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Everything you do to drive traffic to—and conversions from—your website is “gated” by your landing page. But, does the design and layout of that landing page really matter?
You betcha.
Think of it this way: when a guest is invited to a dinner party at your house and shows up on your doorstep, what kind of welcome does he get? Your landing page is your doorstep.
Welcome Guests with Your Landing Pages and Invite Them to Open the Door
I recently attended a free Google webinar where Tim Ash of SiteTuners, a landing page optimization consultant, offered tips for improving your landing page. If you’ve got some time (the webinar runs just over an hour), I strongly recommend it.
In the webinar, Tim highlighted seven landing page pitfalls and fixes. Here, I’ve matched them up with some examples of professional services landing pages. Our landing pages, like most doorsteps, could use some spiffing up.
1. Where’s the doorbell?
Unclear call to action
When you invite someone over, you don’t expect them to go around to the back of your house to find the doorbell. Once you’ve attracted a visitor to your landing page, he shouldn’t have to search around to take the action that attracted him there. You have only a few seconds to engage that visitor; online attention spans are notoriously short. It doesn’t take much to send a visitor to the back button, exiting your website to visit another.
Within a few seconds of visiting your landing page, your visitor should be able to answer “What am I supposed to do on this page?” It should be very simple and obvious. As web usability guru and author Steve Krug says, “Don’t make me think.”
Takeaway: Add a call to action above the fold. Make your doorbell visible.
2. Which door is which?
Too many choices
Ever arrived in an apartment complex and been overwhelmed by hundreds of doorbells? Don’t overwhelm your visitor with too many options on your landing page. The more options you offer the less likely it is your visitor will take any action other than closing the browser.
Takeaway: If you have a lot of services to present, don’t give all the detail too early—categorize the options into a manageable number and guide the visitor along a path that allows them to hone in, or drill down, on the specific area that’s right for him.
3. Nice to meet you. Where’d you grow up? What year did you graduate college? What’s the name of your unborn child?
Asking for too much information
Say you meet someone new at a dinner party and instead of engaging in a conversation with you they start drilling you with 20 questions. What a turn-off.
The same holds true for your landing page—don’t ask for too much information early on. When creating a form, for each form field ask yourself: is it absolutely necessary to gather this piece of data at this point in the process? (Don’t ask: what info would I “like” to have?)
Takeaway: Only ask for the absolutely necessary info. Consider capturing additional information at a later time, when your prospect is further along in the lead-nurturing process.
4. TMI
We all know those people who decide to tell us their entire life story along with what they ate for breakfast and wore to bed last night…too much information, thanks!
On your landing page, there is such a thing as TMT (too much text). This goes back to point #1—the short attention span of your visitors and information overload. Don’t add to their burden, lighten it. This is not to say that long copy doesn’t work. You’ll need to test both long and short copy to know which will work best for your service and your audience. It’s OK to provide more detail to those who need or want it (through a link, or with additional detail below the fold, for example), but you don’t need to overwhelm everyone with a high level of detail.
Takeaway: Write clear headlines, put the most important information first, avoid jargon, use bullet points, and edit unnecessary words.
5. Knock, knock: nobody’s home
You don’t invite a guest for dinner and then leave for the night. So why would you tell your visitor to go to a landing page to get something (a white paper, service information, article, webinar, etc.) and then not offer a way to get that exact something on the page?
Look at your promotional materials and landing pages together and ask yourself, “Do I drop the visitor on a page that matches the expectation set in the promotion? Is the promised information there?” If you don’t keep your promise and deliver what you said you would, your conversions along with trust and credibility, will suffer.
Takeaway: Repeat the keywords, text, or message from the source that led the visitor to the page. Match what’s on the page with the expectations your visitor had when he arrived.
6. Wow, that’s an interesting candy cane sculpture on your front lawn
Don’t assail your visitor with annoying graphics unrelated to the topic at hand; he’ll waste time looking at the wrong things on the page and won’t focus on your call to action. It’s OK to have more than one goal for a page, but give your primary message top priority—don’t interrupt that message with visual distractions.
Takeaway: Simplify. Don’t compete with your call to action, remove animation, and replace generic photos with relevant images.
7. Is your door falling off its hinges?
Lack of credibility and trust
What impression do you get when you pull up to a house where the stoop is rotting out, the siding is falling off, and the roof is sinking in?
Your landing page needs to instill credibility and trust. You need to demonstrate why the visitor should trust you. Look at your landing pages, do they lack endorsements and social proof (testimonials)? Are they professionally designed?
Takeaway: Improve the production quality of your page. If it looks old and dated, you will too. Use client logos and media badges where possible. Remove your visitor’s anxiety about giving you their email, phone number, or credit card information by featuring your generous policies and guarantees.
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Review your landing pages with an eye to the above rules-of-thumb and you may find yourself creating landing pages more like the examples that follow, than the ones above:
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Most landing pages have problems and all would likely benefit from some spiffing up and improvement. Do you have a a landing page success (or failure) to share?
