October 22, 2014
5 Quick & Easy Tips To Improve Your Landing Pages
The world around is full of marketing messages competing for attention. There’s an estimate that consumers are exposed to an average of 5,000 of these messages per day. The Internet can be a competitive space when marketing your product or service. If you’ve got something to sell or to say, you want to stand out and attract visitors, but getting someone to visit to your site is only half of the battle. With mere seconds on your side before a visitor to your website decides to stay or move on, you’ve got to employ as many smart tactics as you can to encourage them to stay. Having high quality, optimized, and focused landing pages can help you improve conversions, especially if you are running PPC campaigns.
What’s a Landing Page?
A landing page is any web destination someone arrives at from a link, but in marketing speak, a landing page is a web page that only directs to a call to action—typically an email sign-up form, a product purchase or a phone call. Landing pages are stand-alone pages specifically created for direct conversion: Do you want them to sign up for more information? Subscribe to your email newsletter? Purchase a product from your ecommerce store? Or pick up the phone and call you?
The best landing pages have a lot of thought put into them in order to capture every available opportunity to turn a visitor into a customer—graphics, videos, style, colors, clearly presented information, with a focus on user experience. For the purposes of this post, we’ll assume you’ve created a great offer for your customer and the important info is already there. You just want to make sure you are presenting the offer the best you can. Whatever action you’d like your visitor to take, you can run through this checklist to see if you’re doing these things, or whether you can optimize your landing page for better results. Here are just a few quick and easy tips for improving landing pages:
1. Use Energized Verbs in Your Headers
Use the opportunity for big, bold headers to inspire action in your visitors. Use verbs and verb phrases that feel high-energy, inviting and positive. For example, “Learn all about how to …” or “Download a free copy now!” Don’t waste valuable real estate on passive language. You want them to feel energized to buy, so use phrases that are energetic. An excellent resource for writing engaging, magnetic and compelling ad copy for your landing pages is Ca$hvertising by Drew Eric Whitman.
2. Keep Your Contact/Lead Form Short & Sweet
Only ask for the information you really need for a quality lead or sale, and don’t worry about the details. Try not to have more than 3 fields in a contact form. If someone is on the fence about signing up, a long and intrusive form may be enough to push him or her away. Just looking at a long form with several fields can make a potential customer’s stomach drop. Suddenly what you have to offer feels like a burden. Only ask for the basic contact information you need to follow up, which is often just a name and email address. You can gather the rest of the information later, should they show an interest in pursuing your product.
3. Use Bullet Points
- Bullet points easily and quickly get the most important information across to convince someone to pursue your offer!
- Data suggests that when we read online, we’re scanning the page, rather than actually reading all of the text that’s there. Customers look for the information they need to make a purchase decision or move on. Make sure your content here is concise yet compelling.
- Boil down your most persuasive selling points into 3-4 bullet points.
- Use the first and last bullet points for your strongest sales messages. Most people will only recall those two.
4. Place Important Content & Lead Form Above the Fold
By all means, do not make your visitor scroll down the page to figure out how to buy what you are selling! Place your contact form and pertinent product information above the fold, which is the screen space that is immediately accessible without having to scroll down. Everything a customer needs to know about what you are offering, its benefits and how to redeem that offer should be crystal clear when they arrive on the page—direct their eyes to the goal (lead form, phone number). Potential customers should not be searching; everything should be right there for them, ready for them to complete your conversion goal.
5. Remove Navigation Menus and Links
That’s right, you don’t want a menu bar or navigation links to anything other than your conversion goal. When you direct customers to a landing page, you want them to do one thing and one thing only: Convert (buy your product, fill out your form, or call you). You don’t want to provide links back to your main site because you want them to be hooked right then and there, and they can find their way back to your homepage on their own. You want no distraction from your main goal: convert the visitor into a lead or a customer. Once you direct someone to your landing page, this is where you present them with an offer they can’t refuse.
