Having the right landing page is incredibly important in getting conversions. It’s one thing to get traffic, but if it doesn’t convert what’s the point?
WebProNews spoke with Janet Driscoll Miller of Search Mojo at PubCon recently. She shared some thoughts on creating effective landing pages. "I think that there are a lot of great tools out there you can use, but there’s also some creative ways that you can implement what you already know about people," she tells us.
You need to focus on more than just the click. It’s what happens after the click that really matters. "That’s your entire return-on-investment," she says. "It’s your ROI, so what good does it do if people just click and cost you money, and they’re not actually converting for you obviously, so we’re finding that conversion rate optimization as a practice and a discipline is really growing. You’re seeing more and more people discuss it…there’s so many great tools out there…those test really accurately and really get the best information they can, and to make the right decisions about how to design their pages – what kind of information to put on them to get the most conversions."
There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for landing pages. It’s going to differ depending on your goals, and what you’re trying to sell.
"There’s a lot of other challenges with things like…with Google AdWords specifically or any search engine marketing, where you’re trying to target for your particular product, but you might have many different audiences who might search on the same term that need many different types or variations of your product," says Driscoll Miller. "I have a client, as an example, who serves home users as well as business users, but they’re two different products."
"So we use segmentation for that, where you have buttons on a page to try and segment those people down a path to get them to the right product very quickly," she adds. "And those types of things can really help your conversion rate."
"I think a lot of people put things below the fold, which is a mistake, and certainly not putting a form right there on your landing page is a problem," she says. "I’m seeing less people actually land people directly on their home page, which is good, because you know…a home page has a lot of stuff going on…I am seeing people try to create their own landing pages, which is a real positive."
Forms can be critical for landing pages, but you don’t want to go overboard, or you’ll lose the conversion.
"We’ve done some experimentation where we’ve done like tiered forms where you ask for the absolute essential only on that first form, and then once you get to the thank you page, you might ask them for a couple different optional fields, and surprisingly in the tests that we’ve run a lot of our clients see anywhere between 70 and 80 percent of the people who fill out the first form fill out the second form with optional information," Driscoll Miller tells us. "What the beauty of that is, more people fill out the form when it’s shorter, so you get initially more people signing up, but then a lot of the go and fill out the secondary information."
"So the initial form can’t be intimidating," she adds. "It can’t be too many fields – everything but the kitchen sink. Try and make it as small as you can."
The same thing applies to the checkout process.
"Things that e-commerce companies too can be focusing on are things like even the words on the button," says Driscoll Miller. "Sometimes something like ‘buy now’ is a little more intimidating, and seems like something that you have to do versus ‘add to cart’. It’s a little gentler. So experimenting with words and buttons and colors, and all sorts of things. There’s many, many options."
She also had some advice for landing pages on Facebook and Twitter. Read here for that.