7 Guaranteed Ways to Improve Your landing Page Success
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC digital, a Hybrid marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound marketing, Greg helps medium-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
7 Guaranteed Ways to Improve Your Landing Page Success
When it comes to your landing pages, success is measured by conversion rates. These pages are designed to get people to act; therefore, it’s critical that they be optimized for action.
Here are 7 essential ways to make your landing pages work harder for you. Professional landing page design for your Denver business is the first step. How do you get the best results? Be sure to pay attention to these fundamentals:
1. Define the purpose of each page
When designing your pages, you need to define the conversion activity you want for each page. Do you want the visitor to subscribe to a newsletter? Download an ebook? Fill out a form? All elements on the page—including creative, content and formatting—should be designed to drive this specific action and nothing else.
2. Keep it focused
Keeping your pages focused will help your visitors stay focused, as well. Remember, you want to prevent wandering away from the purpose. So, eliminate unnecessary elements such as ads and navigation bars. Unless something on the page is necessary or helpful to the conversion process, get rid of it!
3. Match headlines and creative elements
Your visitors are arriving at your landing pages through some kind of ad or call to action. Here’s a tip: match the headline and/or verbiage from your ad to the headline on your landing page. This tells visitors that they are at the right place, and lets them know what you want them to do.
4. Stay “above the fold”
In web design, the important stuff goes above the fold—that is, the space you can see without scrolling. When visitors have to scroll down to see the offer, conversion rates tend to slip. Why? Scrolling, much like confusing navigation or too many clicks and links, requires an extra action that people just don’t want to take.
And, anything below the fold runs the risk of being missed by viewers. So make sure to place your important elements above the fold. Better yet, consider editing your content to fit on one page.
5. Fix your forms
Making your forms user-friendly encourages people to fill them out. Auto-populate fields wherever you can. Remove unnecessary fields. Don’t ask for too much information. Shorten forms and make navigation simple.
6. Lead the eye
Your landing page design should lead the eye inevitably to the conversion exit. This can be done in many ways. Careful placement of content, use of white space, a compelling image and color choices will accomplish the goal of directing people to the desired action.
Be careful, though, that your design elements don’t distract the eye. Important content and other design elements should be a focal point placed close to the middle like a visual funnel. And, a great image is great, but make sure it’s not so great that it makes people forget why they are there!
7. Never stop testing
To be truly optimized, your landing page design must be constantly monitored for effectiveness. Could it be better? Simple A/B testing allows you to test different elements of your page against each other to see which performs better. Use it to optimize each landing page until you get the conversion rate you’re looking for.
You can also create a checklist and test your pages with small user groups. Are your pages focused? Is the message consistent with the ads? Have all distractions been removed?
To get you the conversion rates you want, your Denver business needs landing page design that is optimized, focused and consistently analyzed for effectiveness. Keep these tips in mind and your landing pages will deliver results.
