Optimising your landing pages’ conversion rates has a direct impact on the performance of your Facebook, AdWords, or any other type of campaigns that are linking to your pages. In other words, by taking certain steps to improve your landing pages’ efficiency, you are directly maximising your ROI. Below are some of our top tips for easy wins on your landing page conversion rates.
Your landing page’s message should be consistent with the ad that drove the user to it.
This might seem like an obvious point, but it’s incredibly important and it’s an easy mistake to make. If your potential customer clicks on an ad because (s)he found its messaging compelling, but then finds a different type of offer when reaching the landing page, you’ve lost them. Don’t think of your ads and landing pages as two separate pieces of your marketing activity. Rather, always keep the user’s journey in mind so that the experience is consistent across all touch-points.
Keep links on the page to a minimum.
When you are building your landing page, think of any link you add – other than your call to action – as a ‘leak’ for potential conversions. You may think it’s a good idea to add a link to your website so that users can find out more about you and your services, but a potential lead that clicks on a link is effectively leaving your landing page. The only element your potential lead should be compelled to click on is your Call to Action. Make sure you keep links to your website and social media accounts on the confirmation page so that users can check you out after submitting their details. Some links may need to be added to the page itself for compliance purposes, such as terms & conditions or your privacy policy. If you are required to include those, make sure you place them in the small text at the bottom of your page so they do not become a distraction for your audience.
Focus on benefits rather than features.
In other words, always think in terms of what your audience is going to get out of what you offer. For instance, let’s take a look the below landing page example by SalesForce. The messaging does not mention the specific functionalities of the CRM system. There are no mentions of lists management, dashboards, or anything like that. Rather, the landing page communicates what results the user could get by using Salesforce: “Increase revenues, deal sizes, productivity and forecast accuracy by x%”. The reality is that people respond to online advertising in a very direct and emotional way. The decision to leave details on a landing page is made within just a few seconds, and not by conducting an in-depth analysis of all the technical aspects of an offering.
Your Call To Action needs to stand out.
This is self-explanatory. Always make sure your button is located above the fold in the standard 1280×1024 Desktop screen format, and always test your landing page on your mobile to ensure the call to action is visible. Use contrasting colours between your button and the background it is placed on to ensure it is the first element to pop when giving the landing page a quick glance. A trick is to stand far from my screen to see what elements are most visible. On top of using colours, the Hyphen team occasionally uses a visual cue like an arrow that points in the direction of the button to help guide our users’ eyes directly towards the button.
Social Proof. Always.
Social proof is one of the six key principles of influence listed in Robert Cialdini’s classic psychology book “Influence”. This principle states that people will be more comfortable taking a particular action if they see other people have done so before. In our experience analysing and tracking adverts, we have found this principle to be particularly relevant. We consistently observe that advertising material containing social proof elements such as customer quotes, ratings, reviews, or number of users, awards won, partnerships or anything that says “hey, other people have tried these guys and loved it!” performs better than an identical ad without these elements. Social proof builds trust, and can have an important impact on whether or not your audience clicks on a button, submits details on a form, or takes any action you want them to take.
Have a look at the landing page below promoting Shopify, the popular e-commerce CMS platform. It clearly outlines 175k businesses worldwide trust Shopify, and major trusted publications like the WSJ, USA Today and Fast Company endorse it. Enough to gain instant credibility.
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Keep it concise and don’t give it all out on the landing page.
When is the last time you saw an ad and carefully took the time to read every word on it? Probably never. Your potential customer is exactly the same. The truth is your average user will skim read the page, absorb a few keywords to get the gist of your message, occasionally pay slightly closer attention, but mostly, the decision of whether or not to respond to your page’s call to action will be quick and emotional rather than rational. So keep this in mind when writing your page’s copy and preparing the layout. Make the text easy to read and absorb and avoid loading your page with all the awesome information you want to give out about what you are offering. Actually, your aim with your landing page will be – most of the time- just to stimulate your audience’s curiosity and encourage them to click on your CTA to find out more. Don’t give it all out on the landing page itself.
Taking our previous SalesForce example, notice how concise the message is. The headline gives you the key benefit of using the product at first glance, then we have 4 key appealing stats standing out. Oh you’re interested and would like to find out more about how you could get all these benefits? Head over to the form and leave your details then!
Provide the same amazing experience on mobile as desktop.
Yes, it’s 2016 and every marketer should know that. The reason I want to stress the fact that you absolutely can’t provide a sub-optimal experience on mobile is not only that mobile Google searches are overtaking desktop, but also that Facebook has recently officially become a mobile-first company, with mobile-only users now surpassing both desktop and desktop & mobile users. So if you are going to use Facebook and AdWords ads to push traffic to your landing pages, you really should think about the mobile experience first.
Test all your assumption with A/B tests.
It is really important to test any assumptions when thinking about what could help your page convert better. You may think that button would be clicked more often if was green, or that this image will be great to entice users to engage with your ad. But the truth is, you will never know the impact of the elements of your page until you test them by comparing the performance of 2 (or more) landing page variants. When comparing results, you must also ensure you have enough data to determine with statistical confidence whether a variant performs better than the other.