Five Core Elements of an Effective Conversion Page
This article is a collaboration with Ferdi, Head of Performance Marketing & Intelligence for GoMerchant at Gojek. Do check his profile to see more tips around Growth, Digital Marketing, and more.
After seeing the massive growth from e-commerce companies, you saw an opportunity in online business. You call your agency, ask them to build a website, and after weeks of development, the webpages are there. Six months later, you notice the revenue from the website isn’t growing well. You stop looking for solutions and you were advised to just quit the game because the product isn’t going to sell well throughout the internet.
Imagine how many people stop halfway through just to realize later on that it’s not a product problem; it’s a landing page problem.
Making a landing page might seem like a straightforward and obvious task. You put information on your product tagline, what it is, share its benefit, and provide a call to action button at the end of the page.
Wrong.
As it turns out, it is not as simple as decorating your storefront during Christmas. It’s relatively simple to capture people as they walk by your retail store, however the same cannot be said in digital marketing, where attention span is short and information is constantly overloaded. You might be surprised as to how your offline marketing mentality just can’t translate well to a rise in the conversion rate on your landing page.
Reasons why most landing pages fail
The effort required to understand this can be a bit of a crutch. Later on, we’ve come to learn that the devil lies in the details. Some common pitfalls might include the following:
1. Failure to bridge the user’s sense of urgency with the design
Most of the time the issue is not about the design, but how the design accentuates certain urgency for the user. For example, during an exclusive product launch, you forgot to tell how many units are left on the landing page to communicate how valuable is the extrinsic value of the said product.
2. Information that impacts the speed
We try to squeeze in so much information in so little space, thus bumping up the loading speed and lowering the user experience.
This can come in a form of complex copywriting, or putting out too many unnecessary large-sized images. Ever try to measure your average loading speed in Google? This might be another symptom that your page is jumbled with too many redundancies.
3. Not putting the relevant keywords that can increase the exposure
It is important for us to constantly mention the keywords relevant to our niche, let it be through our product explanation, content marketing. Not only does it affect our SEO, but also how people can associate your offering with a certain category of their needs.
From the above reasons, we can see that the problem is not only limited to design problems, but also an amalgamation between copywriting, and SEO management, and other fields as well. This requires a collective team effort that cannot be hurled into one specific decision.
Here are at least five key elements to a successful conversion page that you can consider for your impending project;
1. If you’re collecting information through your landing page, keep it short & simple.
Buying something is always a tradeoff between the perceived benefits & how much effort & sacrifice need to be made to earn that benefit. You don’t want to spend 3–5 minutes filling up an online form just to buy that $20 earphone right? What people often miss is that sharing personal information is also a part of the sacrifice.
Have you ever visited a free e-book page and they just ask for 10 questions and you just dropped? Let it be a B2B or B2C type of enterprise, you need to keep the list of questions as few as possible, preferably five to seven items.
You can also do this by avoiding being too intrusive, like asking for a credit card number for a free trial of a product that might be perceived as less important in your niche.
What happens if you are required to ask more questions? For example, you can separate the page into a short form and long form to avoid exhaustion from staying too long on a page to fill up the questions.
2. Apply a reason to believe or use elements at the right place
Why should people sign up for your site? Why should they believe in the things you promise?
“Show, don’t tell.” is probably the most sought after yet criminally underrated quote of all time. People will believe anything they see, as long as it is rationally believable.
The same can be said for your landing page. Sometimes, it’s more important to be convincing than to be pretty. Now, let’s take a look at the landing page below.
It doesn’t look all dazzling but it’s a fairly effective one (or else they won’t be having 600k+ active users).
The UI element looks packed, but the reason to believe elements, as well as the reason to use elements, are placed in the right location. When users scroll through a page of a new product, they’re expecting some easily digestible piece of information. Believe it or not, but most people just can’t keep it simple at least in the top fold of their pages.
3. Place a clear CTA that conveys a consistent message.
You already gave people a reason to believe, now they are convinced to go further down the road. What happens next?
Unfortunately, it does not stop here.
Maybe we haven’t really convinced them enough, that’s why we need to facilitate them by providing an appropriate call to action. Make sure you are using a Call-to-Action that attributes your customer and business model. You can start by breaking down your sales process. Are you a high volume that needs further convincing? Or do customers need to actually “try” your product before making a huge decision?
These call-to-action can be accustomed to different problems and questions. For example;
- Are your customers need further convincing?
If the barrier to entry to try your business is high, “View Demo” or “Book a Demo” that primes users that they will have a “free trial for 30 days” to window shop your product before actually having to decide whether they want to buy your product or not. It is more inviting than a CTA like “contact our salesperson”. - Do you want to convince me there is nothing for them to lose?
You can use “Sign up for Free” to help emphasize to users that you are actually offering paid services and no free versions.
“Create an account” will set the nifty expectation that they will be taken to an account creation process that requires them to fill in several documents. - Do you want to lower the barrier to entry?
You can use “Join Free for a Month” adding the “Free” to the CTA makes it clear users won’t need to pay when signing up for your process, increasing your conversion rate. - Do you want to facilitate further explaining?
You can use “Learn more” if your product needs a little more explaining. = “Explore the collection” can also prompt the user to see the list of options first.
It’s all about being clear and concise with the purpose of the CTA, so you can direct people’s attention based on their initial intention.
4. Incorporate relevant keywords about your business
Put plenty of keywords that are relevant for your niche on your landing page. For example, you are making a restaurant that sells Vegan Food in Yogyakarta, do include the top-ranked keywords for your market.
To do this, you can do research on platforms such as Ahrefs and shortlist a handful of relevant keywords to increase the chances.
You can also insert these keywords in your content marketing tactics; such as making a blog post that is relevant for your niche. Make sure you are creating the keywords in your own website and not on a third-party platform, so you can make it crawlable, in other words, readable by Google.
5. Understand your buyer’s customer journey
Knowing the target user’s customer journey will guide us to decide the appropriate and relevant placement for our messages.
To do this, start by asking your team, how long does it take for the average user to decide the purchase? What does a user have in-mind when they are currently shopping for groceries online?
The customer journey can become a guide for us to make important design decisions, for instance;
- How do you justify to users that they are purchasing the right product? What kind of information do you need to put out there to convince users?
- What are the things that interest your target users? This can inform you what relevant content is necessary so users won’t drop out of your site too quickly.
Summary
These are to name a few you can try to increase the possibilities of conversion to your online shop. To summarize:
- There are three reasons why most landing page fails, be sure to know which pitfall did your product fell to.
- There are five things you can do to increase the chances of uplifting your conversion rate;
- If you’re collecting information through your landing page, keep it short & simple.
- Apply a reason to believe or use elements at the right place
- Place a clear CTA that conveys a consistent message.
- Incorporate relevant keywords about your business
- Understand your buyer’s customer journey
