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Is your landing page feeling a little under the weather? Let's say its generating a good amount of traffic but failing to turn that traffic into leads.
Diagnosis: Chances are, what you have on your hands is a conversion problem. Don't worry though! The prognosis doesn't have to be as fatal as you think. With a little bit of TLC and a few quick fixes, you can nurse your landing page back to health and turn that ailing page into a conversion-optimized, lead generating machine.
4 Ways to Heal a Poorly Converting Landing Page
1. Make Sure Your Messaging Aligns: One reason for poorly converting landing pages is unaligned messaging and positioning. Take a look at your page's referral sources to identify where your traffic is coming from. Then take a look at the messaging from those sources. Perhaps you're generating traffic to the landing page via your blog and from social media, yet the language you're using to promote the offer in these channels isn't really in sync with the language you're using on the landing page itself. Conflicting messaging is an easy way to confuse visitors to your landing page and mess with their expectations, resulting in a lot of potential leads left on the table.
2. Make Sure You're Clearly Communicating the Necessary Action: Once visitors land on your page, does it clearly communicate what action they need to take? If your visitors are left with a question of what they need to do next to retrieve your offer, you definitely have some healing to do. Use clear, actionable language to let visitors know what action they need to take. Do they need to 'download' the ebook, 'register' for the webinar, or 'sign up' for the free trial? Use specific, action-based text that's clear and obvious, and avoid vague terms like 'submit.'
3. Remove Site Navigation and Competing Calls-to-Action: Your landing page is no place for competing calls-to-action for other offers. Including other calls-to-action on a landing page is a sure-fire way to increase your page's bounce rate, confuse visitors, and inhibit lead generation. Focus each landing page on one specific offer, and limit the chances of visitors navigating to another page on your site by hiding the top navigation from that page.
4. Test Form Lengths: Another factor that may be contributing to your landing page's conversion problem is form length. We always recommend marketers decide on their forms' length based on their particular leads goals (i.e. longer forms may result in fewer, yet more high-quality leads, and shorter forms may result in a higher volume of leads, but ones that are lower in quality). However, a page suffering from a low conversion rate may be a good indicator that its form length needs shortening. Remember: you should only be asking visitors for the information you need from them. Test a shortened version of your form, and see if it results in more leads, especially if that's your goal.
5. Offer Security: In a world where online privacy and security is becoming more and more of a concern for many internet users, sense of security is a must-have. Keep in mind that, by completing your lead-capture form, you're asking your site visitors to share some sensitive, personal information about themselves, and this is often a point of concern for many. To combat these issues, include an obvious link to your company's privacy policy on or near your form. This will help ease people's fears and fight many visitors' hesitation to fill out your form.
How else can you heal an ailing landing page?
Image Credit: Michael Tam
