The main goal of a landing page is to capture leads and turn visitors into customers. Therefore, there’s no surprise that the vast majority of marketing campaigns are aimed to lead people to the landing page where they are supposed to make the desired action.
Businesses spend thousands to design impressive, well-performing landing pages and to drive traffic to them, hoping to get leads and conversions. But how many businesses do it right?
Given that landing pages are made to generate sales, their performance directly affects the success of your business, and landing page optimization often helps businesses significantly increase their conversion rates. Optimization can also help you decrease customer acquisition costs, obtain more customers, and maximize the value of your ads.
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To boost your conversions, you should understand the features of different sources of traffic and know some basic factors that affect your conversion rates. Now let’s get into some details on how to optimize your landing pages for better results.
What Landing Page Optimization Is
Landing page optimization is a complex process that includes optimization of each element of your landing page. The ultimate goal of landing page optimization is to increase conversions. Therefore, you shouldn’t simply redesign your landing page in different ways, waiting until some of the approaches turns out to be effective.
Every adjustment that you make must be based on the analysis of data. You need to perfectly understand the current state of your conversions and have a clear goal.
The good news is that you can start to collect some information even before your landing page goes live. For example, a great approach is to create surveys for your potential audience, studying their needs, preferences, and expectations. This way, you will understand your audience better, being able to come up with a more effective landing page. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t expect that your landing page will show great results immediately. When your page goes live, you need to analyze it and monitor it non-stop, tracking conversion rates, and improving it all the time.
Why Do You Have Problems With Conversions?
There are many reasons why your landing page may not perform well. However, the key reason is that marketers often don’t understand the needs of their prospects. Simply put, your conversion rates depend on how well you can predict your visitors’ needs, expectations, and desires. There are also other common reasons, such as poorly written headers, an inconvenient design, and discrepancies between your landing page content and ad content.
Sometimes, a landing page might have calls to action that are not recognizable enough. Quite often, landing pages also have too many elements that distract visitors from the main purpose of the page. We will consider some of these reasons in more detail later. One of the most important parts of the optimization process is preparation. You can optimize your landing page in different ways, but the most important thing is to determine the main problem and solve it.
What Are Good Conversion Rates?
To improve your conversions, you should have a plan and a clear understanding of the goal you’re aiming to achieve. According to statistics, the most successful landing pages demonstrate conversion rates of about 27%. However, most pages from various industries have conversion rates of 4-6%. When working with landing pages, improvement and success are closely interrelated. If you realize that your conversion rates don’t change much with time, the chances are that your landing page needs improvement. In this case, you either don’t collect the necessary data or don’t analyze it properly.
You should be able to see a correlation between your conversion rates and web traffic. When your traffic grows, you should get more conversions. However, it’s not always the case. Sometimes, site owners get a lot of good traffic from Google search but their conversions don’t grow. In this case, there is a negative correlation between traffic and conversions. It means that there is something wrong with the landing page, product, or offers. Here are the most common problems that prevent conversion growth.
- Offers. Perhaps, you’re using the wrong “hook” and it doesn’t resonate with your audience.
- Landing page. The framework, design, imagery, or other aspects of your landing page make it unattractive for visitors.
- Product. Your product isn’t what your target audience is looking for.
As soon as you figure out what exactly the problem is, you can start to optimize your landing page.
It’s More Than Just Conversions
An important thing about landing page optimization is that you shouldn’t focus on conversion rates only. The main goal is not to generate conversions themselves but to get more sales. You need to get more orders or greater revenue from each purchase. After all, that’s what you need conversions for. Therefore, it’s important to know when changes to your landing page or testing can actually cause damage to your marketing campaign. For example, it might happen when your website is still under construction or when your web host plans an outage. If the number of people accessing your website is small, you won’t be able to collect the right information.
We also recommend that you don’t start to work with your data if you’ve just launched your website and it just starts to get its first traffic. For example, you may get ten conversions a day and it might seem like a good result. However, we suggest that you wait until your site starts to get more traffic to evaluate it properly. Landing page optimization to a large extent depends on statistical data and probability. You won’t be able to make an informed decision regarding optimization if you don’t have enough data.
Keep in mind that sometimes, low conversion rates might be caused not by an ineffective landing page but by the lack of traffic. However, in this case, you should also keep in mind that your traffic can fluctuate depending on the season or holidays. When people want to buy gifts, many companies get increased traffic. You should be able to predict such fluctuations. If you expect a surge in traffic, it’s certainly not the best moment to change your landing page or to try some new methods of marketing.
Identify Potential Problems
Many marketers who want to optimize their landing pages simply start to change everything, which is not the best solution. We recommend that you determine the problem first, and then focus your efforts on it. You should know what exactly you should change to improve your results. For example, you can analyze the visitors’ activity on your website using a heat map. This way, you’ll see where people click and what elements they focus on. It may turn out that your visitors mostly focus on some unimportant elements, such as stock images. If you have more than one CTA on your page, you can see which one of them demonstrates the highest activity so that you can put the most important element there.
Visual data reports are very useful when it comes to landing page optimization. You can use heat maps, overlay reports, confetti maps, list reports, and scroll maps to get actionable insights into your visitors’ behavior. To understand what areas should be improved, you must see which sections of your landing page grab attention and which sections are ineffective. For example, you might notice that your visitors simply scroll down through some sections. These sections might contain irrelevant information. Different tools enable you to analyze your visitors’ behavior in different ways. For example, overlay reports can show you click percentages of elements, while confetti reports can show individual clicks.
Know Your Traffic Sources
First of all, you should understand where your traffic comes from. Usually, online marketers have a few marketing campaigns aimed at different channels and different segments of the audience. For example, you can have marketing campaigns intended for LinkedIn, Google Adwords, Email, Facebook, Reddit, etc.
The main thing is to know what sources are most popular among your target audience. You should know what sources bring you unique prospects and what your landing page should look like so that you can have a consistent message delivered through different channels.
If you’re selling some products and promote them using paid ads and social media, you should design a landing page that will reflect your visitors’ search intent. You can provide some specific details about your products that make them different from the products sold by your competitors.
When selling clothes, your landing page may include images that will help people understand how they will look in these clothes. You can also add an element of social proof by including reviews from influencers. The main thing is to provide a good landing page experience for all of your prospects, no matter where they come from.
Tips for Effective Landing Page Optimization
1. Make It Simple
To make your landing page more effective, you might want to get rid of the clutter that distracts your visitors from important elements. The main element of your landing page is a call to action, and you must make sure that your visitors will focus on it. In most cases, landing pages don’t need to have too many elements. Just make sure that your landing page contains your logo, some information about your offer that doesn’t take too much time to read, and a call to action. If your landing page is long, it’s best to use multiple CTA’s throughout the page. For instance, you can divide your landing page into three parts and add CTA blocks in-between.
2. Keep the Most Important Information at the Top
Imagine a line that your visitors should cross when scrolling your landing page to learn more. In traditional newspapers, editors placed the most important information “above the fold” to make sure that people will read headlines and crucial details when buying a newspaper. Of course, your landing page doesn’t have a fold but you should follow the same principle, making sure that your visitors don’t need to scroll down the page to see important elements. The key features of your product or service must be visible “above the fold”, to grab users’ attention immediately.
3. Use Scarcity Tactics
You might have noticed that phrases like “limited offer” or “limited time” are extremely popular in marketing. They are so popular for a good reason: this way, marketers can use FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) to encourage potential customers to make a purchase. Scarcity tactics motivate your visitors to make a purchase quickly because otherwise, they may not be able to buy the product. Include limited-time offerings or discounts on your landing page. You can also add a countdown timer to show your visitors how much (or how little) time they have to buy your product at a discounted price.
4. Use Contrasting Colors
Contrasting colors help grab attention and make your landing page more effective. If you use contrasting colors for your CTA, your visitors will be more likely to focus on it. Besides, contrasting colors can help you make all the elements on your landing page clear and easy to notice. We also recommend that you use negative space to make your CTA stand out.
5. Include Contact Information
You can help your visitors contact you in many different ways. For example, you can simply add your email and phone number. You can also include a contact form or a link to your help center. Most people know that if they contact a help center, they can get any information about products or payments. If you include contact forms, you can also use your visitor’s information in other marketing campaigns.
6. Use Testimonials
Social proof is a powerful tool that is often overlooked by marketers. Testimonials allow you to demonstrate that people actually use your products and are happy with them. We recommend that you use your customers’ full names and headshots. The best approach is to include video testimonials. Just make sure to offer your customers something in return so that they can feel motivated to record them.
Wrapping Up
If you don’t optimize your landing pages, you likely lose a lot of revenue. A landing page has a very specific purpose, which is converting your leads into customers. If you analyze your visitors’ behavior and optimize your landing page according to their preferences and needs, you will be able to increase your traffic and conversion rates. The main thing is to understand why your landing page doesn’t perform as well as you want and to make adjustments that actually make sense.
