How to Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates
How to Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates
Table of Contents
How To Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates Some websites have between four to 10% conversion rate. This means for all your marketing expenditure, for all your marketing budget, you’re only able to convert between four to 10% of your traffic. How does that reflect on how much has been wasted on your marketing? The higher your conversion rate, the lower your customer acquisition cost. The lower your conversion rate, the higher your customer acquisition cost.
In this article, I am going to show you how to increase the conversion rate of your landing pages. This will help you reduce customer acquisition costs. You spend a lot of money on PPC campaign and other acquisition channel when you don’t optimise your landing page, you waste a lot of money. So if you look into increased conversion rates on your landing page, make sure you read this article to the end. My name is Femi Olajiga and I am the author of the book titled Lean Agile Marketing.
This article is going to be structured into four sections. I’m going to start with what is a landing page. I’ll help you understand what it means and why it’s important. And then I’m going to talk about landing page optimization process. The step-by-step process you need to follow, if you’re going to tell your designer or your agency to optimise your landing page. As a business leader or a marketing leader, you need to ask the right questions, so I’m going to show you the process you need to follow.
And then I’m going to talk about design elements. You see a lot of very pretty beautiful landing pages. That does not mean they’re going to convert. Landing page conversion rate is totally different. If you look at Amazon, for example, Amazon is not the prettiest website, but the conversion rate is out of this world. And then I’m going to show you step-by-step process of increasing conversion on your landing page. If you’re new to my website, I recommend you subscribe to my YouTube Channel. Click Here TO Subscribe.
What is a landing page rate?
It is easy to think about a homepage when you hear the word landing page, but it’s important to also understand that people behave differently, and people come to your website for different reasons. Someone that knows your brand and knows your company by name will type in your company name into Google Search and will come directly to your homepage. If they’re coming for the first time. Or if they click on an email that was forwarded to them, they will land on a particular page that might not necessarily be your homepage.
So other people will even come to your website to the blog section. Some will even see your videos on YouTube, and they will click on the link and they will land on a particular page. So the concept of a landing page does not mean your homepage, your category page, your product page. It means the page that someone lands on, irrespective of the section on your website. So the first thing you want to think about is how do you match the intent of that person to where they land to. For example, someone that lands on your block section might not be necessarily ready to buy than the research phase, so you want to treat them differently than someone that lands on your product page.
If someone lands on your product page, they have a more inclination to buy. So you take them through the conversion, the checkout funnel and then lead them to the thank you page. But if someone lands on your product page and they’re researching about a product, they’re not really ready to buy, there’s a high tendency that they’re going to drop off. So, when you see very low conversions on landing pages and websites, is because they’re sending the wrong traffic to the wrong pages.
Someone that is researching about products and services that is not ready to buy, she would be directed to your blog section or content pages that is more about engaging with them and educating them. And then when they’re ready to buy, that is when you send them to your product pages or your services pages. So the concept of a landing page you should have at the back of your mind, that when someone lands there, you need to take them through a journey. The landing page is the start of a journey. It should not be the end of a journey.
If you have a landing page that someone lands in and leaves, that’s when you have bounce rates because the page might not really satisfy what they want, then they leave. But if the page does satisfy what they want, they are bound to come back. There’s this concept that people assume that someone will come to your landing page and convert immediately. It doesn’t happen that way. When someone lands on your landing page for the first time, if that’s the first time that they know about your organisation, they will come multiple times before they convert.
Some research suggests people would convert after eight to nine visits, between seven to nine visit that that’s when they convert. So, imagine if that person clicks on your Google ad eight to nine time before the convert, that increases your cost of acquisition, your customer acquisition cost. So the old concept of landing page should be structured in a way where you have people coming through SEO or PPC, and they go to your product page or your homepage. Then you want to make sure that those landing page funnel them through your checkout funnel.
You have a checkout form, a series of pages that is called the checkout funnel, if you’re an eCommerce page or a form page, if you’re a B2B organisation. That is your checkout funnel page and your landing page should be aimed at pushing people to the next stage of the journey. And when they get to that next stage, even though there might not be any information for them on that next page, your landing page should have done a very good job to ensure that that page that they go to next, they will complete all the form or go through all the funnel and go to the final checkout page and get that final confirmation.
If you’re going to get money from them, if you’re going to get them to download the whitepaper, whatever thing you’re trying to achieve with your landing page, it’s the start of the journey, it should not be the end of the journey.
Landing page conversion optimisation process.
The first thing you want to do when you’re looking to optimise your landing page is to review your analytics. What I mean by this is you need to look at the qualitative metrics on your landing page, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and other analytics will identify the page that has very high bounce rate, a page that is causing people to drop off. Once you know that page, then you use qualitative metrics, qualitative analytics, to identify where people are clicking on, what people are engaging with, what’s part of the content they’re engaging with, and then how far into the page they’re scrolling, if it’s a long page. And if they are not scrolling, look at the elements that they engage with that makes them leave.
This is subjective as well, because some elements on your page they will engage with and they will make them convert quickly. So, you need to identify the exact element which is why you need usability testing to be able to identify this type of situations. So, you review those analytics metrics. You determine the page objective.
What is the objective of the page?
And you make sure that it aligns with the objective of what is sending traffic to that page. If someone is looking to buy something, you don’t want to send them to your homepage. If someone is looking to buy something, you don’t want to send them to your blog section. And if someone is just interested in reading content, you don’t send them to your product page and trying to get them to convert. They won’t convert. It doesn’t work that way. And then after that, you need to identify the friction points and the anxiety, as I mentioned earlier and remove those friction points.
Then you want to create incentive, some incentives and some landing pages, which I’m going to talk about later is more about creating free shipping, discounts, whatever you think is an incentive and a motivation that would nudge the people that land on that page to convert. I said earlier that conversion is about nudging them to your checkout funnel. The purpose of a landing page is to get them to move to the second stage, which is start putting their credit card detail, so they can make that final purchase.
Then you also want to review your competitors’ pages. Look at all the competitors in your sector from a product by product perspective and look at what benefits, what incentive that they offer to the customer on that page. If you have that same incentive available, you need to accentuate those kinds of incentives on your landing pages. Then another thing you want to do is after you reviewed the competitors’ pages, you want to kind of implement AB testing. AB testing is a situation where if you’re not 100% sure of different ideas that you think is going to motivate customers to buy from you, you create variation of those pages and kind of give those two samples to the customer.
When they have those two options, you run that test for like a month and then they will decide that okay, this page is what really accentuates what they want, and the conversion of that page will most likely be higher. Then you know that, okay, that’s the winning page, you implement that. In some instances, the page might do worse than your original page, then you know that whatever idea you think would encourage customers to buy from you is not actually going to work, so that’s the whole purpose of AB testing. So, you just don’t make changes to your website and assume that it’s going to work. You’re given that flexibility to run a test and then go buy the customer data and that data is the amount of conversion, the page that has higher conversion.
Let’s start by looking at Amazon’s landing page, so you can understand what a good landing page looks like. So, if you look at the left section of an Amazon page, like this page I’m looking at now, it’s a page about a RODE wireless microphone. You would notice that there’s seven images to the left. And at the bottom end, there is a video. That video is for people that just wants to view the video and learn more, people that are not really inclined to text content. That, again, is subjective.
Some people will read the text content and also watch the video. I personally like watching the video on an Amazon page when I see a product page that has a video, but that’s an important element of a landing page. So, if you’re looking to increase conversion on your landing page, you want to make sure that you have images that is relevant. You go on some websites and the images on those website does not really interpret what the company sells. So, my point here is if you have a landing page, remove all the texts on your landing page. If someone was to just see the image alone on your landing page, would they know what you do?
So, what I’m trying to say is, if someone lands on your page and they cannot see anything, does the image on your landing page tell customers what that page is about? If that image cannot answer that question, then you have a bad image. Over the years that I’ve worked in marketing, I’ve seen a lot of organisation use stock photos. People are more mature on the internet now. They can see a stock photo and they don’t take you seriously. So if you’re looking to optimise your landing page, I recommend maybe hiring a professional photographer or finding someone within your organisation that knows about photography and take a professional photo that represents your product or your service or your organisation.
Something that someone will see, and they won’t think too much to understand that okay, that is a dentist. That is a lawyer. That is a construction company. That is the photo you want to put on your landing page. Then if you look at Amazon landing page again, you see that it has a header, a very clear header and then a subheading. And then if you go down, you see the review. The review is the social proof. What I want you to pay attention to here is look at the proximity of all these things.
If you go to the right, you see free shipping and then under you see the price, you see free delivery, you see options, black and white, and then you see the call to action that is Add to Cart. So, they are assuming here that if you’re just shopping, you have other things that you’re buying. You’re not just buying one product. You click on the Add to Cart button. If you’re buying just one single product and you don’t have any time to go through a shopping cart or anything, they give you express checkout where you just click on Buy Now.
And if you look right below that, you see the secure transaction icon. And then right below that again, you see Add to List. And to your right, under the black and white, you see about this item with seven bullet points that goes straight to the point about the product. This is what makes Amazon really tick because every question, every friction that a customer might have about buying a product, they’ve answered that on a single page. And one important thing you need to pay attention to is most of the links on this page is keep people on that page. If you click on the review, it would take you down to the bottom section where you then see social proof, customers that have bought that product.
You know that this review is not biased. A lot of websites will have reviews on their landing pages, but customers know if you have a review that is not really genuine, they know, they can see through it. So you need to make sure that whatever reviews you have on your landing page is authentic. It’s not manufactured, because no organisation is going to put bad reviews on their own website, but you want to put actual reviews from actual customers that have bought your product. And even within that review section, you will then see that some of these reviews even have videos that kind of authenticates that that product is really, really good.
I’m not saying that this page is a reason why Amazon has very, very high conversion and always one of the best eCommerce websites, but this page talks about the most important elements of landing page optimization. This kind of principles if you apply to your eCommerce or even your B2B website, you’re bound to increase conversion on those pages, because this is the gold standard of landing page optimization. It doesn’t get better than this. If you’ve got other websites, if you look at another website, for example, that sells luxury goods, you see that they have actual images of products and services that they sell, and they authenticate that with genuine reviews as well.
I believe if you use all these elements that I’ve discussed in this article to optimise your landing page, you’re going to get increase in your conversion rate. If you’re need support with your conversion rate optimisation contact me.