5 Easy Hacks to Improve a Poorly Converting Landing Page

Landing pages might be easier to create than constantly changing your website, but if you are a performance marketer that is constantly AB testing and require results, development costs and ongoing alterations to pages can become quite a nuisance and pricey. This is especially true if you want to only change a button or the color of a specific element.

 

Obviously it’s a marketers dream to develop a page, launch and then see great results instantly, but in reality that barely happens. When your landing pages don’t convert, what are you supposed to do? Furthermore, what should you do when you are constantly throwing traffic on a page that people are bouncing off of after a few seconds?

When it comes to creating landing pages, the most important thing is that they are kept simple and focus on one objective; capturing leads or driving traffic to a specific goal. On the surface it may appear to be an easy task putting a landing page together, as there are so many different resources now available for you to use when building one.

The process itself of building a landing page is not complicated at all, once you are reasonably proficient with a computer. It only starts getting difficult when you have to start putting yourself in the shoes of your desired audience and optimising the page to maximise conversions. And in most cases, it is the audience that will ruin all of your carefully laid plans when it comes to a landing page. While it can look like a masterpiece to you, if the landing page is not suited to the audience and isn’t converting well, you are just wasting your time and money.

There is no one-size fits all way in which you can build a landing page and get great conversions straight off the bat. Instead, it requires patience and learning through trial and error. A lot of it is intuitive, as you pair the knowledge you have about writing copy and the best practices of building landing pages.

No matter how experienced a person may be at building landing pages, there are always going to be readjustments and tweaks needed to be made, as even the best can have conversion rates that are lackluster. There are many tweaks that you can easily make if something is not working, but this does not mean that you should be constantly poking and prodding at the landing page, you need to give it sufficient time to do its job.

In this article I am going to show you the Top Hacks to Improve a Poorly Converting Landing Page.

1) Put Trust Elements on the Page

If people don’t develop trust in you or your product, they are not going to buy from you; it’s as simple as that. There are many scams out there on the internet today that people are wary as to who they give their information to and who they buy from.

While you may have been funneling the audience to your landing page thanks to your efforts of nurturing leads, they will most likely not know who you are when they land on your page.

Even if you have been interacting with the audience through mediums like social media and email, you will still need to get some more of their trust before they convert and leave their details.

Implement Social Proof

Social proof is when your audience sees that you are a trustworthy person as they have seen how other people have been rewarded for placing their trust in you. If you have managed to garner the attention of these types of people and businesses, you are very likely to be a person who can be trusted.

Some of the best ways in which you can add social proof to your landing page is to include certain details, such as the amount of subscribers or social media followers you have or number of sales you have made. There are different widgets that you can also add to your page to develop trust, such as AppSumo. While it allows your users to share your content, it also gives your website a certain level of trust.

Affiliate Your Brand with Bigger Brands

If you have a partnership with a brand, whether it is an influencer of a large organisation, by having their logo or name on your page, this will create a positive link in the mind of your audience.

As you are working with such a well-known or established groups, they will know that as those groups trust you, the audience themselves will be happy to put their trust in you.

This is why you will often see labels such as “Sponsored by…”, “As Seen on”, “In association with” on landing pages.

Provide Killer Testimonials and Not Fake Ones!

One of the best ways in which to get people to trust you is to have testimonials from previous customers who were happy with their experience. When the audience sees a real-life person who has gone through the process themselves, they will be a lot more comfortable doing the same themselves.

Try to share as much details about the testimonial customer as you can, such as the city they are from. Nobody wants to appear to have fake testimonials, so be absolutely transparent.

2) Develop Your Page so it is focused around Your Call-to-Action

The only goal of your landing page is to get your audience to convert. Nothing else matters. To maximise the chance of an audience member taking action is by leaving no doubt in their minds as to what you want them to do.

Otherwise, the audience will not know what they are supposed to do and your conversions will suffer drastically.

People have short attention spans these days, so they will often read quickly through your page and see if the content is relevant to them or not. If the call to action of your page is hidden, they will very likely skip over it and do nothing for you.

Make sure that you have your call-to-action clearly visible at all times (preferably above the fold), but ensure that it grabs your user’s attention and it’s compelling.

Use an Active CTA

Never forget that the call-to-action is designed so people do something after seeing it. Use verbs that will harness this type of action, such as “Download” or “Join.” Try to spice it up by explaining the next step of the process. For example “Download the EBook”

The CTA should not only explain what is going to happen but what the users are going to receive.

Don’t ramble

Make sure that you use as few words as possible to get your point across. Keep it to about 5-8 words as you will not be able to hook them in if it is too long. Alternatively, if it is too short, visitors may not understand what is required of them.

Give it a personal touch

Always try to personalise the content and call-to-action to the reader, by using language such as “Experience the Thrill Today” instead of something like “Start Now”

3) Remove Easy Exit Points

While making sure that the links and navigation on your website is clear to the audience is of great importance, the objective is your traffic stays on your landing page. With this in mind you want to keep the audience there and not be stray away to different parts of your website or worse leave your site.

Remove unwanted links and try to have only relevant information on the page

Landing pages tend to have a very high bounce rate so you can try to add Exit Pop-Up that will encourage the audience to take a certain action if they appear to be looking to exit the page. You want to have them focused on the call to action. While you might not be able to capture your entire exit traffic, even if you catch a few percent is better than none.

4) Video Sells Better than Words

If you receive a lot of traffic on your page, but you are still seeing low conversions, you might want to add a video. Your product might be really cool in your eyes, but your traffic might not fully understand. This will cause friction and abandonment.

When there are good videos on a page, the audience will be twice as likely to continue and buy your product or service. Video has been proven to significantly improve conversions.

 

If you do not have the ability to create this type of high quality video, you should use relevant images to capture the audience’s attention. These should be high-definition images, screenshots or illustrations that give an interesting insight into your product or service.

Also videos play another factor. A user forces the user to stay on a pay longer than just reading a few lines of text. If a viewer has invested 30 – 60 seconds on your page then you’ll have a higher chance of converting him.

5) Have top quality copy

While design is nice and can play a major factor on your conversion rate, the copy of your page is also equally important, especially your headlines. They should be error-free, compelling and trigger emotions – build a connection with your audience.

You also need to format and present it in such a way that makes it easy to quickly read through with little effort. This consists of having the most important points standing out and using formatting tools like bullet points.

What you say with your copy depends entirely on the audience at hand, which is specific for each unique product or service.

6) Last but Least – Test, Test, Test

Whenever you make any change to your landing page, it will always affect your conversions. Sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

This is why it is vital that you test different things. There are two main methods of testing.

• A/B tests are a way to compare two different approaches to see which one works better. You can run two separate landing pages with different tweaks or features for a certain period of time and see which one yields the better rate of conversions.
• Multivariate testing allows you to look at a wide range of changes on your page simultaneously, which allows you to quickly see which combination works best. This is more difficult to do than normal A/B testing, but this can lead to you seeing the effects of certain changes a lot quicker.

Developing a successful landing page is an art. Even the Pros constantly test different pages. And just because a page doesn’t work doesn’t mean that a small tweak won’t present a completely different scenario.