You know that landing pages are important. But these landing page design flaws could kill any chances you have.
You’ve heard about landing pages and maybe you even use landing pages for absolutely every interaction where you expect a certain action to take place (like sign up for newsletter or sign up for whatever).
The trouble is that businesses and marketers using landing pages tend to work according to what they think is right, or going by what they’ve read and learnt, or because their neighbor told them so (just as it is with digital marketing in general).
Sometimes, a few things you do will sabotage your own digital marketing efforts. Some decisions you make with landing pages will work against you.
Here are some of those landing page decisions that can sabotage your own marketing efforts:
The “No link” rule
We are humans. We are creatures of habit.
Once we get used to using websites (which most of us do), we think that a landing page is just a miniature, one-page wonder.
Landing pages are wonderful, but they aren’t websites.
Many landing pages still have multiple calls to action, various links, and even social media buttons right on the page which wasn’t supposed to have anything except the main call to action.
Your habit of adding links and buttons could turn out to be disastrous for your landing page’s conversion rate.
Follow the “no link” rule and avoid adding anything that can be clicked on the landing page. You can have your social buttons and other fancy stuff on the “thank you” page if you insist.
The “Buy Now” Button
While nothing stops you from having a seemingly harmless “Buy Now” button on your landing page, it’s the worst thing you could do for your business
I’ll tell you why: no one gets up on any given morning deciding to be on your pipeline. It’s not as if customers are sitting there with a card in hand waiting to swipe, tap, or pay up.
Your customers need time to think, to ponder, to verify, to compare, or to just wait for the right time. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t always end up buying online on your first visit to a merchant, would you?
Landing pages are designed to generate leads through an action that virtually has no friction.
Requesting customers to download an eBook or to signup to receive an exclusive set of videos doesn’t ask for much.
Asking for a sale the first time visitors see your landing page? That’s a little too much to ask, if you ask me.
You don’t test pages
You create a landing page and you launch it. You let the world see it and many visitors eventually make their way to visit your page.
Some of them take action and some of them won’t (Hopefully, you are collecting these audiences appropriately to have a retargeting campaign set up later).
You now have data with you. Your Facebook ad got 324,876 impressions resulting in a total of 156,487 clicks. Of those clicks on your Facebook ad. Since not all clicks lead to landing page visits, let’s assume you had a total of 67000 visitors to your landing page.
Your landing page (a single version, let’s call it A) converts at 20%.
The question: How do you know if 20% is the best you can achieve? You won’t know until you test your pages.
If you had version A and version B and if you sent visitors to both the versions equally, you’d know which of the versions performed better.
Not doing this? You are basically throwing money out into the drain.
Don’t make decisions just because you can. Make decisions based on data, and because that data tells you a story.