Conversion rate is one of the crucial metrics that businesses monitor and analyze to ensure the success of their marketing efforts as well as their overall profitability. Unfortunately, many fail to achieve the average 2-3% rate which renowned businesses flaunt, let alone surpass the 5% only a few of today’s advertisers achieve. One of the possible reasons for this is the lack of landing pages.
Landing pages, in general, are pages which receive traffic from anywhere other than the pages on your website. These are ideally used as destinations in pay-per-click ads, to tease about a product launch, and to create multiple offers that appeal to different segments of your audience. Regardless of their purpose, rest assured that they’ll convert your visitors into buyers… if made right.
But First – How Can a Landing Page Boost Conversion Rates?
According to Omniture, landing pages can improve businesses’ conversion rates by 25% at the least. This is because these pages deliver the following benefits.
1) Stronger Message Match
Landing pages are mainly used to complement pay-per-click ads, further detailing the offer which brought visitors to you in the first place. Without one, you’ll miss out on the power of Message Match and its ability to boost your conversion rates. Simply put, Message Match is a measure of how closely your landing page copy matches the ad or link which visitors clicked to get to you. By abiding by this simple rule, you’ll be able to effectively reassure people that they’ve come to the right place. This, in turn, will increase conversions.
On the other hand, directing visitors to a page that doesn’t mention the offer (your homepage, for instance) will mislead them. Only a very few will take the opportunity to explore your website, and that too if it’s exquisitely designed and content rich. The rest are bound to navigate away within seconds, feeling cheated since you failed to maintain your message across every campaign touch point. Even then, a high bounce rate is the least of your worries. The last thing you need is for disappointed visitors to lash out on social media, publicizing their poor user experience on your site and driving potential clients further away.
2) Reduced Clutter
One of the biggest benefits of landing pages lies in their narrowed focus. Since they only tackle one product, service or offer at a time, they eliminate the clutter that could distract visitors from taking the action you want them to take. Landing pages give you more control to direct your visitors while ensuring that that they find what they’re looking for faster. This, in turn, will help you achieve another benefit: better search engine rankings. Search engines like Google value relevancy and appreciate websites’ efforts to ensure that people find what they’re looking for. So, it’s really multiple wins in one go.
3) Valuable Insight
Landing pages can help you gather valuable information that could help you tweak your offerings, advertising messages, and overall marketing technique. For instance, multiple landing pages used as destinations for your PPC ads will allow you to test, track and analyze the performance of the keywords you use. On the other hand, creating a page to generate a buzz around a product launch will help you analyze the demand for what you’re about to offer. If you create the landing page before creating the actual product, you’ll be able to cut your losses early and only produce a limited stock which you can sell off quickly before moving on to your next idea.
Landing pages are equally valuable for collecting and reporting data on your audience. By creating different pages tailored specifically to your audience segments, you’ll gain more insight on who’s actually interested in your brand and start tweaking your advertising messages. As you segment offers according to your audience, you’ll further discover what appeals most to your visitors and deliver as per their expectations. You’ll also get the chance to analyze underperforming offers, brainstorming to improve their appeal.
And the best part of it all? All the information you collect from your landing pages is quite accurate. Unlike the other pages on your site, there aren’t many potential pathways through which your visitors can wander off to. With no competing information on your landing page, you’ll be able to produce precise, to-the-point campaign-specific reports.
4) Better Decisions and More Effective Changes
Your customers and what they perceive your brand to be are important factors for determining your conversion rates. To discover these, you’ll need to constantly test different elements, including calls to action (CTA), copy length, and form lengths. However, testing each of these elements on your homepage is very costly and downright tedious. This is where landing pages can help.
Landing pages allow you to continuously conduct A/B and Multivariate (MVT) tests. MVT tests are especially beneficial for squeezing the most conversions since they allow you to test different combinations of page elements. As a result, you can remove any barriers that could possibly be preventing visitors from converting. Moreover, you’ll gain insight into your customers’ behavioral traits as well as the messages, images, and information they tend to respond to the most.
How to Create the RIGHT Landing Page
As tempting as the above four benefits may be, you have your work cut out for you. Not only do you need to know the essential elements that guarantee higher conversion rates, you should be aware of the rules of great landing pages. The following lines will go over most of these. Even then, though, you’ll be merely scratching the surface, which is why you shouldn’t hesitate to trust the experts with designing and creating this valuable tool.
Our 10 Landing Page Elements for Higher Conversions
Our Landing Page Development team has successfully helped many businesses improve their conversion rates with the help of only ten thoroughly-tested elements.
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Logo
Displaying your brand’s logo prominently allows you to establish yourself as a reputable, trustworthy business. You can also use it to link visitors to your main website’s home page, ensuring that they know more about you.
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Headline
The headline is the first thing a visitor reads once they’re on your landing page. It helps them decide whether to stay there or bounce. So, you need to have a killer headline with a strong message match.
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Offer
The offer is what brought the visitor to your sight in the first place. It needs to be relevant to the ad and capable of enticing visitors to actually make a purchase.
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Descriptive Copy
The text on your landing page is important for both visitors and search engines. For visitors, the text should provide the information they need, guaranteeing excellent user experience. It should also engage them and drive them to move on to the rest of your site. Ensuring that the text can be picked and understood by Google bots is also important since it increases the landing page’s visibility to users searching in your business’ niche.
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Product Presentation
Landing pages should include relevant pictures of the product or service they’re advertising. Images are high converting assets that guarantee a better user experience. However, it’s important to also add alt text, labels, and captions to images to help Google recognize what they’re about.
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Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
CTAs should be designed to enable users to perform the action you want them to take. You can consider using more than one if your landing page’s copy is quite long, but limit them to one CTA per screen size.
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Trust/Confidence Building
Trust elements such as third-party reviews and testimonials are vital for the success of a landing page and ensuring higher conversion rates. These promise new visitors a memorable customer experience and will help you generate more sales.
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Contact Information
In addition to being a trust building element, your contact information clearly outlines who you are and what your brand (and site) is all about. Adding a physical address (if you’re not a 100% online business) and/or a phone number further proves your credibility as a legitimate business.
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Links to More Information
For Google to deem your landing page as helpful, authoritative, and useful, you’ll need to include links to more information on your main site. This may go against what most service providers have been promoting over the years. However, not being able to learn more about your brand forces visitors to press the back button, wasting your efforts and the money you invest in paid ads.
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Template Elements
Template elements such as the top navigation bar or website’s footer are important to Google as they establish how reputable and trustworthy your website is.
Five Rules for Creating Effective Landing Pages
In addition to our ten landing page elements, there are a few golden rules which can ensure the results you seek. Here are five that our team abides by religiously.
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Match Headlines with Users’ Search Queries
To improve both your conversion rate and search engine optimization, ensure that your headlines match search queries. To determine the latter, put yourself in your potential clients’ shoes and ask, “What do my users expect from my landing page?” if you don’t have the resources to conduct marketing tests and create psychological profiles, use headlines with direction. Tell your visitors where to go, what to do, and how to do it. Doing so will allow you to address visitors’ wants, needs or fears, boosting your conversion rates. Be inspired by Carelogger’s landing page, which featured the headline “Maintain your Optimal Health, by keeping tabs on your diabetes”.
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Keep Your Copy Clear, Concise and Simple
You can improve the conversion rates of your landing page by including everyday language rather than technical jargon. Even if one of your products’ features is complex, take a page from Apple’s book and embrace the ‘less is more’ paradigm. Describing Siri, it wrote, “Use your voice to send messages, set reminders, search for information and more”.
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Stay Focused on Your Customer
Anyone visiting your landing pages should know that they’re very important and valued. You won’t be able to accomplish that by using ‘I’ or ‘We’ often in your text as self-centered language indicates that you only care about yourself and how much will go into your pockets. Your copy should put the user in a position of control and convenience to ensure a good conversion rate. A great example for this point comes from AwayFind. By substituting its headline “Let us find urgent messages” with “Let urgent emails cut through the clutter and fine you”, the app developer increased signups by 91%.
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Become a Brand Visitors Will Trust
Aside from trust building elements, consider increasing the security measures on the landing page. This is especially true if visitors will be sharing personal and financial data with you. A good idea would be to include third-party credentials to back up your promises of better security.
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Don’t Forget the Element of Fun Whenever Possible
Your landing pages’ visitors are bound to respond the way you want them to if you use emotional pleasure cues. For instance, a landing page for a new car can highlight how its owners will enjoy more freedom, turn heads as they drive by, and become the envy of others. You can also emphasize on how pleasure is a by-product of the product or service. For example, if you’re selling arthritis-relief medication, let your copy reflect that you’re selling freedom, relief and joy with each bottle. Once you make your way to visitors’ hearts, you’re bound to win their business.
Landing pages have the power to convince customers to come further into a site and interact with it. So don’t deprive your business from this tool and get in touch with our Landing Page Development team to get a free quote. Trust us to deliver the RIGHT landing pages to guarantee higher conversion rates as well as help you achieve all your brand’s goals.
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