The truth is, that without a powerful landing page, it simply doesn’t matter how much time and/or effort you’ve poured into your marketing campaigns. While a marketing campaign points a prospect in the right direction, the page puts the product front and center for them. Without a strong prompt coming from a killer page, your conversions won’t be as high as they should be.
In this article, we will list out 13 mistakes you should avoid that may hurt your landing page conversion rate optimization or CRO:
1. Misleading your Visitors
Do not try to trick your prospects by promising one thing, and showing them another or something they didn’t expect to see. You might get a click, but you won’t get people to engage. Not to mention, this will hurt your page quality. 55% of those who see clickbait leave the page within 15 seconds.
2. Confusing your Visitors
You must have a single-minded objective for the landing page. Multiple CTAs will hurt you here, as it will confuse prospects. You want them to take a direct action, and they can’t do that if they don’t know what to do, right? Unfortunately, about 48% of landing pages have multiple offers on them.
3. Hiding your CTA
Make your call to action glaringly obvious to optimize clicks! Visitors will not play a guessing game to figure out what you want them to do. Any confusion may lead them to abandon your page. In some cases, reducing the clutter around a CTA increases conversion rates by 232%!
4. Ignoring the Space Above the Fold
First things first, utilize this space to put your most important messages. Interestingly, videos perform great in this place. In fact, web users spend 80% of their time above the fold!
5. Skipping Mobile Testing
We now know that most users are consuming content and visiting web pages on mobile and varying devices! Mobile devices were expected to reach a total of 79% of global internet use by the end of 2018. As a result, you should never underestimate the importance of mobile responsiveness because if your page looks terrible, your visitors will abandon right away.
6. Straying from your Brand Identity
Keep all your content, including landing pages, consistent with your brand style! You don’t want to confuse your visitors who land on your page as they might think you’re two different brands! The average revenue increase attributed to consistent branding is 23%.
7. Including Too Many Pop-ups
Nothing will make a user click off faster than this (of course, a popup is fine, even expected). No one likes feeling advertised to, or invaded upon. 45% of ad-block users never want to view any advertising and want all possible ads removed from web pages.
8. Forgetting to A/B Test
A/B testing is a powerful tool for CRO. It’s simple: validate your decisions as you build your landing page so that it’s optimized. Only 52% of marketers that use landing pages also test them.
9. Forgoing Page Load Time Optimization
Patience may be a virtue, but the digital age has made us more impatient than ever. 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 53% click off web pages that takes more than 3 seconds.
10. Undermining the Power of Landing Page SEO
To drive more conversions, you should optimize your landing pages for search engines. Use the right content, right keywords, and the right onsite optimization techniques. Of course, businesses that use well-researched keywords rank 1.5 spots higher than those without.
11. Asking Visitors Too Many Questions
Create a form that’s short and sweet. We know long lead-capture forms give marketers plenty of data to work with, but visitors won’t be patient when filling out forms at this early stage. In fact, the optimal number for form fields is 3!
12. Letting Users Procrastinate
Now is the time to create a sense of urgency. You can do this through making your offer limited in some way. Travel websites spend billions of dollars driving traffic to their webpages, yet 81% of visitors leave before completing their booking. Why? They don’t feel that urgency!
13. Leaving them Guessing
It is integral that you use prominent visual cues like arrows, highlighting, bolding, and bright colors to guide the user. Do not leave it up to the user to figure out where to go, or what to click. Adding a simple arrow icon can even increase your CTR by 26%.
To find out how to create a landing page, it’s essential to make sure that it is conversion optimized. The above mistakes help you determine what practices you should avoid.
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