Landing pages are designed to help increase your conversion, but in many cases, they just kill them. Exactly when does that happen? Your conversion rate will shrink when your landing pages distract your visitors or have the wrong copy.
And that’s not all; it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Instead of a dedicated landing page, 44% of B2B clicks are directed to a homepage.
That’s a huge problem, as your landing page performance and relevance are the key elements of your quality score, the single most factor in determining your costs and results.
However, if you can solve the below mentioned top six landing page mistakes, you can easily fix these mistakes in their tracks and begin to see the results you actually want to see.
To help you maximize your landing page conversion rate, we’ve broken down the problems you need to avoid and how you can fix and overcome them to grow your conversion and sales.
#1 Slow Page Speed:
As Neil Patel says “Speed matter a lot”. And believe it or not, but page load speed has probably the most impact on the landing page conversion.
Don’t believe us?
74% of people bail if a page doesn’t load within 5 seconds.
Oh wait, it gets even worse for an e-commerce website. Just a small 3-second delay could cause 50% of your traffic to bounce. This is why many brands load pages within a second.
Unluckily, if visitors don’t stay around long enough to see, it doesn’t matter how valuable the offer of the landing page is. This is even more true on mobile where visitors have to go through multiple pages during just one conversion event.
The following are some great tips to make your landing pages really fast.
Test your page speed:
You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or Pingdom to easily get a better sense for how fast, or not, your landing pages are loading laptops, desktops, and mobile devices. Additionally, you’ll also get some recommendations for specific fixes, like which images, gifs, videos, etc., need to be optimized.
Clean up your code:
The best converting landing pages are well organized and are clutter-free. Free of extraneous junk, clean code is the quickest way to successfully achieve faster loading pages. What this means is that you should avoid excessive use of Ajax or Javascript, remove tags and sections that are not really required, etc. And if you have to use Javascript, as per Google’s recommendations, use Varvy’s Javascript Usage Tool to ensure you’re allowing other content to load first.
Minimize redirects where possible:
The SEO friendly way is using the 301 redirects. Except when they get too many, they bog down your server.
Get Screaming Frog, fill in your URL, and then it will automatically highlight your redirects pointing to redirects, which generally occur as the website gets old and evolve after few redesigns.
Resize and compress images:
The addition of visuals, both video and images, on your landing page can substantially affect page loading time. So, whenever possible, preferably always, host your bigger files externally, considering your priority here is conversion and not SEO.
Else, always resize the images and videos before uploading them, so you don’t have to force 2500+ px down to 400px every time your landing page gets loaded, and use any good image compressor.
Upgrade your hosting:
Just say NO to cheap hosting. As nothing kills page load times more than shared hosting splitting up resources across several websites.
So, if you’re currently using WordPress to host your landing pages, upgrade to a good managed hosting provider, and let them do all the heavy lifting.
#2 Generic landing pages:
Avoid using generic landing pages that sell all your offering in one just place.
The traffic coming to your landing page from a search engine is different from the visitors coming from Facebook, which is different from the people coming from LinkedIn, you get the point. So, instead of creating just one landing page for your entire visitors and all of your offerings, create landing pages that are designed to sell just one offering at a time and cater to just one source of traffic.
For example, if you sell software solutions among which web analytics is the offering you currently want to sell where you want to drive visitors from five different channels like a search engine, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. Create five landing pages just to sell web analytics where each of the landing pages is designed to cater to each specific channel.
#3 Cluttered design:
48% of landing pages include multiple offers. Depressing, right?
Just 16% of landing pages are free of navigation bars. Even more depressing, right?
Are you wondering why that is bad?
Because when a landing page is focused and their navigations are removed, brands can see a whopping 100% growth.
See any list of the top resources on great landing page examples, like this one from HubSpot (link: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list), and one thing that instantly stands out is that they’re all well-organized, clean, and free from any clutter. They all are highly focused on just one action; ensuring visitors know exactly what to do on each page.
The book titles “Don’t Make Me Think” is one of the best books on usability. It basically goes on to say that the best way to make websites simpler to use is to make things so obvious and simple that visitors don’t have to think.
Quite similar to this example from MailChimp;
Sure, they have navigation on their landing page. After all its a homepage. They have added appealing imagery that is centered on the page to draw their visitor’s attention to where the landing page objective lies. Just one simple and small sentence on the entire copy. They’ve added a red button that clearly stands out, helping their visors know what to do next.
So, a clean, simple landing page that doesn’t have any distractions is the antidote that helps visors to avoid hunting around or analyzing the page, allowing them to absorb a landing page’s substance, and also what they should do next in just a few milliseconds.
#4 Limp headlines:
The great headlines are the ones that effectively summarize any complex value proposition in a few jargon-free, simple words. The first impression people get when they see them popping up in their email inbox or scrolling through their news feed.
Now notice how a similar template pops up on a landing page from HubsSpot (link: https://offers.hubspot.com/excel-templates-to-make-marketing-easier).
The headline formula described above goes something like;
Number of (helpful done-for-you tool) to (make complex things easy)
The best headlines do one of the following two things;
- Take away pain
- Deliver pleasure
The first dig more into negative messaging that can easily result in more than 63% click-through rate growth over more positive ones.
The negative headlines include those headlines that help visitors to protect themselves from external threats like bedbugs.
The second one references the goal of simplicity. People are overworked, overstressed, busy, and overcommitted. And offering them a pain-free, simple solution is an effective tactic to pique their interest and gear them towards the desired action.
#5 Irrelevant visuals:
Stock photos can be the worst. Not only because they’re highly overpriced, but because they don’t work well.
And instead of stock photos, using real people in real photos can easily result in a 36% growth in conversion.
To successfully achieve better results, the visuals on each landing page should;
- Show off your offering in use or at least in context.
- Give the visitors a clear idea of what they are about to get.
- Show off the transformation between before and after using your offering.
- Highlight more of that “after” end results so visitors can easily project themselves into it.
Here’s an example from lululemon;
They are showing off the product in the context of its use which is just great. The original, high-quality picture greatly helps build a mood and also set a tone that closely matches the words used in the heading and sub-heading. And together, they make a strong statement that resonates quickly.
If you look back in time, Nike has been a trailblazer in showing off its offerings similar to this. All of their commercials incorporate a good combination of product usage, storytelling, and humor.
That’s the ideal situation, the lofty goal. However, even on a small scale, good visuals should help visitors better understand what they’re about to get.
The next example is from RightSignature;
Agreed, the above image you’re seeing clearly translates how electronic signatures might work.
What you get on this landing page is a live walk-through, little visual demo, showing visitors how the service works. It’s the best way to remove any ambiguity and doubt from your offering, alleviating the fear of visitors for wasting their time in starting a trial.
This landing page from RightSignature also follows the landing page format that we outlined earlier in this blog post. Study, analyze, and follow: great visual, bold headlines, social proof with logos and quotes, benefits with check-marks, and also an eye-popping call to action button.
#6 Generic call to action:
The landing page was very fast, loaded within a second. Additionally, it was jaw-droopingly-beautiful and was also free from any clutter. The headline clearly conveyed how unique the offering actually is and the visuals quickly showed how users can benefit from it.
It’s time for the call to action (CTA) button to grab all the detail.
The most important question here is… where should you position the CTA?
The CTA positioning on a landing page is tiny but crucial detail to help it clearly stand out from everything else on the landing page.
Let’s take an example from Basecamp;
Both Basecamp and RightSignature position the primary page above the fold in the right sidebar. While RightSignature uses a different background color to set it apart, Basecamp also uses a different background color in addition to a small arrow that brings your eye-line from the headline over to the CTA.
Another key to this positioning of CTA is through the use of whitespace to help focus attention on the page elements that actually matters.
This example from HighRise uses whitespace to provide a good buffer around the primary action on the page.
The selection of words in CTA matters a lot. This landing page example from HighRise is more relevant than an alternative CTA like “Sign Up.”
Based on what we’ve outlined in this blog post that specificity and relevancy result in better results. In this scenario, the growth of a whopping 213%.
One can easily take relevancy to the next level just by aligning the CTA and headline.
The next example is from CrazyEgg, who does this by using the “use cases” or “primary benefits” as their CTA copy, confirming what a user would get after entering their URL. Additionally, they have made their CTA quite big, where the CTA takes close to half the page.
In the next example from Sidekick landing page, they have added all the elements that we have outlined so far in this blog post. Additionally, they also match the action-oriented language used in the CTA button to the promise made by their landing page headline.
In the above Sidekick landing page example, there’s a click trigger just below the CTA button. It’s a small line clearly showing how many other users are happy customers, and at the same time, it also provides social proof to alleviate concerns of the visitors.
Conclusion:
Even the best of the best offers in the whole world couldn’t convert if people don’t stay around long enough to explore or check it out. Slow loading landing pages are like conversion-kryptonite that turns away the visitors.
Generic headlines fail to clearly convey or capture why the visitors should care about your offer in the first place.
Removing these common landing page mistakes outlined and discussed in this blog post is key to boost your landing page conversion.
