Landing pages are an essential part of any campaign. In this blog, we share both technical and content-related advice to help you create landing pages that will bring you leads!
Tip 1
Landing pages offer you so much flexibility, more so than your website. As landing pages are typically standalone and not able to be found from your main website menu, this gives you plenty of opportunities to try out offers, pricing strategies and messaging. That being said it can be all too easy to be tempted to try too many things and make your landing pages too busy.
Landing page real estate is valuable and works best when you focus your content on just one offer or call to action (CTA). By distracting your prospect and dazzling them with too many bells and whistles you risk overwhelming them.
Using multiple offers on your landing pages can negatively impact conversion rates by up to 266%. Let that shocking statistic be a lesson and keep your landing page streamlined and your prospects focussed on just one destination.
Tip 2
Landing page layout matters. This one is hopefully obvious, but it’s amazing how quickly design and user experience can fall down the priority list in favour of ‘making a splash’ with visual effects. The most important element on your landing page is your form to capture submissions.
Your form needs to be placed ‘above the fold’, meaning that it can be clearly seen without the need to scroll. Often forms are placed on the right-hand side of a landing page as we read from left to right.
It’s also important to consider the placement of your form for views on mobile devices.
Tip 3
Following on from tip 2, tip 3 is all about form fields. With any landing page, the idea is to encourage form submissions and to optimise the experience to reduce as much ‘friction’ as possible. Especially now, prospects are more selective about whom they give their data to.
Being asked to give too much data and fill in too many form fields can be off-putting and is likely to result in a prospect abandoning the landing page, contributing to a high bounce rate. Landing page statistics have shown that landing pages with sign-up forms asking for personal information like name, gender, or date of birth have the worst conversion rates.
Best practice is to gather only the vitally important information required for you or your sales team to follow up. One tactic we use is to pre-populate form fields with prospect data.
By creating landing pages and your email campaigns in Marketscan Edge, you can upload your prospect data and send an email campaign with a link to your landing page. After clicking the link in your email and viewing your landing page, the prospect data can be pre-filled in your chosen form fields, meaning that all your prospect needs to do is click the submit button.
Pre-populated form fields tend to generate a higher form submission rate, therefore increasing your landing page conversion rate. Research has shown that some of the best-performing sign-up forms only ask for emails or phone numbers.
Another option is to prefill and hide some form fields from your prospects and only ask for additional useful information to help you qualify if this lead. It’s important not to use too many form fields but to use enough to get the information you require.
To find out more about prefilling landing page form fields, speak to one of our team who will be happy to show you a demo.
Tip 4
The success and conversion rate of a landing page is also dependent on the content that appears on it. The use of video can seriously improve conversion rates by as much as 86%. Although a word of caution – ensure that however you choose to add video to your landing page, make sure it does not impact the page load speed. A delay of just 1 second can reduce conversions by 7%.
Showcasing customer testimonials is a great way to influence conversions on a landing page and surveys suggest that 88% of people trust online reviews as much as word-of-mouth recommendations. Reviews and testimonials show social proof, build trust and are more engaging than large chunks of marketing copy.
Something else that is important to consider is your call to action. Make sure your form ‘submit’ button stands out. You can also increase conversions by injecting some of your brand personality by swapping out boring singular words like ‘submit’ or ‘learn more’ for phrases such as, ‘Yes please – sign me up’, or ‘Send me the free download’.
Tip 5
One of the biggest benefits of using landing pages for lead generation is that you have greater flexibility to test what works with your audience. A/B testing or split testing is thought to be the most effective method for optimising landing page conversion rates, only 44% of marketers make a habit of using this type of testing. Our golden rule is never assume, always test.
You can test still imagery vs video, more or less form fields and the use of pre-filled fields, different CTA’s…the possibilities are endless. However, if you are going to test, only test one variable at a time and make the test as ‘like for like’ as possible to get the most accurate results.
Tip 6
Before you launch your next landing page, make sure it is optimised for viewing and functioning on a mobile device. Only 50% of landing pages are usually optimised for mobile but more than half of website traffic comes from a mobile device, so make sure you’re not throwing away these opportunities to convert visitors into leads.
It’s important not to have too much content on your landing page, as on a mobile content is stacked, meaning your form has the potential to get lost in the scroll if you’re not careful.
In summary:
Landing pages require a lot of thought and careful planning to serve as a successful part of your lead generation machine. Across all industries, the average conversion rate is just 2.5% but each industry will have its own benchmark. For help and advice with your landing pages, get in touch with our knowledgeable team.
