We at Power Digital Marketing know how hard it is to make a Supercharge your landing pages that converts well for your business and industry. With these five best practices, we hope to get you off to a good start on the path to a higher conversion rate and more leads. Now there are more than just five landing page best practices, but today we’ll be going over the ones that we’ve seen turn into a high converting landing page again and again in testing and implementation with over a hundred clients.
Best Practice #1: Have only one conversion goal and CTA
To start off this list, we have a relatively easy yet often forgotten mindset of only having one conversion goal and a CTA button that fits with said goal. Why do we want to only have one road to sales on our landing page design?
Let’s say you were running a PPC ad with a very clear CTA that a potential customer clicks on and gets on your page that has several different CTAs and conversion chances. Not only is your PPC manager mad at you because their sales are going down the drain, but your website user is more likely to go down another road, away from your offer. The reason we call them landing pages and not websites is because they are very specialized for one goal; adding multiple goals to a landing page is like putting holes in your straw while drinking — very useless and annoying.
So when you are building out a landing page plan, make sure you only have one clear conversion goal and offer on the page. Not only will you see an increase in your conversion rate, but it makes making content for said page a lot easier if everything is moving towards a singular goal.
Best Practice #2: Make sure your offer is appropriate for the stage of the funnel
If I just heard about your brand from a story I read, I’m not likely to instantly convert to an offer that stands at the bottom of your path and request a quote or proposal. Now would I be willing to give you my email for a freebie or similar low-stakes offer? Potentially, if the material was important to me.
When using landing pages as a part of a PPC campaign, you might not need to worry too much about a possible customer being at the right part of the funnel because a good PPC manager will make sure they are going after the right target group. However, it’s still something you need to consider during the planning stages of your landing page optimization methods and deciding what content would be acceptable for someone at that stage of the process.
Best Practice #3: Use a multi-step form
Now, this best practice is specific to a lead-generation landing page, but is crucial to improving your conversion rates for pages that include forms with more than four input fields. In reality, a multi-step form breaks up several fields into multiple parts, hence the name “multi-step.” When a person completes one step of the form, they move on to the next step, until the form is filed.
The method behind multi-step forms is the idea that people are more likely to finish something that they’ve started. This comes from project management psychology that we as humans don’t want our efforts to go to waste once a job is started, also known as “sunk costs.” That is why we want the first step of the multi-step form to be the easiest to finish.
The key to a high-converting multi-step form is ordering your fields, starting with the fields that are least dangerous (something like “How many pets do you have?”) to most (contact information, name, email, phone, etc.). The first step of the form is to use the least dangerous fields to reduce the amount of delay it takes to start filling out the form, with the following steps utilizing higher threat level fields.
Best Practice #4: Personalize Supercharge your landing pages design
Personalizing your landing pages is something that is relatively new and becoming easier to do using dynamic keyword input and tools like Proof and Dynamic Yield. The idea behind customizable landing pages is to cater content to your customer and create a unique experience that connects to them and is more likely to sell. Personalization is great, but you need to practice some discipline.
People might like that material on a page being personal to them, but being too specific can have an unfavourable effect. For example, if you landed on a page that knew personal information about you such as your age, race, gender, etc. and showed it openly, how would that make you feel? Gross? Violated? Would you convert? Not possible.
Best Practice #5: Make it load fast
Probably one of the most important elements of a successful landing page is how fast it loads. Page speed is one of those things that is more technical, but is pretty easy to improve given your landing page is running on fast and stable servers.
The first step you want to take when improving your page speed is to improve your picture files. A landing page maker like Unbounce automatically improves your pictures when you post them, but if you don’t have access to Unbounce or Photoshop, running your files through TinyPNG is a great way to reduce file size, and therefore improve your page speed.
Another factor to page speed that is easy to change is lowering or removing scripts that are running on your home page. As a digital marketing firm, we love scripts that track as much information as possible so we can improve our strategies, but having too many scripts or unique scripts can negatively affect our page speed. To check if the scripts you are running are clearly slowing your page speed, make sure you examine your page using Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. Both services are free and only need the URL of your page to evaluate and give you practical insights into your load times.
The Bottom Line
These best practices are just what we have seen to work with our clients, improving their landing page response rates again and again. Remember that best practices are nothing if you don’t have a constant testing plan to make sure that what you’re changing on the page is what’s causing your wins — or fails. We have many great pieces on how to start testing your landing pages, 7 Tips for A/B Testing your Facebook Ads and Website CRO: Optimize Landing Pages With These Tips being two of my favorites. Now go change your current landing pages.
