If you are a business owner with a website that drives revenue via sales or leads, you likely occasionally ponder how you can make the pages on your site more effective at improving your bottom line.
If such a thought process sounds familiar to you, keep reading, as today’s blog post provides landing page conversion rate optimization tips that you or your developer can implement immediately. These tricks will help your website’s landing pages turn more users into customers or leads, expanding your enterprise’s bottom line in the process.
The 5-Second Rule: What Prospective Clients/Customers Must Know Instantly
Within the digital ecosystem, attention is and continues to become an increasingly scarce commodity. Such scarcity drives a need for an effectively targeted landing page that provides answers to three fundamental questions sought by prospective clients, enabling them to decide if your business fulfills their need, warranting them to move from user to client/buyer, all within a mere five seconds or less.
These 3 questions include:
- Is your enterprise capable of fulfilling their needs?
- Does the above-the-fold section of the landing page state the service/product offering they’re seeking?
- Is your service/product offering available in their geographical location?
- Does your landing page state the location of your business or the targeted service area to confirm that your service/product offering encompasses their geographical location?
- Can they place their trust in your enterprise to provide what you offer?
- Does the landing page instantly convey trustworthiness, for instance, testimonials or competency badges, facilitating the ascertainment that your enterprise deserves their confidence?
If these questions are not answered on your landing page, it will have failed to clearly and immediately provide what a user is seeking, introducing friction into the user experience. In conversion rate optimization, such friction can be the killer of achieving the desired result from a new site user, a conversion.
Localization: The Placement of Your Targeted Service Area on the Landing Page
By having a landing page tailored to specific geographic regions where your prospective clients are located, a 20-30% increase in conversion rate is feasible to be realized. Such an increase can be achieved by including the user’s city, province, or state above-the-fold, as doing so answers question number two above: “Is your service/product offering available in their geographic location?”
To assist in the choice of city, province/state:
- If your campaign targets a broad region, an entire state/province or all major cities within, test by naming the province/state, rather than multiple cities.
- For a more narrow campaign target, mention the city.
- For local campaigns within a city where your business has an office or brick-and-mortar location, include a map.
- For campaigns targeting regions beyond your physical location(s), avoid showcasing a map as it can harm conversion rates.
The above is all theory derived from a webinar hosted by Corey Zieman, which can be enjoyed here if you’re interested in a more in-depth breakdown.
Conversion Rate Oriented Landing Page Design
The seven Cs, or the seven principles of conversion-centred landing page design, are derived from research by Oli Gardner, published in their ebook titled “The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centred Design: A Framework for Designing Effective Marketing Campaigns“.
When applied effectively, the seven principles of conversion-centred design will lead your landing pages on the path to reducing bounce rates and producing a more meaningful volume of key events.
- Attention:
- Is there a single or multiple call to actions that draw the attention of users to the activity you would like them to take?
- For instance, a “Book Your Free Consultation” or a “Request Your Custom Plan Today” button is where users’ attention would be directed to take the desired action.
- Is there a single or multiple call to actions that draw the attention of users to the activity you would like them to take?
- Context:
- What medium are your site visitors coming from?
- If from Google:
- Does the messaging and other content on the landing page fulfill user expectations based on meta titles and descriptions or ad headings and descriptions?
- If from social media, paid or organic:
- Is the social copy and creative aligned with the landing page copy and creative?
- Do you expect these users to have an understanding of your organization or what services/products you provide? Or,
- Do you have a section on the landing page that explains what you do and how you do it for those who don’t?
- Clarity:
- Is your landing page scannable?
- Can users quickly scan your landing page and realize:
- What you are offering,
- Why they should choose you over your competitors, and
- What action do you want them to take next?
- Can users quickly scan your landing page and realize:
- Does the user know what will happen once they click a call to action?
- The CTA button, when labelled “Book Your Consultation”, provides a clear indication of what will transpire when the user clicks the button.
- Is your landing page scannable?
- Congruence:
- All copy on the landing page should direct the user towards the desired conversion action.
- Testimonials, if included on the landing page, should solely pertain to that page’s product/service offering. Anything off-topic should be avoided to reduce the probability of being distracted from the desired conversion action.
- All copy on the landing page should direct the user towards the desired conversion action.
- Credibility:
- Does your landing page include any of the following to signal to potential clients/customers that your business is capable of providing the product or service that is promised?
- Signals of credibility in your capabilities include:
- Competency badges,
- Certifications,
- Awards,
- Reviews or Testimonials.
- Signals of credibility in your capabilities include:
- Does your landing page include any of the following to signal to potential clients/customers that your business is capable of providing the product or service that is promised?
- Closing:
- Just before your CTA button, place positive reinforcement messaging.
- Doing so will encourage user progression to the desired result at the stage when the user is determining whether they wish to explore your offering further or seek an alternative provider.
- You don’t want your landing page copy to be the driver of last-minute doubt.
- Just before your CTA button, place positive reinforcement messaging.
- Continuance:
- After the conversion action has been completed, confirm such completion.
- For lead forms, a page that states “Thank you for your submission, we will be back to you within 24 hours with a quote”.
- For product sales, an order confirmation page stating “Thank you for your order! Check your email for your order number and expect an email within 24 hours that includes your tracking number and estimated delivery date”.
- Upon the completion of a conversion action, your confirmation page should also encourage users to take additional action by showcasing products/services that can provide them with added value, increasing the lifetime value of the customer for the business.
- For example:
- Educational resources on how they can receive the most value from the product or service,
- List some products that would be complementary to the one just purchased. In this case, avoid showcasing products that could be a substitute for the purchased product to reduce the chance of giving rise to cognitive dissonance.
- For example:
- After the conversion action has been completed, confirm such completion.
Alignment of Ads and Landing Pages
To maximize the ROI of ads, no matter the medium, your ads and landing pages must be aligned across:
- Product or Service
- Ad Copy and Landing Page Copy
- Ad Creative and Landing Page Creative
For instance, if you have an ad on Meta that promotes “Snow Clearing Services”, the landing page ought to at least have a synonym of snow clearing services and mirror or have similar images to the ad to confirm to the user that they arrived at the correct page.
If a mismatch between the ad’s copy and creative exists with the landing page’s copy and creative, the user may believe they clicked on the wrong link, and the link click will result in a page bounce.
A Website Design that Converts Need Not Be Aesthetically Pleasing
While a landing page that appears cluttered with competency badges, certifications, reviews, testimonials, CTA buttons, and bullet points to ensure scannability of the page may not be this year’s winner of a website design award in your industry, if it is driving conversions at a 33% conversion rate, your website is winning where it matters most, improving your businesses bottom line.
One must recognize that the quality of a landing page is not measured by its ability to be visually appealing, its quality is gauged based on its ability to convert. As long as your landing page is driving conversions and growing your bottom line, it is well-designed for its intended purpose.
The above practices, from the three questions, the seven principles, to the alignment of your ads and landing page, form the base of your conversion rate optimization journey.
Beyond the base of your CRO journey will be the utilization of analytics to determine which CTA’s and other sections of the landing page can benefit from being A/B tested, which can assist in growing your conversion rate even further.
