Landing pages are one of the best tools for marketing to multiple target markets through various inbound lead channels. Some of the most common channels used to bring traffic into a landing page include email marketing campaigns, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, traditional media (radio, print, or tv), display ads, or rich media ads.
14 Best Practices for High Converting Landing Pages
Build with Your Goals in Mind
Landing pages are often the highest converting pages on any website. If you decide to build a landing page it’s important to always keep the end goal in mind. Ask yourself, what do I want visitors to do on this landing page? How can I sell my products or services in the best manner possible?
Avoid Sending Campaign Traffic to Your Homepage
While your homepage can be a valuable way to earn search traffic, it’s not as effective at closing sales. When launching marketing campaigns your best bet of closing sales is to send traffic a landing page designed to convert. It also allows you to keep track of traffic and conversion, which is necessary to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign (including landing page). According to MarketingCharts, a lot of small businesses send their PPC traffic into their homepage, wasting an opportunity to properly close a sale and track the analytics.
Test, Test, Test
Every single landing page needs to be tested for at least a week or two before analyzing its effectiveness. Don’t assume your landing page isn’t working after 2 days of testing. Unless you have an immense amount of daily traffic you’ll need at least 7 to 14 days to get accurate results.
Avoid Overloading Your Page
Your landing page should be clean, simple, and concise. Avoid overloading your page with useless information, designs, or special effects.
One Call-to-Action on Each Landing Page
Each landing page should only have a single conversion action. In can collect contact information while providing a download (ebook, brochure, webinar, etc), offer a form to request information or an appointment, or allow customers to place an order.
Keep Forms Short
The longer the form the higher the drop off rate. No one wants to fill out a long-form, which is why keeping forms short allows you to maximize your conversion rates. You should only collect enough information to contact the prospect. You can then work with that to contact them and close the sale. Conversion Expert, Tim Ash, explains that shorter forms convert better.
Provide All of The Information Needed to Earn The Lead
Take into consideration what type of information prospects need to see and read regarding your product or services. Offer information about what they can expect, why your product or service stands out, and describe what you are selling. As long as they don’t need to go to other pages to get more information you will be able to increase your chances of earning that lead.
Reinforce Your Company’s Credibility
If you’re recognized by an organization, a major publication, or have partnered with a reputable company be sure to include that in your landing page. This will help reinforce your company’s credibility and help increase your chances of getting leads.
Make Sure Your Site Is Secure
Your website should be secure, which means you should be able to display any logos of security protocols your company is using to keep your website safe. For example, an SSL certification. Having an SSL certificate gives people confidence that their personal information will not be stolen or misused.
Make your Landing Page Responsive
Avoid losing mobile customers! Nearly half of consumers shop for products and services through their mobile devices. If your landing page is not responsive it means it will be difficult to read and navigate on mobile devices, ensuring that you lose any and all mobile customers who come to your page.
Include Relevant and Tasteful Images
Be sure that all of the images added to your landing pages are both relevant and tasteful. These images are meant to increase conversions, not confuse prospects.
Keep in Mind Your Landing Pages Quality Score
Google offers instructions on how a high-quality landing page should be structured. It’s important to keep those things in mind because Google will move your PPC ads down if your keywords are not relevant to your landing page or if your landing page has a low-quality score. It’s important to include keywords within your landing page by incorporating them into the text, never “stuffing” them under the background-colored text.
Continuously Test Your Page
We mentioned testing your landing page a few suggestions up, however, it’s important that you continuously test your landing page. By making small changes, such as form length, the text on a submission button, form placement, etc, you can test the effectiveness of your landing page and fine-tune it until you are able to get the maximum ROI. According to MarketingCharts, A/B testing a landing page is the most effective way to optimize it.
Minimize Loading Time
Regardless of how incredible your landing page it, if it takes too long to load customers will drop off like flies. No one likes to waste time and a slow-loading landing page is considered exactly that, a waste of time. Give prospects the opportunity to come in, get the info they need, and convert quickly so that you can get the most leads possible. Wordstream explains that “decreasing loading time can drastically increase conversions.”
By following these best practices you will be able to have better quality landing pages and more successful marketing campaigns with higher conversions.
Colling Media is a Phoenix, AZ-based advertising agency specializing in digital advertising.
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