Somewhere along the way, it seems that many marketers forgot the purpose of landing pages or misinterpreted how they’re supposed to be leveraged.
Just to clear up any confusion, landing pages are designed to convert visitors into customers. If your landing pages aren’t doing this, then you’re wasting your time and money.
Give These Conversion Tactics a Try
When you direct a customer to a landing page, you not only want to engage and inform them, but you also want to move them to action. Sometimes this happens naturally, but more often than not, it requires a concerted effort on your part. The following conversion tactics will be helpful in encouraging movement.
1. Use Video
Not only do you want to deliver content in the most intuitive manner possible, but you also want to engage landing page visitors for as long as you can. One way to satisfy both of these needs is to integrate video into your landing pages.
Video works best when included at the top of a page – such as in this example from Pearly Whites – and generally complements textual content quite well. If the video content is descriptive enough, you might even get away with just using a written transcript below the video and including a call-to-action.
2. Write Better Headlines
How is your headline-writing? According to research, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, while just 2 out of 10 will read the content beneath it. So if you aren’t being strategic with how you craft landing page titles, then you’re missing out on a chance to increase engagement in a significant manner.
There are lots of different rules of thumb you can follow when drafting headlines, but The Four U’s approach is as good as any. It says that headlines should be useful to the reader, provide readers with a sense of urgency, convey the uniqueness of the main benefit or idea, and do all of this in an ultra-specific way.
3. Rely on the Five-Second Rule
When you’re done designing a landing page and you’re tempted to hit the “publish” button, pause for a moment and use the Five-Second Rule. This rule states that you should be able to engage any visitor and draw them in within five seconds. If it takes any longer, their chances of bouncing skyrocket.
4. Stop Trying to Do Too Much
It’s astonishing the percentage of landing pages that try to do too much and end up overwhelming visitors. Remember, a landing page should have a very specific purpose. If you find yourself attempting to move people in multiple directions, then you need to reevaluate and simplify.
Simple landing pages always perform better than complicated ones. This page from Wistia is a good example. Notice how it’s clean and crisp and clearly communicates the main ideas without intimidating visitors. You need to find a way to do the same. It won’t look identical to the Wistia page, but it should utilize some of the same minimalistic principles.
What’s Your Conversion Rate Benchmark?
In order to get serious about your landing page conversion rate, you have to set some quantifiable objectives that allow you to measure progress and track how you’re doing in different areas. For perspective, average landing page conversion rates in major industries range from 2.6 percent to 6 percent, with top performing businesses sometimes achieving rates as high as 25 percent on particularly well-designed pages.
If your conversion rates are coming in below 2.6 percent, then there’s almost certainly something you could do to improve. Give thought to some of the conversion tactics discussed in this article and look for tangible ways to improve.