Landing pages are one of your most important lead generation tools, most brands and companies focus on their product details and benefits instead of focusing on their landing page. Despite all the design guidelines and best practices available these days, We witness far too many brands make the same landing page mistakes.
Today Social Champ is going to lay it out straight: avoid these mistakes with your own landing page designs in order to increase your conversation rate and increase social presence.
Slow Page Speed
Let’s start with Headlines? Sure. or maybe CTA’s? Makes sense.
But, shouldn’t we be focusing on Speed first? Because according to most web-designers, speed has probably the single biggest impact on landing page performance.
Let’s prove it with some stats, according to Kinsta’s Beginner’s Guide to Website Speed Optimization, if a page fails to load within 5 seconds, 74% of people are bailing.
It gets worse for eCommerce sites. Moreover, a study by Neil Patel revealed that Only a little 3-second delay could lead half your traffic to bounce. That’s why some top brands load pages in less than a second!
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how valuable that landing page offer is if visitors have to wait for it to load its content. Especially on mobile, which according to a study by Smart Insights, has outpaced desktops for internet usage, and over multiple pages during one conversion event.
To Avoid This Mistake
Here are a few quick tips to make landing pages blazing fast.
Test Your Page Speed
Recommended Tool: Pingdom or Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Clean Up Your Code
Recommended Tool: If you are using Javascript, use Varvy’s Javascript Usage Tool.
Minimize Redirects Where Possible
Recommended Too: Screaming Frog
Resize and Compress Images
Recommended Tools: Wistia, Compressor.io
Upgrade Your Hosting
Recommended Hosting Providers: Kinsta, WP Engine, or Pagely.
The CTA Button Doesn’t Stand Out By Itself
Call-to-action (CTA) buttons are the buttons you use on your landing pages to guide users towards your goal conversion. But the CTA button gets lost in the melee if there are too many links competing for attention. Look at this example.
Which button is the CTA? It’s hard to tell in all this confusion. My guess is the form, whose button says, “Find Your Card”
Not only does this CTA sound way too generic, but the page also has an attention ratio of 60:1. There are 59 other links that a visitor can go to.
To Avoid This Mistake
Make your CTAs prominent on your landing page. Include a single one that grabs the visitors’ attention and stands out on the entire page, Instead of including more than one CTA. Use appropriate colors and design elements to make them visually appealing and evident. Also, place the CTA where it is more noticeable and test different variants to know what works well.
Not Having Enough Landing Pages
At the starting of this decade, studies were showing that the more landing pages businesses had, the better the results they were getting. The question arose, Why? Because these businesses are creating landing pages to highly specific buyer needs rather than trying to appeal to everyone with the same few pages. You are setting yourself up for failure before you’ve even started if you are trying to do too much with anyone landing page.
To Avoid This Mistake
Club W included below the header of their corporate gifting landing page, targets audience specifically with this landing page
The easy approach is to create separate landing pages for different conversion goals, buyer personas, potential prospects, each stage of the consumer journey – not just your products/services.
For example, if one of your conversion goals is to generate signups to a free trial for your beauty product, create specific landing pages to target female bloggers, fashion managers, sales teams or whatever your target audiences may be.
Lack Of Optimization In Forms
One thing marketers often overlook while designing landing pages is not optimizing the forms for conversion. The main focus is to keep in mind that the goal of the landing page is conversion. For someone who is in the Awareness stage, asking for details more than the name and email address would lead to losing them. It is, therefore, necessary to include forms that are relevant to the targeted audience and tested and optimized for conversion.
To Avoid This Mistake
Get a good optimization tool that lets you test and tracks your landing page performance. Start out with the basic information such as the name and email address and test for the various target groups to know what works best. Review the performance and identify areas that can be simplified to get maximum people to sign up.
Trulia starts with a simple form asking for address, followed by a bright orange button and emphasizes that the estimate will be personalized to your home.
The “Disconnected” Headline
When visitors see and click an ad on any social platform, they have a thought at that very moment that leads to having a few “expectations” of what they won’t see on the page that follows the click of the ad. You are shooting yourself in the foot, f your Landing Page Headline is NOT a continuation of the conversation that you started with your PPC ad.
To Avoid This Mistake
For example, let’s say you are selling electronics, but specifically, want a Landing Page for “Men Socks”. And let’s say your ad states the testimonial “The most comfortable and well fitting socks I have ever owned. After my first pair, I bought a dozen and threw away all my other socks.” – Sam R.”
The Headline is not only an easy thing to test, but the mistake that gets made too often is not continuing the conversation or not being the “other side” of the conversation that a visitor expects when they click.
Example – From an ad that states the above testimonial.
Not Mobile Responsive, Mobile Dedicated
Proven the fact that user visits websites more while using mobile devices, we’ve fortunately gotten to the point that we understand the importance of being able to use a website or landing page on a mobile device, but now marketers and designers focus on dedicated mobile-only experience.
The question arises that is the intent, distraction levels, and behavior are all different when you go from desktop to mobile? If yes, so why would we think that we can have the same type of info and goals on both devices?
To Avoid This Mistake
Marketers and Designers need to make sure they create landing pages by keeping mobile and other smart devices in mind. Keep the design and code lightweight to avoid loading issues. Stick to a single-column layout and place the CTA above the fold. Moreover, one tip is to keep the content to a bare minimum and use responsive form designs that can adapt to different screen sizes.
Using An Unclear Value Proposition
People are selfish. They don’t care about your product’s features, even if you think that your product’s awesome. People who land on your website want to see what’s in it for them.
A visitor visits a random landing page, he is struck by cheesy lines by marketers boasting about their product and its high-tech features.
The websites that follow the above-mentioned pattern lack a clear value proposition telling clients why they should buy the product.
Take a look at Khan Academy’s home page:
Both the headline and the sub-headline explain how you can learn anything, being a student, teacher or even a parent, carefully mentioning how it is always for everyone.
To Avoid This Mistake
- Remember it’s all about the customer, not your product
- Think about the biggest benefit your product brings to the client
- Usage of action verbs such as do, get, win, improve, etc. to describe the benefit
Lack Of Visual Content Especially Images
Humans process visual information up to 60,000 times faster than verbal communication. Which leads us to the developer our branding strategies interesting by using visuals – images matter a lot.
We wisely pick the Facebook ad images but the images on your landing pages are just as important. The absence or little usage of images on your landing pages can leave a huge potential untapped.
There are several reasons to use images on your Facebook Ad landing pages:
- Images help to tell a story faster
- They help to create emotions and trust
- They provide the basic structure to your page, making it easier to read
- A well-chosen image drives engagement
To Avoid This Mistake
Below listed are most common landing page image mistakes that Facebook marketers usually make (and that you can easily avoid):
- Irrelevant images – avoid it by always using an image that tells a story related to your product
- Distracting images – simply use images as visual cues but don’t let them steal the entire show
- Untrustworthy images – counter it by using high-quality scenic images that ignite positive emotion and trust
- Small images – always use high-resolution images (double size for retina screens)
- Boring images – assure that the story your landing page images tell is interesting for the visitor
Showcasing The Product
Since marketers are so used to seeing the product they sell, but it’s quite common, as witnessed, that many landing pages do not have any image or screenshot of the product they are offering.
As a customer, you’d like to see the product before buying it.
So when a Facebook ad landing page fails to showcase the product, the potential prospects are much less likely to buy the product and bounce back.
For example, Heap Analytic’s home page features customized gifs of their analytics tool.
Why this approach works so well:
- Visitors can see the actual product
- The zoom-in makes the image content readable
- The image is complemented by the text message
Zero/Unbelievable Testimonials
As we talk about credibility, marketers fake people out even more by leaving out proof that other people just like them have used their offer.
Every product owner or service provider should Include testimonials that are believable and from real people with real names, and real headshots, not generics.
To Avoid This Mistake
- Don’s use in-house testimonials from your own employees
- Use real names and real images
- Don’t use vague testimonials
- Don’t bury your good testimonials
Take a look at this perfect design to show the testimonials, by BioClarity!
Wrapping Up
This is it, although there are tons of other mistakes that we do, the simple approach is to avoid these mistakes and try to be as relevant as possible to provide a remarkable landing page experience to your visitors. The ultimate goal of any business is to sell their product or service and an effective landing page will help in moving their prospects a step closer to become customers.
