Best Practices of Landing Page Optimization
Landing pages are an essential part of any website. They serve the main purpose of any website — they generate leads and convert them into customers. Studies show that leads sent to the dedicated landing pages have a higher rate than those sent to the homepage.
Let’s take a peek at the landing page optimization and find out why it is crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns.
Landing pages vs. Homepages
For many business owners, the question of homepages and landing pages is a tough one. Most often they hear the same things about these two and that complicates the picture. Do you need both of these? How are they different from each other?
What is Homepage?
A homepage usually meets the following criteria:
- occupies the root domain (like www.mywebsite.com),
- gives an overview of the business goals and services,
- contains links to other important web pages of your website
- provides its visitors with ways to contact you.
Landing Page
Landing pages are intended to promote a single action — create an account, sign up to a mailing list, make a purchase, book a demo. Its purpose is to convince visitors to perform the desired action. Unlike homepages, landing pages are not necessarily intended to be permanent parts of the website.
Landing pages are also important tools for tracking, researching, getting to know your customers better. Aside from lead generating, they collect the demographics of your target audience. Your visitors fill out lead-capture forms (a.k.a. conversion forms) sharing some information in exchange for some data, service or some sort of access. Demographics data allow you to set up better targetting for your next marketing campaign. Contact information gives your opportunity to contact your leads and convert them into customers.
What Is Landing Page Optimization?
Landing page optimization (LPO) is an Internet marketing technique also known as conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization (CRO). The goal of landing page optimization is improving the percentage of visitors to the website that converts into customers or performs other desired action.
LPO refers to enhancing elements of the landing page to increase its conversion. You don’t need to rebuild your landing from scratch each time —
- conduct research and learn what can be improved
- generate hypothesis and create variations
- run the experiment and see if your page performs better.
Landing Page Optimization Tips
When building your next landing page, consider the following tips and best practices:
Use Single Call-To-Action (CTA)
Don’t get your website visitors do everything you want them to do — focus on one thing at a time. Make sure that your landing page has a single purpose and a single CTA.
Users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold
Make It Obvious
This one is self-explanatory. You need to have a clear and bright call-to-action positioned in the center of your landing page. If it’s a large page, you need to have a CTA per every full page scroll length. Use large fonts and highlight the CTA with contrasting colors — it should be eye-catching.
Make It Convincing
The purpose of your landing page is to convince your visitors that they need to perform the action that you are promoting. Supply the landing page with essential information about your CTA, pictures, screenshots, videos, testimonials and more.
“63% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a site that has product ratings and reviews” — Unbounce
Limit the Number of Actions
E-commerce shoppers have short attention spans and every little detail may distract them from their initial intention to make a purchase. With a few exceptions, your CTA should be the only option available on the landing page. Limit your visitors’ options to the action you are promoting. Social media links, website navigation, footer with a website map — most often you don’t need these on the landing page.
Mind Headers
Headers are important for your website’s SEO. Search engines love headers for the same reason people do — they make your content easy to read and navigate. Both Google and your visitors grasp the gist of your webpage out of headlines. You may also want to conduct an A/B research and test headlines to find out which ones work better.
Use Visuals
When it comes to convincing, visuals are a great tool for that. Users need to see what they are going to get and what’s it going to look like. A vague idea of some product or service is not going to work — users want to know what they are paying for / subscribing to. That’s why it’s important that you convince your users with pictures, screenshots, animations, videos — this way they will get a clear idea of your product and react positively to your CTA offering.
A website visitor will stay an average of two minutes longer on a site after they watch a video
Mind Branding
Your CTA button, conversion forms and other elements on your page should be designed the same way. Make sure that your design is consistent and that every element of your landing page is a part of your company’s branding.
Establish Trust
Use social proof to help visitors learn about your company and product and proceed with greater confidence. Consider adding reviews, testimonials, customer logos to your landing page. Numbers also have a positive effect on the landing page conversion. One of the LPO’s best practices is showing your visitors how much customers do you have, what is the satisfaction percentage etc.
“Consumers trust user reviews 12x more than manufacturers’ description” — Emarketer
Decrease Page Load Time
Page load time is an important part of the User Experience. The faster your page loads, the lower its bounce rate and the fewer reasons there are to leave your website.
Keep It Short & Simple
The fewer texts there are on your landing page — the better. Keep the reading on your LP short and simple. Your visitors should scan the landing page, grasp the idea, have all their questions answered and chances are they are going to make a purchase.
“38% increase in conversions when using fewer words to convey your message” — Unbounce
Multiple LPs for Different CTAs
As I mentioned earlier, the key rule for any landing page is one landing page — one call-to-action. If you offer several desired actions on your website — be sure to have an LP for each — trials, demos, free downloads, email subscription etc.
Websites with 30+ landing pages get seven times the leads of those with only 10 — Wishpond
Multiple LPs for Smart Targeting
Your landing page should match the needs and expectations of its visitors. My advice here — segment your audience. You need to line up your visitors’ experience with the content of your landing page. Email subscribers, advertisement leads, first-time visitors, blog readers — all these require different approaches. The ideal scenario is where there are N groups of visitors and N number of landing pages tailored for them.
“Call-to-action targetted to the user had a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than calls-to-action that were the same for all visitors” — Hubspot
Landing Page Optimization Tools
With online marketing, it’s easy to track and evaluate a return on investment. There are countless tools out there to make tracking easy, like Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
With GA, you may collect customer data for A/B testing and the whole landing page optimization process. Check out the number of page visitors, their average time on a page, bounce rates and other metrics to learn what can be improved on your landing page. Make a hypothesis, create two or more solutions and test them out during A/B tests.
A/B Testing
Put effort into A/B testing your landing pages, it’s worth it. The more you learn about how your specific audience reacts to different landing page designs, the better.
Above-mentioned headline testing is a part of A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) — an act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best.
A/B tests are valuable to a business because they’re low in cost but high in reward. Using the results of the testing you may increase website traffic and conversion rate, lower bounce rate and cart abandonment.
Heat Maps
Heat maps are another tool for website optimization.
A heat map shows where users most often click on your landing page. This one represents the F-shaped pattern of user activity on the website. Red and yellow areas are the most viewed.
Scroll Maps
A scroll map is another visual data report that shows the scrolling activity on the page. White areas indicate that users either scroll quickly past it or they often leave the page at this very moment. Orange, yellow, red areas attract more attention, make your visitors stop and take a closer look.
Conclusion
Landing pages are essential parts of the website. They allow getting to know your audience better, conduct marketing campaigns and have your leads convert into customers. Landing page optimization practices improve your website performance, drive more leads, conversions, sales, and revenue.
What landing page optimization practices are missing here? What tips and tricks worked out for you and boosted conversions on your website?
