As a bright, young, marketing whizz, you know that having a winning PPC or email campaign that brings in the visitors by the bucket-load is no use unless you have a landing page that can convert those visitors into customers.
All that hard work performing keyword research, creating spectacular ads and fine tuning your bidding to perfection will all be for nothing. Why don’t you just grab your wallet, head to the nearest window and just throw it out. Because that’s what’s happening.
Wait! Don’t actually go and do that. I’m here to help you. We can pull through this together. There is a way we can turn your whole campaign around, simply by making some changes to your landing page.
Believe it or not, we all act pretty similarly. Because of this we are able to anticipate, to an extent, how the visitors to our landing page are going to act. From this we can make sure that the design and function is constructed in a way that gives us the best chance of transforming visitors into customers. Whether that’s directing them towards and then encouraging them to get in touch, or simply reading a great bit of content we’ve produced.
To make sure you’re getting the most out of your landing page, here are some tips and best practises that you should be considering when creating and improving your landing page.
Big call-to-actions
OK, they don’t necessarily have to be BIG. I’m not saying that you should just replace your page with a huge red button that says ‘BUY NOW’. What you absolutely need to make sure is that your CTA buttons are prominent. Let the visitors know where they can get your product.
You wouldn’t open a shop and then hide the till, so make sure you don’t do it online.
Did you notice that I said ‘buttons’? This is another thing that many people overlook. You don’t need to just have one button right at the bottom of your page. Include CTAs at multiple points throughout the page. If there are sections of the on-page content that are there to influence any action or could inspire the reader to make a decision, give them the opportunity to act on it by adding a way to contact you next to that content. They could have changed their minds by the time they reach the bottom of the page.
Even the colour of the CTA buttons is something to be considered. Different colours can be used to influence people in different ways.
Source: Kissmetrics
Think about the message you are conveying and the tone of voice of your brand. This may even be where you create a voice for your brand. You don’t want to scare people off with overly aggressive colours, but you also want your audience to notice your CTAs.
Whatever you decide to do, my advice would be to just make them noticeable, be placed in areas that are beneficial to your reader, as well as areas where decisions are likely to be made.
Create urgency
Adding urgency can give your product a sense of exclusivity, which makes it a lot more appealing. Offering a discount on products has proven to influence more sales, so you need to let your customers know how good of a deal they are getting.
You can see many prime examples of this during the spectacular yearly phenomenon we’ve come to embrace, Black Friday. Did you do any online shopping during Black Friday? If you did then you will have definitely seen hundreds of big banners on websites letting you know how long you’ve got to get a particular discount on your favourite product. It really does work to influence purchases.
Source: 2X eCommerce
Obviously this only applies if you have a discount to offer which, unfortunately, isn’t always possible. Don’t you worry, there is another way to create urgency. Add a sense of limited time to your campaign. For example, if you’re a hotel and are trying to get bookings for the Christmas holidays, make sure your audience knows that they will need book their room soon to make sure they can definitely get it for Christmas.
Sometimes you just need to give them a little nudge to get the ball rolling. If you’re struggling to figure out where to start, here’s some words that help create a sense of urgency. Hurry! Don’t miss out on your chance to read them today!
Consistent messaging
More than likely, your landing page is where you’re sending your PPC or email marketing traffic, so you need to make sure that your messaging is uniform throughout all stages. This consistency will ensure that you are constantly providing your audience with the content they are expecting, which will keep them interested in what you have to offer.
No one wants to click on an ad only to be taken to a completely irrelevant page. All this is going to result in is your visitors bouncing right off the site and getting what they need from one of the many other providers you are competing with. Don’t let that happen! And give them what they want.
This is also where keyword research can come into play. Like most AdWords campaigns, you need to make sure you have a good understanding of the keywords you are targeting and make sure you’re running the ads to match them.
This means that your ads need to be relevant to the keywords that are triggering them. In fact, a whole section of your quality score is based on ad relevance. To improve your ad relevance, it’s normally good practice to include keywords in your ad copy.
This is generally the same for your landing page copy. To maintain your messaging, it’s a good idea to use those keywords as a guide for how you write your content, including headings and subheadings. By doing this you can further improve your ad relevance, your landing page experience as well as increasing your conversion rates because you are guaranteeing that your audience is definitely meant to be there.
Spleliing n gramer;
On the topic of words, I think this needs to be included. Check your spelling and grammar! This is such a common oversight with a lot of businesses and I expect most don’t even think it’s that big of a deal. But it is. Roughly 42.5% of consumers have stated that poor spelling and grammar will damage their opinion of a brand.
Source: Disruptive Communications
If you have a potential customer right on the brink of making a purchase and then backing out because you spelt something wrong, you’d kick yourself for being so lazy. It is such an easy thing to check and will make a bigger difference than you think if you can get it right. Before you make any changes to any pages on your site, just make sure you get someone to check it before putting it live.
Offer a free trial (if you can)
I’ve found in the past that offering a free trial can do wonders for encouraging enquiries. A free trial doesn’t require as much commitment from the user, so they are much more willing to participate. Plus, everyone likes something free!
These are also brilliant for retrieving data from those users as well. As long as you make it a requirement to include their email to get the free trial, you can then remarket to those users, if for some reason they don’t sign up after their trial has expired.
Now, free trials aren’t necessarily the right move for all businesses, so you should really consider whether or not you should invest your time into it. But if it something you can, or currently are, offering then you need to make sure this is something you are prominently advertising. This is just another way to incentivise people and ultimately help users decide to interact with your product.
Testimonials
If you don’t already have testimonials, then get some quick! (Look at that great example of urgency). These things are a fantastic tool to immediately give your brand some credibility. They’re especially useful if you’re a relatively small brand and your visitors most likely haven’t heard about you before.
People are wary of brands, but they’re also very influenced by what their peers have to say about something. Word of mouth is one of the most powerful tools for helping someone become invested in your brand. No matter how well you can sell yourself, you are never going to be able to convince someone as well as a fellow customer. In fact, 90% of users say they are influenced by positive reviews.
We have previously ran heat mapping software on our landing pages and found that the area on and around testimonial sections are on fire!. People just want more and if you can give them that then you’re laughing. Especially when you know that all those nice people who have given you a review are helping you bring in the sales.
Above the fold
Many marketers and developers say that ‘above the fold is a myth’, which I think is a little too dismissive. Yes it isn’t as important as it was all those years ago and yes everybody does scroll down the page. But, it is still the first, and sometimes last, thing that a user sees when they’re on your page.
Because of this, the area above the fold is still a prime location to show important information about your company and provide your potential customers with a good first impression. So there should be a few things that I think you need to make sure your visitors can see as soon as they land on your fancy new landing page.
Source: Imagebox
Firstly, you need a prominent and relevant title that sums up the page and your product. Remember, it’s likely a large majority of your users will be visiting here from clicking an ad or email, so make sure you are providing them with the page they are expecting to see.
You also want to chuck in a few USPs in there. You don’t need to go into massive detail, just include a few key points about why your product is so good and why these potential customers need it. And as always, make them prominent. You want these to be the next thing they read as soon as they’ve finished being in awe of your spectacular title.
Source: Fortune Indonesia
You should also consider including a star rating or a small snippet of a very complimentary testimonial as well.
Then top this all off with a prominent call to action to catch any quick deciders. It is entirely possible that this information you provide will encourage users to immediately purchase your product within a matter of seconds. So make sure you have something there to catch that.
So now let’s think about what we’ve just done to this customer in the space of a couple of seconds of being on your landing page. They immediately know they’re in the right place because of that wonderful title. They have seen just how much better your product is compared to the other stuff they’ve been looking at. They have seen that this is all coming from a trusted source. And look, a button to buy this amazing product right here, right now. Sold! And all before they’ve scrolled anywhere.
One more thing to consider with this is the device that the landing page is going to be viewed on. Assuming that your website is going to be responsive, make sure that the above the fold content looks good on desktop, mobile and tablet. You don’t want to put a load of effort into making it look brilliant on desktop, only to lose out on sales because the majority of your traffic is coming from mobile, where the landing page doesn’t look anywhere near as good. Just keep that in mind.
Split testing
A huge mistake that is easily and quite often done, is not split testing your landing page. This is where you are going to gather your most important data to help you fine tune that page into a conversion producing machine. Don’t be lazy and just put it live and leave it!
Source: Neil Patel
Split testing is a brilliant way to figure out which elements of your pages are and aren’t working. If you’ve done any PPC before, you’ll know that testing multiple ads against each other is very productive for understanding what ad text works best for your target audience. Well, the same works for a landing page.
We have always done this with our landing pages and have always seen an increase in performance over the period of the running split test.
This is just a short test we ran on a landing page we created. This was our initial test that was running our landing page (top result) against the two pages they were using that were on their website. Our landing page was based on the points I’ve made in this article and you can see that it immediately increased conversion rates massively. (This kind of thing is also great to show to a client).
The same techniques don’t always work for everyone so split testing is where you find out what changes will make a worthwhile difference to you page. If you implement something new on you page, maybe something I’ve mentioned here, make sure you’re testing it against the current version of the page. Then you will be able to see which is definitely working and you will be left with a winning page.