For most marketers, landing pages are an indispensable tool. They support your efforts by allowing site visitors to download content, book appointments, sign up for newsletters, ask for a quote, request a call from one of your agents, and more. However, only 22% of companies are satisfied with their current landing page conversion rates. Whatever type of landing page you’re creating, these 10 tips can help you boost your results.
1. Back Up Your Claims with Evidence
Every piece of content you write for your landing page is simply an unsubstantiated marketing claim. To gain your audience’s trust, you can add testimonials, reviews, or other forms of social proof to back up your claims. In fact, it’s been shown that 88% of consumers trust testimonials and reviews as much as personal recommendations.
2. Use Long-Form Landing Pages
According to a recent study by InVision, 60% of landing pages have more than 1,000 words. In fact, the average landing page word count is 2,106. This is not by accident — long-form landing pages are proven to drive up to 220% more leads. The reason? Your visitors are likely at different stages in the customer journey and require varying levels of information. You should provide a wealth of evidence so you can convert customers at all levels of the funnel.
3. Remove Extra Links
It’s important to keep your landing page visitors focused on your offer. Additional links can be a distraction, causing visitors to leave your page before converting. HubSpot tested this by running 2 identical landing pages side by side. The only difference: one had a navbar, social sharing links, and footer links, while the other had none of the three. Ultimately, HubSpot found that the landing page without links saw 28% more conversions.
4. Use Video Content
Video is a highly engaging medium you can use to showcase your product or service. It’s been proven to increase landing page conversions by a whopping 86%. However, only 14% of landing pages include video, leaving you a major opportunity to you to differentiate yourself from the competition.
5. Use a Descriptive, First-Person CTA
According to Andy Crestodina—CMO of Orbit Media Studios—using first-person language on call-to-action (CTA) buttons increases conversion rates by 90%. For example, rather than “Download the Free eBook,” use “Download My Free eBook” on your CTA buttons. This allows the user to more easily envision themself performing the action.
In addition to using first-person language, you should also ensure your CTA buttons are specific, vivid, and answer visitors’ questions. For example, for a product page, “Free Trial” is far less effective than “Claim Your Free 14-Day Trial.” This language is more vivid — it shows the visitor more evidence and it describes exactly what they’d be committing to.
6. Use Design Elements that Drive Attention to Your CTA
You should craft all the design elements of your landing page with a single goal in mind — to compel users to click your CTA. A great way to accomplish this is to use an image of someone looking at your CTA — psychology shows that users follow the gaze of human faces.
Another design technique to bring attention to your CTA is to use The Rule of Thirds. The human eye is naturally drawn to elements that fall on the “thirds” of the page — or where the gridlines intersect in the below example. To capture the attention of your landing page visitors, try placing your CTA and other important elements on the intersections of these “thirds” gridlines.
Source: InVision
7. Create and Test a Separate Mobile Landing Page
Additionally, you should cater to mobile users, who make up 63% of all US web visits. However, simply having a mobile-responsive landing page doesn’t guarantee your mobile experience is up to par. The flow of the page on mobile is entirely different than it is on desktop. In addition, load time is far more important on mobile than it is for desktop. To drive conversions, you need to ensure your landing page loads on mobile in under 3 seconds — otherwise, 53% of your visitors will bounce.
8. Include a Call Option
In today’s omnichannel world, customers will convert how they want to convert. That’s why more marketers are including a call option on their landing pages. This is especially important for mobile devices, which will drive over $1 trillion in spending to US businesses this year. Best practice is to include a click-to-call phone number in the header and footer of your mobile landing pages, so visitors can seamlessly engage with your agents.
9. Track Calls and Analyze Call Conversions
While segmenting your landing pages allows you to capture the number of online conversions you receive from each online channel, phone calls are often a black hole. This is problematic, since inbound calls are often the most valuable conversions. They convert to 10x-15x more revenue than web leads and they also convert 30% faster. To truly optimize your landing pages, you need to track the total number of conversions you’re driving — both online and over the phone — as well as the value of these conversions to your business. Without these metrics, you could be making decisions based on an incomplete data set.
10. Test, Refine, Repeat
Only 11% of landing pages are redesigned to improve conversions after they launch. However, in order to boost conversions, marketers need to continually test and refine their landing pages. A/B testing, heat maps, website tracking tools, and call tracking solutions are all valuable tools to help you develop an informed, data-driven strategy.
Want to learn more best practices? We teamed up with Andy Crestodina, who has planned over 1,000 websites, to create this 60 Minute Masterclass: Website Conversion Optimization webinar. You can watch it now on-demand.