. The landing pages are for them.
You need to make sure you’re understanding your customer, and you know your ideal customer model. Create buyer personas to understand the wants and needs of your customer, and then create pages to fulfil these personas.
Be Emotional with Your Content
We live in an age where emotion is the best way to sell and connect with your audience. If someone doesn’t feel emotionally connected to a product or service, they’re simply not going to be interested.
Take influencer and vlogger David Dobrik. In his YouTube videos, he has a kind-of running sitcom that follows him and his friends as they live their lives and go about doing crazy things. However, over the years, his followers have learned about who is who and have developed emotional connections towards these ‘characters’.
When something happens, such as a couple getting together or breaking up, the audience feels this and are heavily involved, even though neither of the two parties actually know each other. Now when Dobrik wants to sell something, whether that’s tickets to his tour or a partnered brand deal, the connection is there where the viewers are so emotionally invested, they want to use what he’s saying.
When it comes to your landing pages, you need to do the same. Use images, languages, and an overall customised approach that speaks to your potential buyer connects with them on an emotional level and makes them want to proceed with your conversion process.
Include Information Near a Well-Positioned CTA
Now, think about where you have your CTA on your landing page, and see what kind of information you have surrounding it. There are two things you’re going to want to consider here.
Firstly, where is your CTA? If your CTA ‘Add to Basket’ kind-of button is not easily accessible and one of the first things you see when you enter your landing page, this needs to change right now. For some people, they know they want to buy your product, and they’re ready to go, so you need to make sure the button is a highlight feature of the page so they can just click and go.
Already, if you don’t already do this, you could see a huge potential spike in your conversion rates, just from this point alone.
However, the second part of this point is thinking about what kind of information is surrounding your CTA button and how you’re supporting it. If your CTA is outlying and has no information surrounding it, this simply doesn’t work; you need to drive home the reasons for people to click on that button and to convert.
The best way to do this is to simply bullet point features of the product that are going to back up and confirm the reasons for people to want to click the link. If you have a specific product, highlighting the key features in an easy enough way that can be skim read is ideal.
You don’t want to be too informative in the sense that you’re bombarding the reader with information that makes them feel overwhelmed, but just enough that they skim the text, like what they see, and then have the button right there, and have the ability to click it and convert ASAP.
Experiment with Emotional Commitment Language
What does your ‘add to basket’ CTA button say? What’s the text you’ve chosen to use to start your customers on their conversion journey because when you start to think about it, it’s so important that you get this bit right.
There are plenty of approaches and studies out there that have looked into this point, but we can simplify it all really easy right now. When someone clicks on your add to basket button, they are saying ‘Okay, I have no problem with making this purchase, and I’m ready to go’, so you need to start using the right language on your CTAs that encourages this way of thinking.
For example, one of the more increasingly popular phrases being used on landing pages around the world is ‘Continue’. Rather than being blunt and maybe even slightly aggressive with something like ‘Buy’ or ‘Buy Now’, ‘Continue’ works along the lines of being encouraging.
Hand in hand with the points we’ve made above, if someone comes to your landing pages, skim reads the key selling points and goes to themselves ‘Okay, this looks good, and this is what I want. How do I make a purchase’, and then they see a button that says ‘Continue’, they’re going to want to continue on this journey.
Nurture Leads, Not Just Immediate Sales
One of the most common drawbacks digital marketers face when working with landing pages is the fact they pour all their attention into the areas of their target markets where the people in there are ready to make a sale right here, right now.
However, the truth is that you might get a ton of traffic come to your landing pages, but many people are simply browsing, or they’re not quite ready to make a purchase just yet and are doing their research or simply seeing what’s out there.
With that in mind, if you’re pouring all your resources into immediate sales and not thinking about nurturing the leads and people who may be interested in making a sale and converting later, you’re missing out on a huge amount of sales potential.
By nurturing leads, we mean finding creative ways to get your target markets email addresses, or if you’re linking people via emails anyway, then sending follow-up emails to reignite the interest they may have had for your product.
Of course, you don’t want to spam your customers, nor do you want to seem too pushy, but with just the right level of nurturing, whether you’re emailing more information, educating people about your product or service, or simply guiding them through the process, you can drastically increase your conversion rate.
Not convinced? MarketSherpa did a study on this that showcased that businesses can receive a huge boost in sales as high as 45%, so this is definitely not a point you’re going to want to miss out on.
Consider Implementing Live Chat Functionality
Go onto plenty of modern-day landing pages over the last year, and you’ll see a huge increase in the number of websites who are using live chat features. While you may find them annoying to a degree, I know I do when I click onto a website, and I’m bombarded with little notifications in the corner of the page, the statistics don’t lie, and these features work.
“Thanks to the capabilities of AI, live chat services can now be run on websites 24-hours a day, seven days a week, and with the ability to answer basic questions and help potential customers learn about the products their buying and the service they’re receiving, they are a fantastic way to boost your conversation rates” shares Nina Francis, a tech blogger at Draftbeyond and LastMinuteWriting.
Of course, we could go on all day about the nature and benefits that chatbots can bring into your life and your landing pages, especially when you start to consider how easily customisable they are and how they can bring about so many more sales, but this is common knowledge, and there’s plenty online I’m not going to repeat here.
However, if you’re looking to get started, simply look into some live chat service providers to see what they offer and whether they suit your budget, and then try them out for yourself. If you see an increase in conversions, you’ll know this is a feature you’ll want to invest in. Trust me; it’s worth it.
Test, Test, and Test Again
The final point you’ll need to remember is like we said in the introduction, every business is different and will need a different approach. You’ll need to be open to experimentation to see what works for you, and you won’t want to simply try one approach and stick with it because it’s getting some okay results; there are always things you can do to be better.
That being said, instead of randomly changing factors and see if it works and increases your conversion rate, take a more strategic approach by testing certain aspects individually and seeing which performs best. The easiest way to do this is via A/B testing.
For this, you could try different layouts, different language, different colour schemes and images, and then post both pages online, advert and market them equally to the same target markets, perhaps by sending out emails to two groups of people, and then see, statistically, which one is more successful.
Everything you want to change or implement onto your landing pages; you need to make sure you’re testing them over and over again to make sure they’re the best they can be. Even when you’ve tested something and seen what works best, several months down the line, test it again to see if it has the same effect.
Conclusion
Trends and customer demands change all the time, and while this can be seen as a bit of a hassle, it’s just how it is, and if you want to be successful, it’s something you’re going to have to start implementing into your practices.
As you can see, there are plenty of things you can do when it comes to boosting the conversion rates of your landing pages, but you’ll need to be proactive in finding out what works for you. Be creative, get productive, and you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.
To give you the quick breakdown:
- Create your pages for your customers
- Use effective CTAs with supporting information
- Experiment with emotional language
- Nurture your leads more effectively
- Use live chat features and chatbots
- Test everything over and over again
