Without a doubt, landing pages are an extremely important part of any marketing strategy. After all, a landing page is a remarkably effective way to generate business leads and begin fostering that all-important relationship with your customers.
Despite the lead generation prowess of landing pages, it took a while for businesses to realize their value. And even as recently as last year, brands were still struggling to create optimized landing pages, making all-too-common mistakes like using homepages as targeted landing pages.
Similar to many digital marketing tactics, truly impactful landing pages are constantly evolving. Unfortunately, we’ve found the most common landing page blunder is a failure to analyze, tweak and improve existing pages. Marketers must be diligent in assessing and updating their landing pages in order to maintain or potentially increase their conversion rates.
We hate seeing good tactics go to waste, so read on to learn our 3 landing pages tips for 2018 and beyond:
Landing Page Tip #1: Assess Your Customer Experience
With all the clutter and distraction of today’s digital world, consumers are more impatient than ever. Consequently, your landing page has to first and foremost make intuitive sense to a potential customer. When a customer clicks on your link or ad, are they expecting the page they see next, or do you completely surprise them?
For example, if your ad offers a “free” product or service, but your landing page contains three forms and requires the user to submit credit card information, you’re stretching the limits of “free.” Sure, you might technically be offering something for free, but if the potential customer is frustrated by all the hoops you’ve asked them to jump through, many will decide the offer isn’t worth their time.
Rather than surprising your potential customers, keep things easy and give them no more or less than you promised. Landing pages that use simple and to-the-point language convert the best, according to research conducted by Unbounce. Further, a single call to action can increase conversions up to an astounding 62%.
Put yourself in a customer's shoes and assess whether your landing pages give users a simple, enjoyable experience...or something else. If it’s the latter, you’ve got work to do!
Landing Page Tip #2: Optimize Landing Page Workflow
In keeping with the theme of delivering an experience your customers expect, an often overlooked component of landing pages is how you handle incoming leads. We’ll call this your landing page workflow.
You could have the most amazing, highly converting landing pages on the planet, but if your landing page workflow isn’t optimized, guess what? The vast majority of your leads will go to waste. Why?
Response time.
Think about it. When you’re looking for a product or service and finally reach out to a company, you expect to hear back fairly quickly, right? It’s shocking, then, that only 37% of companies respond to digital leads within an hour. There is no excuse for this lag. An hour is an eternity in the digital world and, in some cases, your lead will make a purchase from a competitor in the time you haven’t responded to them.
In our increasingly digital world, it’s not good enough to simply target an audience and collect their information. You need to respond to their questions and interest in real time.
Once you have your landing pages in place, don’t overlook the lead workflow. Who in your company contacts new leads and by what method? Is this contact immediate? Have you A/B tested these touch points? The answers to these questions are as important as the landing pages themselves.
Landing Page Tip #3: Tweak and Test and then Test Some More
Measurement and testing are a significant part of the landing page design process. Don’t be afraid to constantly test and tweak your landing pages as you can always return to the things that worked the best. It’s a fact: some landing pages convert better than others. If you don’t measure the performance of your landing pages, how will you know which ones to tweak, and how to improve them?
As an example, over the course of a 20 month campaign, the digital team working for Barack Obama conducted approximately 500 A/B tests that increased conversions by 161% and increased donations by 49%. These are no small feats, and they underscore that constantly monitoring and improving landing pages is vital.
Overall, the importance of landing pages in 2018 and beyond will only become more prominent as businesses realize they are living, breathing components of a marketing strategy. The time is now to get the jump on your competitors who are still taking the “set-and-forget” approach to their landing pages.
Do you have any other landing pages tips that we didn’t mention here? Let us know in the comments or chime in on Twitter, we’re always discussing this stuff @wsiworld.
