Your marketing landing pages may receive a lot of traffic – but are you converting those visitors to hot leads? For marketers, nothing’s more frustrating than low conversion rates, especially when it’s challenging to determine what the actual cause is.
Marketers must consider several possibilities to correct their errors and create winning landing pages.
Website loading speed makes a massive difference. In fact, even a 1 second delay in page load times can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions.
Several factors may slow down your landing pages. Oversized images are the most common reason. In an analysis of around 18,639 landing pages, pages without oversized images led to an average conversion rate of 11.4 percent, compared to 9.8 percent for pages with oversized photos.
Each landing page should include only one direct call-to-action that informs visitors what to do next. Competing CTAs can create confusion among visitors, which then result in fewer leads. Research shows that landing pages with only one link led to an average conversion rate of 13.5 percent. In contrast, pages with two to four links led to an average conversion of merely 11.9 percent. For five or more links, conversion rates dropped even lower to 10.5 percent.
Most visitors take only a few seconds to make their mind whether they’ll stay on a page or not. For this reason, it’s essential to include multimedia elements to add life to your landing pages. Studies show that using relevant videos on landing pages can increase their conversions by 86 percent. Keep in mind that you should spice up your landing page to make it more visually appealing, but don’t overdo. Always favor a simple, cleaner design over a page with many bells and whistles.
Currently, mobile users spend more than double time accessing the internet as compared to desktop users. So, if your landing page isn’t optimized for mobiles, you will likely miss out on a significant portion of the traffic. In fact, research shows a mobile-friendly landing page lead to an average conversion rate of approximately 11.7 percent, compared to 10.7 percent for desktop-only pages. Beyond making your pages responsive, you should also consider the differenes in the way users interact with your website on mobile vs. desktop. Mobile pages should be streamlined and include shorter, multiple-choice signup forms that are easy to complete on a mobile device.
Most web users scan a page rather than read them entirely. Due to this reason, landing pages with a high word count receive fewer conversions. Consider these statistics: Landing pages with less body copy lead to an average conversion rate of 14 percent, compared to 11 percent for landing pages with too much body copy. Landing pages in the business sector with less than 100 words convert 50 percent more compared to pages with more than 550 words.
For this reason, we recommend that you cut down on your word count and only include essential information within your web copy. Also, consider text formatting. Use headers, bullets, and spacing to break up large chunks of text.
As previously mentioned, every little detail on your landing page can impact your conversion rates. That’s why it’s important to test your landing pages as often as possible to ascertain what is working and what isn’t. Consider these stats on the benefits of frequent landing page testing:
There are plenty of mistakes that can negatively impact your landing pages – the above list is by no means exhaustive. But, we hope these common problems can help you identify a few improvements you can make to your own landing page. While reduced conversion rates may be frustrating, you can make a few small changes and see results quickly.