13 Tips to Turn Your Unlucky Landing Page into a Lucky One

We all have them; those hard luck landing pages that just don’t get any love. No matter how much thought or time we put into designing these pages, they just can’t seem to get a decent break. They are truly unlucky, or are they? Fear no more! Here are (lucky number) 13 ways you can turn those unlucky pages into lucky ones.

1. Make your headlines persuasive

Headlines are the first thing, and often the last thing that people see on your landing pages when they land. Why then do most site owners treat headlines as the neglected garnishes of their site, when they are actually the meat and potatoes? Your unlucky landing page may be doing a great job of having headlines, but sadly it is failing at persuading your visitors to do what you want them to do. Persuasion is vital to your landing page’s success.
So how do you persuade people to take action, I hear you ask? Great question. Here are some key points for headline persuasion:

• Offer value: This is where most people go wrong. We get so consumed with all the other elements that make up a catchy headline that we forget about why people should even buy in to our offering. Make sure this is apparent and clear in your headline.
• Engage your visitor: Can you be funny? Can a metaphor be leveraged? Will controversy be appropriate?
• Be bold: Size does matter. The bigger it is the more people will notice it. Simple as that.
• Be relevant: Does this headline make sense? Is it clear what the headline is telling users?
• Talk about them, not you: People love to use the “We know the most about…” or “We help people do…” in headlines, but that’s sometimes not the most effective approach. Try “The knowledge you’ve been looking for about…” or “Helping you do…”
• The rhetorical question: “Are you looking for…, Do you need…, Have you ever wanted…” can work very well.

2. Use big product shots

Ever seen this?

Sure, there’s a picture of the product here, but it’s really not flattering for the product and definitely not showing people clearly what they are purchasing. Try this instead:

3. Add contrast to calls-to-action

Web designers often use the same colours or different shades of the same colours from the rest of the page in calls-to-action as a way to maintain consistency with the look and feel of a landing page. Sometimes they are even hands tied by colours available within their company’s style guide. While this can be great for aesthetics, it can be a detriment to conversion rates. Why shoot top line revenue growth in the foot over something as trivial as colour?
It’s advantageous to make use of colours that offer the highest contrast possible to others used within the colour scheme of your page. For example, on a blue or green schemed page, try using orange or red in the call-to-action. This can quite easily be done in such as way so as not to clash with the aesthetic look and feel of the page. Here’s a good example currently in use on Animoto.com that still looks elegant within the look and feel of the page while offering high contrast:

Another great way to improve contrast on calls-to-action is to leverage odd shapes. This works particularly well if your call-to-action is a button. Here are a few great examples of oddly shaped buttons from around the web that you might recognise:

4. Simplify your forms

This should be quite obvious to website owners by now, but more often than not it seems that forms still ask for way more information than necessary for the lead, and include elements like optional fields.
Do you really need a mailing address, home phone number, mobile phone number, and e-mail address in order to follow up with a lead? You may sometimes have a slightly lower follow up success rate by only requesting a phone number and e-mail address on your lead form, but you will also have a much higher form completion rate by requesting less information. The rule is: the more information you demand from visitors, the fewer visitors will provide any information at all.

5. Got 2 columns? Try 3! Got 3 columns? Try 2!

We often hear expert advice telling clients that 2-column page layouts always work better than 3-column layouts, and vice-versa. Our advice is to ignore that advice. Since no two landing pages are identical, what works for one may or may not work for the next. Trying different types of layouts can often be a quick win for conversion rate improvements as they allow for content to be repositioned for maximized visibility.

6. Mute those background colours

After all, the background is not where you want people to focus. As a cognitive reaction, we tend to look at the most vivid colours on a page first. Does your page use bright colours for the background? Moreover, is the background of your page matte or does it use a background image? There are some elegant ways to use background images on websites without detracting attention away from important content. As an example, 1800Flowers.com has a floral pattern as the top portion of their background, but it is muted in a pastel yellow compared against the rest of the content:

7. Reverse risk for your visitors

Just because your page looks sexy, and you tell people that your product is amazing, and you even show them all types of images and maybe even videos of your product in action, it doesn’t mean they will purchase that product. In fact, the internet is widely regarded as risky business and visitors need constant reassurance that they will not be scammed, spammed, or slammed by visiting your site.

Risk reversals, or elements that help to reverse risk, are ideal solutions for this. Elements such as testimonials, user ratings and reviews, awards and achievements, trust symbols such as antivirus seals and branded third party logos can be very effective as risk reversals.

Have a look at what we’ve done on BruceClay.com.au in terms of reversing risk:

8. Turn paragraphs into bullet points

An unfortunate fact of the web is that, if your content is not engaging, nobody will read it. Large blocks of text, regardless of how well written they are, tend to be difficult for users to track and unengaging. Eye-tracking studies suggest that most users read web pages in an ‘F’ pattern, or as Jakob Nielsen says; “F for Fast.” Essentially, people first scan horizontally across the top line of content, then across one row lower and finally down the left column of the page looking for other important information. So if your content is more than two lines deep, a vast majority of users may not even see it, let alone read it.

Clearly users do not read every word that you write. In fact, you might not even be reading this (ha!). However, you can increase the likelihood of the ‘F’ pattern becoming more of an ‘E’ pattern by utilizing bullet points. This is because bullets are typically:

• Comprised of shorter sentences.
• indented
• and straight to the point

See how much easier that is to track? This is of particular importance on above the fold content (content that is visible without a user needing to scroll down the page) on landing pages.

9. Segment for multiple persona groups

Your landing pages should offer self-segmentation with conversion actions for all of the different types of visitors that apply to your web site. Does yours?

Here’s how one online medical journal has simply segmented between doctors, residents, and medical students – all being identified as common visitors to the landing page:

Here are a few tips for successful user segmentation:

• Identify the problem that the specific type of user is trying to solve, and speak to that problem within the segment.
• Identify the type of conversion action most likely to appeal to that type of user, and offer it within the segment.
• Make sure that the next page in the conversion funnel speaks directly to the specific user type that was targeted by the landing page segment.

10. Follow the scent trail established by your ads

Humans shop on the web in much the same way as animals hunt; they catch the scent of their prey and follow that trail until they either find their prey or lose the scent. On landing pages, scent trails are established first at the ad level. This applies for organic search in the form of title and description tags, paid search in the form of ad copy, and even offline advertising on billboards, radio, and TV.

A perfect example of good scent can be found on the American car insurance company Geico’s website. Geico has made their spokesperson into a gecko in every advertising outlet imaginable. When you land on their home page, this is what you see:

If the gecko wasn’t present on this page, the scent trail would be much weaker and would likely cause many users to bounce (some of whom would probably still seek out the Geico home page, not realising that they had already been there).

Make sure that your landing pages, and the entire conversion funnel for that matter, maintain a consistent scent that your users can follow all the way until they catch their prey. As side notes, notice also their excellent use of contrast on call-to-action buttons and the rhetorical question in their sub-headline.

11. Move important items above the fold

There has historically been a push amongst designers to limit page scrolling to an absolute minimum for usability purposes. This is a good strategy in many instances. Obviously the more of your page that a user can initially see, the more likely it is that they will be able to find the important parts. But these days, with users being a bit savvier than in the past, if your page remains engaging enough throughout, users will typically scroll quite a while. This is what makes squeeze pages effective. Definitely be open to testing both long and short pages as potential solutions.

Still, in the cases of long pages, be sure to include the most important call-to-action above the fold. This can sometimes be challenging as roughly 10% of visitors to an average page will still be viewing at 1024 x 768 screen resolution. Accounting for browser windows, that’s about 520 pixels of clearance before the fold. Is your call-to-action visible in the top 520 pixels of your page?

12. Leverage white space where appropriate

Adding white space to a page can be a great way to improve eye-tracking and add clarity to important elements. White space is actually just a confusing term for empty space. The space itself doesn’t have to be white, but it does have to be devoid of content.

Here are a few white space tips:

• Try adding some white space between your copy and calls-to-action
• Increasing margin sizes for segments can be a good way to add white space
• Increasing white space between product images can reduce clutter and noise.

After all, this:

Is not as viewable as this:

But all that is different between the two is usage of white space.

13. A/B/n split test!

And lucky recommendation number 13 may actually be the most important of all. The tip is to split test your ideas. You never know unless you know, and the best way to know about your own website is to scientifically test. A/B/n split testing offers so many benefits that other types of testing do not, including:

• Ease of installation
• free facilitation solutions
• Controlled, scientific testing on randomly split, live traffic samples
• Capable of as many page variations as your traffic will allow for
• Calculated margins for error to the tenth of a percent
• And so much more!

Conclusively, before you write off your landing page as unlucky or failed, try these tactics and see if you can’t find a four leaf clover in the mix.

Posted by Scott Fowles

Source : BruceClay

Posted in: Landing Page Optimization