This is an older post. For more up-to-date information on landing pages, check out our 5-Step Guide to Optimizing Landing Pages or see if you need to make any of these 10 Quick Fixes to Build Killer Landing Pages .
What is considered an effective landing page ?
Landing pages are where a business captures leads. An effective landing page is capable of getting a high proportion of site visitors to provide their contact information for future lead cultivation. This is no easy task, however. Based on interviews with Service Marketplace providers , we offer 3 tips to help you build effective landing pages.
Before we dive in, it is important to note the interconnection between call-to-action buttons and effective landing pages. Prospects don’t automatically land on a landing page, and you need a compelling call to action message to motivate them to learn more about your business—and thus fill out the lead conversion form on a landing page. Therefore, while you improve the effectiveness of your landing page, don’t forget to design call-to-actions that induce people to click on them.
1. Content on your landing pages needs to exactly match corresponding call-to-action messages.
Prospects click on call to action buttons because they expect to receive information that a CTA button says the next page would provide. If they don’t quickly recognize the content on the corresponding landing page, they will leave. Therefore, make sure that whatever message your CTA button promotes is the focus of the landing page.
This tip carries one implication. Adhere to the rules for different stages of the sales cycle. Call-to-actions and landing pages can serve multiple stages of the sales cycle: obtaining contact information so that you can qualify leads later, getting leads to participate in demos so to allow more interactions, and the like. Depending on how close prospects are to becoming potential customers, their receptiveness to your products or services varies, and it won’t help you close deals if you push additional messages too early. Call-to-action buttons serve to proactively draw prospects closer to the selling point, while landing pages that correspond to CTA messages serve as a sign of respect for prospects’ choices. The combination of the two will make your website a rock-star sales representative.
2. Reduce required fields to what you absolutely need to achieve objectives for the current stage of sales.
Reducing required fields is analogous to making any part of a-call to-action button clickable . Both make it convenient for prospects to get what they want and thus increase their willingness to interact with your website. If you are at the stage of collecting contact information for future contacts, the four essential fields are: Name, Phone Number, E-mail, and Company.
Of course, you might also want prospects to provide more information that either reduces your sales reps’ work on researching leads or helps with data analysis. In that case, you can either make these non-essential fields optional or pick a select few fields. There is no rule for maximum number of required fields on a landing page, and you can experiment with slightly different numbers to decide how many fields yield the highest conversion rate for a particular page. In general, the more value prospects see in the resource they are getting (such as free trials instead of whitepapers), the more willing they are to follow instructions and fill out more fields. Utilize this consumer mentality well.
3. The infrastructure needs to be flexible so that you can experiment with different layouts and templates.
This probably applies to a webpage in general but is especially important for landing pages. As mentioned, experiments can help with determining the most effective number of fields for a landing page, which in turn makes it important to have an easy-to-change webpage. Having a flexible page can shorten your experiment period while helping you find the right number and launch it early.
There are definitely more ways to optimize your landing pages, and this article provides only a peak at available effective strategies. Without considering any of these elements, however, a landing page is unlikely to be able to sign up lots of leads. Only by building a corresponsive, user-friendly, and flexible landing page can a business aspire to attain online marketing success.
What tips do you have for improving landing page conversions?
Picture: Sean D'Souza
Free Download: Marketing Data: 50 Marketing Charts and Graphs
|
HubSpot has compiled over 50 original marketing charts and graphs on topics including Lead Generation, Blogging and Social Media, Marketing Budgets, Twitter and Facebook Download the ebook now! to have access to these charts for use in your own presentations |
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Andy Cook 10:39 AM on July 19, 2010
Nice article with easy-to-understand tips. I would think it is important to have the data from your lead forms go directly into a CMS as well? That way you can actually keep metrics on what is working, and what isn't.
Lily Zhu 10:57 AM on July 19, 2010
@Andy: Thanks for your comment, Andy. It's definitely a good idea to have your data on lead conversion rate for a particular landing page to go into your CMS dashboard for quick monitoring.
Best,
Lily
Lily Zhu 11:03 AM on July 19, 2010
@Michelle, yes, I recognize the other school of thought you mentioned. Indeed, making stuff free for download without requiring anything in return will greatly boost download rate and perhaps reach a much wider audience, but it's difficult to track how many or who among the downloaders actually come back to your site to further engage in your sales cycle. Being able to reach to more people is definitely valuable, but it's equally important to get results, which to many people mean customer acquisition. Besides, tracking individual leads' progress in regard to engagement with the company helps with data analysis--so that you know what kinds of people (of what profession or in what kinds of companies) are more likely to buy from you. This piece of information, in turn, can help you decide whether to specialize in selling to these industries/people.
I hope this helps,
Lily
Jon Patrick 11:12 AM on July 19, 2010
Your point about making sure the call to action matches the landing page content is right on. But it's interesting that in all the discussion about landing page optimization out there - and there's a lot - not much attention is given to the different types of Calls to Action, and testing the CTAs themselves. After all, it's the "offer" that ultimately compels visitors to convert.
For example, how do whitepapers fare vs. newlsetter subscriptions? For service businesses, are free trials effective? Is a 30 day free trial necessary or is 7 days enough? Obviously the answers to these questions will vary by industry, but testing these attributes is ultimately far more important than the color of the Order or Submit button.
Optimizing a landing page without first being sure the offer is optimized is like tuning the engine in your car only to discover your passengers would rather fly.
Lily Zhu 11:24 AM on July 19, 2010
@Jon: Great insight. Regarding your questions:
--when we compare lead conversion on the website versus that through e-mail marketing, we need to first control the types of content being distributed (they should be at least of similar nature and address the same stage of the sales cycle). Also, while there can be many landing pages on your website (people can check out whichever whenever they want), subscription through e-mail marketing needs to be closely monitored. It's improbable to send all offers through e-mail (high frequency of e-mail marketing may annoy some subscribers).
--service business: you can still share free content on best practices on how to choose service providers, what kinds of results certain services (that your company provides) should yield, etc. Also, instead of free product trials, you can offer free consultation calls.
--30 vs. 7 day: depends on how comprehensive your product/service is. The more complicated it is or more features it has, the longer it may take for people to see the benefits your product/service brings.
You can always test your results. Any industry best practices provide only a general guideline--the secret to success lies in your internal data analysis and continuous experimenting.
Hope that helps,
Lily
Rich 12:39 PM on July 19, 2010
Always a good reminder of the basics. However I must chuckle a bit at point #2. Whenever registering for a HubSpot webinar it has about 8 or 9 mandatory fields to enter. Why do they need my physical address! On a number of occasions I have bailed out when the webinar content wasn't compelling enough for their extended request for information! Of course it's been a long time since I put anything in remotely useful in those fields ;-)
Lily Zhu 9:47 PM on July 19, 2010
@Mike--thanks for your comment. Yes, I do think that measurement is the ultimate recurring step that allows us to gauge how effective any CTA or landing page design is.
Thanks, Lily
JT 8:28 AM on July 20, 2010
Great tips. I recommend adding great design and a funnel approach.
Lily Zhu 8:33 AM on July 20, 2010
@JT: Thanks for your encouragement. Great design definitely helps--would you like to elaborate on what you mean by a funnel approach?
Thanks,Lily
Mckinley Media Group 12:32 PM on July 20, 2010
Great Tips...
(I know that's not much of a comment, but I had to show acknowledgment, best wishes..._)
Lily Zhu 12:43 PM on July 20, 2010
@Mckinley Media Group: That definitely counts as a comment! Thanks for your encouragement.
Best,Lily
diseño murcia 4:58 PM on July 20, 2010
Good landing pages generate great advantages
Larry LaFata 10:55 AM on July 21, 2010
Thanks to your great tips here, my latest site redesign tries to make every page a landing page; for opt in, product trial or newsletter.
Lily Zhu 11:04 AM on July 21, 2010
@Larry: making every page a landing page is not a bad idea-I will only make sure that each of them has something unique to offer (instead of redundant offers). Also, prospects might want to spend a good deal of time reading information uninterrupted by offers or forms, so inserting a few information-rich webpages can provide a good balance to your landing pages.
Hope this helps, Lily
Beth the IMVA 12:08 PM on July 21, 2010
@Lily I think TJ means that there are specific pages/steps involved in the "conversion" set up of the landing page. To track how and which route is more effective. I'm doing that for a client and the most I see is that the more links and places a visitor can go and veer off the "conversion" trajectory the less likely it ends in a conversion.
I see clients insisting on keeping all the extra links and this is going to continue to slow down and cost sales. A good funnel is a route with few (if not zero) navigational links that take the prospect away from the desired action.
Lily Zhu 1:46 PM on July 21, 2010
@Beth: very good point. I certainly agree. I see different landing pages building upon each other just as one stage of sales cycle follows the previous one. Instead of free offers that target the same stage of a sales cycle, a company is likely better off if it provides the most compelling offer for that particular stage and provides a differnet kind of offer to further engage those who fill out the first form.
Thanks for addressing my question, Lily
Lily Zhu 5:15 PM on July 21, 2010
@Foundation Repair: thanks for your nice comment! Landing pages are definitely fundamental to lead nurturing and eventually customer acquisition, though I'm flattered to hear that it's analogous to a foundation of a house (perhaps parts of it) ^_^
Thanks,Lily
Sean D'Souza 6:35 PM on July 21, 2010
Lily: Don't you think that the cartoon you used should be attributed to the correct source?
It's our cartoon you've used and you've probably read Google notices saying it's copyrighted, yada, yada, yada. So first, it's been used without permission, but then there's been no attribution.
Do you think that's fair?
Lily Zhu 6:50 PM on July 21, 2010
@Sean: The problem is resolved. I have not blogged for quite some time and forgot the important step of attributing credit to artists of pictures we use in our blog. Apologies and this will not happen again.
Lily
ManPuppy Men 1:02 PM on August 12, 2010
Flexible infrastructure is key. We've redesigned all of our data handlers as independent modules to be called conveniently by any front page html layout we like at the moment, and have tripled traffic in two months as a result.