When running any kind of digital marketing campaign, landing pages are going to be what welcomes the visitor to your website.
Because of this, it is one of the important aspects of your campaign. While you want to make sure you’re constantly testing factors on the page, you also want to make sure you’re at the highest converting starting point.
This way you can avoid losing money, time, and most of all the valuable visitors. Let’s discuss why Conversion Rate Optimization is important and how to apply it to your landing pages.
Why CRO is Important
Asking a marketer what his steps for CRO is one of the best ways to determine their knowledge. If someone can’t answer the question clearly or doesn’t think it’s important then chances are you won’t have an efficient campaign. Whether you’re hiring an agency to help with your startup or rolling up your sleeves to do it yourself, CRO can make a huge difference in the outcome.
Revenue
First and foremost, the biggest impact you will notice is the impact on your revenue. Conversion optimization, or a lack thereof, can be the difference between you shutting your doors down or keeping your business thriving. It can be the difference between you realizing that digital marketing works, or abandoning it all together with a false belief that it doesn’t. I’ve seen campaigns go from breaking even to turning a 20% profit with a few small tweaks of a landing page. When money is at stake, you don’t want to run the risk of running the well dry without having the water to replenish it.
UX
There is a lot of talk of user experience in the startup world today and yet many companies don’t realize how vital it is to the conversion process. This also works in reverse, the more optimized your website is for conversions the better the user experience. CRO tends to stop the complexity from the website and keep it to the bare essentials that are needed to get the visitor to take an action. This creates a better outcome for everyone involved.
Process Improvement
Optimizing your website and your landing pages also has the benefit of improving your processes. It forces you to cut the fat and determine what is and what isn’t working in your business. It’s a mindset that is built on trusting what the data is telling you over what your opinion or bias might. This mentality of constantly testing and improving could and will have a huge impact on your business in a positive way.
The Tricks
Now that you know why to do it, let’s talk about a few conversion tricks to help you convert your landing pages at a higher rate.
Match the Message
The first step of any conversion campaign is to make sure the ad that brought them to the landing page, and the landing page itself, have the same message. It’s important that the main call to action (the headline) on the landing page is similar to that of the ad. For example if your ad is talking about life insurance products, don’t take them to a page about saving money or one where they have to select a type of insurance product as that will create a disconnect. You want to make sure they feel like they have arrived at the right place when they reach your landing page.
Use Faces
A lot of marketers like to experiment with different graphics when it comes to landing pages because they want to be different. Sometimes being too different can have the opposite effect on the results. In fact, sometimes when you see all the competitors doing similar things, especially if they have been around for a while, it can mean that this is something that works.
This is true when it comes to using people’s faces. You may see a lot of landing pages have people there, more specifically, happy people. This is because all conversion data points to the fact that having a happy person on your landing page will help it convert at a much higher rate.
Make sure to make it make sense though, and that it is relevant to whatever you’re offering. It’s also been tested that when the people on your landing page are looking at the call to action, it is much more likely that it will be clicked.
Provide an Incentive
Most people can’t pass up a good deal. That fear of missing out is strong within most people out there. This is why providing an incentive, especially one that screams “act now or doesn’t get this offer again” will have great results. Even if people suspect it “could be fake” they still will not want to take that risk, and most people will respond to it positively.
An incentive could be things like “save 25% on this deal if you apply today.” Or “contact us now to get this free (offer) with no questions asked.” Make sure that your deal are actually redeemable though, otherwise you will run into a world of trouble. Another way to do this is actual countdown clocks, telling them the offer is on the table for a set period of time. This can be a great tool to get people to act now.
Social Proof
A big part of conversion is trust and trust is hard to come by online. A good way to earn that trust is social proof. If you’ve read books like “Invisible Influence” then you know that a lot of what we do is influenced by other people, whether we realize it or not. Because of this, you want to have some form of social proof on your website. This can come in the form of reviews or testimonials that can be in text or video format. Using the customer’s faces will further improve that. You can also write things like “thousands of customers have tried it, now it's your turn” or something along those lines, in order to let them know that there are others who are doing this, and they’re the odd one out.
Reduce the Ask
Sometimes marketers can get greedy and require too much information up front. While information is valuable to a marketer or a sales team, it's only valuable if they receive it. Asking for too much upfront can deter people for two reasons, the trust factor, or the human laziness factor. These days, especially in the digital world, everything is instant and most people expect it to be so. If you’re asking them questions, try to stick to the basics like name, phone number and email. If this leads you to get bad quality leads, maybe ask a qualifying question to help weed out the tire kickers.
Friendly Design
According to a case study in the “Conversion Code”, the design had an effect on 96% of participants. Women were asked to gauge their trust for a fitness website and 96% of them said that design was one of the major factors that prevented them from trusting a site. While you want the website to be functional, you can’t forget the aesthetic aspect. The more it looks like a lot of resources were poured into it, the more likely that that the visitor will feel you’re a reputable company. This is because most scam websites will not go out of their way to build a really nice website.
Trust Logos
Trust logos historically help you convert better, especially when they are better recognized. Whether you’re a member of an organization for a specific industry or have a reputable security company protecting your website and its visitors, putting those logos around the call to action can remove the hesitation of taking that action. If you want to learn more about the benefits of trust logos, the book “Landing Page Optimization” dives deeper into it.
No Links, No Navigation
Lastly, you want to make sure there is no escape. Most people try to make their landing pages follow the same feel as their website and as a result leave the menu in there and include a multiple links within the landing page. This is a HUGE mistake. Most people think it can increase trust when in reality it just increases the options, which increases the indecisiveness, which then leads to inaction and that is the opposite of the result you want. According to Hick’s law, the more options a person has, the longer they will take to make a decision. Apply this to your landing pages and you will have conversion success.
Keep it Simple
These conversion tricks are meant to help you have a much better starting point than you would with just experimentation. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test every aspect of your page. Make sure to try different headings, CTA’s and even colors to see what works best. Continue to split test your landing page and get rid of the losers, then add another one to test into the mix. Eventually, you will fine-tune your campaign to a perfect cost per acquisition that will help you grow.
About the Author
Sean Dudayev is the Founder of Frootful Marketing who is passionate about all things related to business growth. After selling his first company, he chose to take what he’s learned and help other entrepreneurs scale their start-ups to the next level.
