A landing page is a place you send visitors when you really want them to do 1 specific action.
It can be a sales page, an email opt-in page, a video landing page, or even a content landing page designed to rank well in search engines. As you might have guessed, there are a lot of ways to screw these up.
Here are five of the most common mistakes people make with their landing pages. More importantly, I’ll tell you how to avoid making them yourself.
1. Blowing the headline
Landing pages live or die by the quality of the headline. It’s your two-second chance to overcome the swift and brutal attention filters we’ve developed due to information overload and poorly-matched promises.
Often, a better headline alone will boost the effectiveness of your landing page, and even overcome some of the other mistakes below. Split-testing different headlines is relatively painless, and can bring you much higher conversions compared with multiple other tweaks.
When we do website conversion optimisation the headline is 1 of the first things we look at, often times a headline change results in 300% more sales for our clients websites.
2. Using your regular site design
Most web designers who use WordPress to build their website on get this VERY wrong. That means we’re using design themes for the visual presentation of our sites.
While your typical sidebar and header approach to a website is fine, when it comes down to visitors reaching a landing page with a singular focus on specific action, all of that extraneous stuff causes confusion, distraction, and reduced conversions. Lose the clutter and create the cleanest page possible when you want some action.
3. Asking for more than one thing
The idea that more choices make people happier has been proven to be a psychological fallacy time and again. This “paradox of choice” reveals that when given multiple options, the decision ends up being not to choose at all.
An effective landing page asks for one specific action, and that’s it. And don’t forget to actually clearly ask for that one specific thing, which is an even bigger conversion killer if you don’t.
4. Ignoring basic aesthetics
Why is it when some web designers decide to ask for some action, they lose their minds on the appearance of the page? Bad fonts, garish colors, cheap highlighting, and silly clip art do not make for better conversions in most cases. What they do is crush your credibility.
While using your standard blog theme is distracting and confusing in the landing page context, there’s no need to become the typographical equivalent of a carnival barker, either. Great landing pages use fonts, colors, and visuals that are tailored specifically to the audience and action you desire, thereby enhancing the experience and boosting conversions.
5. Being lazy
Did you know that web users spend 80% of their time above the fold? Does that mean people won’t scroll down the page? No, it just means you can’t take it for granted that they will (instead of leaving).
Don’t be lazy about grabbing and holding attention. Don’t assume everyone instantly “gets” the benefit of your offer the way you do. Don’t overestimate your credibility. In short, don’t drink your own Kool-Aid. Think about it from their perspective, and you’ll realize you might not be all that (until you unequivocally prove you are with compelling copy).
Here’s how we did it for the 50 Prontaprint Franchises we recently looked after the digital marketing for:
We have their 5 main services (design, print, direct mail, finishing and display) on a rotating banner, we split tested the banners to achieve maximum ROI then set to work optimising after they click to make sure the visitors became buyers.
Above we’ve identified 5 easy ways to blow the online sale and shown you some of the landing page best practices we help our customers implement to increase their online sales and profits – Try them in your business today.
Want us to look after your online marketing using the latest strategies to maximise revenues? Then click here to see our services.
Neil