6 Ways To Improve Your Landing Page Conversion Rate

Everyone wants more visitors to their website. It is said that traffic is the lifeblood of any website, but it’s also true that people merely visiting your website doesn’t actually make you any money. Once they’re there, you have to convince them to take action to move further along in the sales process. This may mean inputting their name and other personal information to subscribe to your newsletter or other information in which case you’ve now secured them as a lead. If your website is an e-commerce site, you want to get them to buy something immediately. The primary purpose of landing pages is to get the visitor to take this additional step in the process of turning them into a customer, and this is where the all-important subject of conversion comes into play.

The percentage of visitors to your website that actually end up taking the desired next step in the sales process is also known as the conversion rate, and in order to maximize your website’s contribution to your businesses’ bottom line, you have to increase this percentage as much as you can. Below are six tips to enhance your conversion rate, so you can start bragging about all the sales you’re making instead of just the traffic you’re getting.

• Having a Targeted Page for Each Ad or Ad Campaign

  Before going into the details of how to increase the conversion rate of any single landing page, the most critical element is to have enough landing pages. You want to have a separate page that is specifically targeted for each particular ad campaign you are running and each type of product you’re selling. As an example, if you sell leather wallets, cases and fanny packs, you should run a separate ad for each of these specific types of leather goods. Once someone responds to the ad by clicking on it to be taken to your website, you want to make sure they land on a page that talks about the specific product or type of product mentioned in the ad. As a general rule, the more landing pages a company’s website has, the more leads it will generate.

  You can always try to upsell them on other items you offer in your shopping cart if they add one of your products to their cart. For the purposes of their initial visit to your website, however, you want this page focused on what brought them there in the first place. Having ads and pages that are targeted to each product or at least product category that you offer is the first basic rule in optimizing your conversion rates. Additionally, if you have a retail or service business in a particular city, you may also want to create location-specific landing pages for each neighboring town or major neighborhood, so potential customers will feel comfortable that you service their specific area.

• Without a Good Headline, They Won’t Read the Rest of the Page

  The importance of a simple and powerful headline cannot be underestimated. This applies to landing pages as much as it does to the headline for the ad that brought this visitor to your landing page as well as to the headlines in any follow-up emails that attempt to entice them with further offers.

  There are several important parts in any effective marketing piece, but without an attention-getting headline that sells the reader on continuing to read, they’ll never get to these other parts. For more detailed advice, your headlines should be relatively short and specific, so people know what they will be getting if they continue reading the page. It has to get their attention and let them know that the rest of the page contains information of value to them. The use of subheadlines throughout your landing pages is also a good way to draw your visitor’s attention to specific bits of information they may be looking for as well as being an excellent way of keeping a page from looking like an unsightly wall of text.

• Utilize the Power of Images and Video

  If you sell a specific line of products, you’d be a fool not to have pictures of them on any page that is targeted for those specific products. Images mixed with text will attract attention far better than text alone. Even if you sell an information product, you should show a picture of the cover of the e-book or a screencap of the webinar or some other appropriate picture for whatever type of product it is. If it’s a service business, you can show pictures of your roofers, plumbers or landscapers in action at peoples’ homes.

  As powerful as images are, it is 2018, and practically everyone has both text and images on their landing pages in order to pull in prospects. With a video presentation, you can utilize the power of the written and spoken word while combining this with sound in order to involve more of the viewer’s senses. Not everyone has videos on their landing pages yet, so this is a powerful way to set yourself apart from the crowd, and it’s known for increasing conversion rates over pages without a video. You’ll never know exactly what a couple minute long explainer video about your product or service can do for you until you try it.

• Answer the Visitor’s Questions

  Marketing can be seen as a process of overcoming a potential customer’s objections, and unanswered questions about your good or service are the source of many such objections. You may want to hold off on answering more general questions for a dedicated FAQ page on your site. At the same time, you want to ensure you answer the most obvious questions anyone may have for why they should be buying your product or service and exactly what they’ll be getting when they do so. Doing this in a manner that keeps features and benefits at the forefront should provide a healthy boost to your conversion rate.

• Tell Them Why They Should Do Business With You

  Let’s say you own a home improvement company in or near a major city. You have an ad campaign and a landing page that’s trying to sell people on having a new deck installed on the back of their home. You always have to keep in mind when crafting the content of this page that there’s plenty of other home improvement companies in your area that they can also call to get a new deck installed. While it is true that you need to be selling the visitor to this page on getting a new deck for their home, you also need to be selling them on why you should be the one to install it for them.

  Perhaps you’ve been doing home improvement work for 20 years now, and all of your workers are licensed, bonded and insured. This information, as well as any other specific selling points that may set you apart from other companies in your area, should be sprinkled throughout the page that’s selling this specific product and service. Unless you’re lucky enough to be in some niche market where you have some exclusive product line, people can get whatever you’re offering many other places, so always be keying in on why they should be getting it from you.

• The Call to Action

  Let’s say you’ve implemented all of the above into your landing pages. All of this effort will be wasted without a compelling call to action on your landing pages that gets the visitor to your website to take that step where they fill out that form or buy that product. The call to action is the final step in converting someone from a mere visitor to your site into a lead or customer. Given this fact, you can see how it would be more than a little silly to have all your page optimization ducks in a row up to this point and then forget to have a compelling, powerful call to action that moves them over this last hurdle.

  Most of us already know that a good landing page needs a solid call to action, so what are the elements that make one particularly effective? You have to use action words that literally tell someone to take some step. Whether it’s “download your free e-book now” or “call our friendly staff today!,” it needs to actually ask them to take the final step in the sales process. The use of colors that contrast from the rest of the webpage for things like download links or “add to cart” buttons can also be helpful. Everyone loves something for nothing, so if you have an overstock on some cheap item or a helpful e-book, tell potential leads or buyers they can “receive their free item” if they fill out that form or purchase a product today.