How to Design a Landing Page That Drives Conversion

How to Design a Landing Page that Drives Conversions

Given the complexity of multi-channel sales management, the job of a modern website has turned more crucial and sensitive. Visitors land on your site through a variety of online channels; pay-per-click (PPC), organic search, backlinks, promoted content, social media, email offers and print advertisements. Once they land, they have to satisfy the objective of following up a promotion, or purchasing a particular product. If the site doesn’t provide what they’re looking for, visitors bounce.

Landing pages are understood to be a key player in modern digital marketing. They provide specific and to the point information about a particular offer, program or service. Conceptually, landing pages are meant to avoid higher bounce rate by engaging people in a transaction without any distraction.

Now, have a look at the following statistics (Source: MarketingSherpa)

  • 48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign.
  • 48% of landing pages contain multiple offers.
  • Marketers will focus more on conversion optimization than attracting more traffic their landing pages, this year.
  • Using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%.
  • Roughly 75% of businesses have problem finding suitable expertise for optimizing their landing page copy.
  • Of B2B companies that use landing pages, 62% have six or fewer total landing pages.

Despite popularity and widespread usage, majority of landing pages fail to meet the fundamental objectives. There are multiple reasons behind that. In the following, we’ll identify those and put forward some professional suggestions to help you improve your LP conversion rate.

Also Check: 25 Interesting Digital Marketing Stats from 2014-15

Why Landing Pages Fail?

Landing pages are meant to serve a purpose and you don’t have any defined objective. Ideally, a landing page is a standalone web page (separate from website) designed to get visitors to take one specific action.

  • Subscribe to newsletter/blog/email list
  • Make a purchase
  • Register for a webinar
  • Submit data & download something
  • Click through to another page

Each objective has separate mechanism and SOP to achieve and when there are no specific and visible objectives, result is failure.

1. They Are Overstuffed:

Going by the report of MarketingSherpa, 48% of landing pages have multiple offers, which means; almost half of them aren’t meant to give specific and non-distracting information. As a result, visitors don’t find any charm in your offers and leave the page without any action.

Solution: We can see in Marketing Keep your page free of excessive information, too many pictures and clutter. Avoid change drop-offs by making it simple to see why your visitor is on your page and what they have to do.

2. They Require Too Much Data:

People feel insecure while providing their private information to companies. Therefore, if a particular offer is asking too much or too sensitive information (credit cards, email, address, phone numbers), they may leave the offer.

Solution: Try to minimize the information collection as much as possible to decrease rejection.  If you feel it is essential to offer extra information, move those additional fields to a form on a second page.  The effect is that by the time a visitor clicks through to this second page, they’ve effectively built some energy in the conversion process and are more averse to bail out. Or if you’re seeking some sensitive information, give a separate note of keeping it secure to build trust.

3. They Don’t Have Hot Cakes:

Yes, if your landing pages don’t contain what’s selling like hot cakes; don’t expect to see better conversion rate. By hot cakes we mean, those practices that are working well or trending in the tech world or more specifically, in your industry.

Solution: Do a little market research and see what’s working best in your industry. Design a checklist of features, content, design etc. that you find more trendy or effective. Adjust things as per your goals and brand; and see the result.

4. They Are Not Responsive:

Have you seen the impact of Google’s mobile-friendly update on your business website? If not, then better do now. Google is working hard to provide mobile search users (80%) the most convenient search experience. The reason is simple; an unfriendly page will not show up properly on a mobile device and force people to leave. Therefore, if your landing page is not mobile friendly, it might fail to receive good response from smartphone users (over 2 bn worldwide by 2016).

Solution: Using this tool, check out if your website/landing page is mobile-friendly or not? If it’s not, work on mobile-friendliness to give a better navigation experience to your prospects. We know from our experience at Makesbridge that it works.

5. They Lack Visuals:

We all know that images tell a thousand words. This is especially true for online platforms. If your landing pages don’t have a product or related image, endorsing/explaining/testifying the story; it becomes a bit weak case. In addition, lacking visuals also makes the page boring, aesthetically speaking.

Solution: Remember, images are most liked and shared thing on social media and have also proved out to be extremely effective in your lead-generating campaigns. We’ve seen in the statistic section that “videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%.” This applies to all visuals and graphics as they tell similar stories and present information in a better way.

6. They Lack Hot Spots:

Studies have endorsed that online customers and visitors just skim through webpages. Your landing pages fail, if you’ve written multiple paragraphs, added graphics but ignored hot spots or punch line.

Solution:  Remember, people are not interested in your advertised product/service; they’re more concerned about “what’s in it for them” or more precisely benefits of that particular thing. Use bullet points or blocks to highlight the most prominent feature and benefit for the customers and you’ll rock.

7. You Ignored A/B Testing:

According to Event360, President Barack Obama raised an additional $60 million, using A/B testing. Over 45% companies use A/B testing to ensure their campaigns go successful. You never know how effective it could be for your campaign.

Solution: Do what other 44% companies (successful one) are doing. Use some software or other testing mechanism to test your pages. If you are running some email marketing drips, divide your target audience against both versions of the page, throw your message and see which performed well. Next time, you’ll have a list of best practices for your email and online campaigns.

8. You Missed Important CTA:

Words matter a lot. I’m not saying that people ignore call to actions; instead, they either place it on the wrong area, use the wrong words, or don’t make it prominent enough. The result is obviously failure.

Solution: Make a visible, creative, and attractive call to action. Stuff like ‘Why Not Make Free Account’, ‘Click Here’, ‘Sign Up for Free’ or ‘Download Now’ should be visible and clearer.

9. You Don’t Understand Your Platform:

There are many marketing automation platforms that have a dedicated landing page tool. However, many of the popular marketing automation platforms do not offer free training or their users  just don’t work hard enough to understand them.The obvious result is ill-planned and non-professional landing page.

Solution: Sign up for the platform that provides you free platform training. If you don’t understand anything in landing page builder, ask their support teams. If you think that your email platform’s templates aren’t good for your brand, simply design your own html and upload into the system. This will ensure that your landing page looks professional and truly presents your brand. We’ve created a dedicated video on “How to Create a Landing Pages In Makesbridge” that helps people learn how to design their landing pages with our marketing automation platform.

Conclusion:

The importance of landing pages can’t be overstated; they’re part and parcel of modern marketing. It’s hoped that the above given suggestions help you design better, clearer and effective landing page that drives conversions. For any confusion, question or feedback; reach us out on our social profiles.


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Published by

Zeeshan Ahmad

Zeeshan Ahmad

Zeeshan Ahmad is senior content developer at Makesbridge. His primary areas of interests are content strategy, search and email marketing. He tweets at @zeeshanbh.