4 Small Landing Page Tweaks to Take Your Forms from Good to Great
Landing pages are like dates in the wooing stages of a relationship. The lead-gen form is like a first date. The order form? That’s a few dates in when you’re looking to seal the deal.
No matter how many dates in you are (or, whether or not your landing page includes a payment), any marketer knows the basics of how to design a “good” page. Clear call to action, only ask for the vitals, keep it simple.
But as we all know, today’s consumers have an increasingly fleeting attention span, and ever-growing standards when it comes to user experience. Even the smallest detail or functionality can make or break your user’s interest.
Marketers must get down to the nitty-gritty of their landing page build in order to keep the leads flowing, or proverbial cash register ringing.
Here are four small tweaks that can help keep your visitors from developing a wandering eye.
1. Use dominant, contrasting colors on your CTAs. Sure, we all know that color design plays an important role on your pages. But your landing page design process involves, well, a design team. And while designers are marketers’ BFFs, sometimes their agendas can stray slightly from ours. Aesthetics can overpower conversion on their hierarchy of priorities — even if unintentionally. (Trust me, I’ve seen it happen at more than one workplace.) Beautiful forms are great. But high-converting forms are better. If there’s one golden rule you should enforce, it’s this one: always include dominant contrast on your calls-to-action. The whole point of the button is to draw your user’s eye to it, no matter how aesthetically pleasing it is (or isn’t). Hopefully, it’ll grow on your designers in an ugly-cute kind of way (think Yogurt the Pirate Dog).
2. Make your error messages adaptive. How many times have you filled out an order form, tapped submit, and eagerly awaited a confirmation — only to be rudely interrupted by a pesky little error message? You skipped a required field, or mistyped something somewhere, and now you’ve got to go back and fix it. Since most error messages are woefully generic, chances are it offers zero help. Yes, this may be a first world problem, but if we can fix it we should. And we can: with adaptive error messages! This type of error message significantly reduces error recovery time by dynamically changing to best match your situation. (Finally, someone that understands you.)
3. Auto-select an offer (and tell why you did). This is one of those tips that will leave you thinking “Duh, why didn’t I think of that?” (Unless you already did, in which case, all the kudos.) If your offering includes more than one tier or term option (i.e. multiple duration commitments for a subscription box), simply engineer your form so that one of those offers is auto-selected for your user. Just be sure to explain which logic is behind the auto-selection. For example, if you’ve auto-ticked the offer which presents the most savings, add a visual call-out to identify it as “Best Value.” Maybe even make it a different color so it’s super clear. It’s basically like letting users hit the “Easy” button. Plus, you can guide them to the offer that you most want them to select. Gotta love a good win-win.
4. Offer alternative payment options (if applicable). Alternative facts are bad; alternative payment options are good. In the age of Venmo, mobile users have little patience for traditional payment options. Dig for their credit card and type in all those numbers? That’s almost a minute lost from their 6-month deep Instagram lurk. Instead, keep the attention of digital natives long enough to convert them by offering alternative payment options like PayPal, Apple Pay, Pay with Amazon, and Google Wallet. Low effort plus instant gratification equals happy customers. Oh, and let your users know early on in the form that you offer these payment options so they don’t abandon before finding out.
Follow these tips to make sure you bring your “A” game with your landing pages — just like you would during those first few dates. It may not take you on the road to happily ever after, but a higher conversion rate and a lower bounce rate aren’t a bad deal, either.
