Last updated on
February 8, 2023
Building an email list is a crucial part of doing business online, and to build strong lists, you need strong offers and landing pages too. While there are many simple tips available online to help create a basic, serviceable landing page, we wanted to dig a little deeper by asking leading digital marketing experts for their favorite more unique tips—ones they might usually keep to themselves!
Without further ado, here are eight pro tips to help you optimize your landing pages for boosted conversion rates in no time.
The first couple of tips on our list are ways to encourage opt-ins without scaring people away with too many questions and requirements.
With the “Breadcrumb Technique”, you keep things casual by asking one simple question initially, then coming back in for person information later. And with a secondary offer checkbox, you can potentially opt visitors into two lists at a time with no extra work for you or for them. Finally, consider embedding a custom widget that gives visitors a quick way to get what they came to your landing page for.
If you're trying to drive leads or SaaS trials/demos, using a traditional single step landing page could actually hurt you, regardless of all the other parts of the landing page you're testing.
We’ve discovered that people don't want to have a sales person reach out to them. “The Breadcrumb Technique” is the best way to increase conversion rates because it uses compliance psychology to get them to take the first step to convert:
Instead of asking for name, email, and phone number fields right from the first impression, we use an easy to answer the question as the first step. It allows the visitor to stay anonymous at first. Then we collect their personal info on the second step—works flawlessly!
-Johnathan Dane, KlientBoost
This tip will help to convert more email traffic on your landing pages, with an extra tick box for your primary website goal. A lot of email traffic goes to pages set up for what we call secondary conversions, such as eBook or whitepaper downloads. These downloads are valuable but not as valuable as requesting a demo or a call back from sales. An optional tick box for that primary goal won't lose you any downloads. Most users won't tick it, but the ones that do are more valuable leads for your business for zero extra effort.
-Rob Cleeve, Castleford
Our company offers a service called "Picatic Anywhere", which essentially boils down to offering a ticketing function that's powered by Picatic on any site. Event planners and organizers can utilize our system and directly embed our widget into their site or landing page, minimizing the steps needed for customers to convert.
We've seen great results in our customers that have used our Picatic Anywhere site widget. For a 6-month time period, users who installed our widget had a conversion rate of 12.8%, whereas before our widget was released, the conversion rate was hovering around 7%.
-Chris Chu, Picatic.com
With the ubiquity of social media, if your product is a good one you’ll have no trouble rounding up pictures of happy customers. Use them to your advantage (with consent from your customers of course)! Offering visual social proof can be far more compelling than just using numbers, and it lends credibility to your product that can help reduce your landing page’s bounce rate.
First impressions count as research indicates that visitors form an impression of a website within a fraction of a second. This means you need to be ruthless with clutter to keep content to a minimum, have a clear information hierarchy to avoid cognitive strain and use images of real customers to help communicate your value proposition.
In this A/B test for Cheekybingo.com we tested a new landing page which used selfies sent to us by recent winners. We also used a new aspirational headline, removed the bullet point text and changed the labels for the call-to-actions. This resulted in a 31% uplift in registrations and a 93% fall in clicks on the CTA for the homepage. Neal Cole, Conversion Uplift, Digital Marketing and Landing Page Optimisation Consultant.
-Neal Cole, Conversion Uplift
Once you have someone on your landing page, the next thing you want them to do is opt in by providing their email address. To get them to do so, you’ll need a compelling call to action—something a little more descriptive than just “Read More” or “Learn More”. Spending some time analyzing your AdWords data can help you here as well. Learn what your prospects are clicking on and use that information to your advantage when it comes to CTAs.
You can also provide a series of quick, to-the-point facts/features about why someone should sign up for your service or product.
Above is a great example from US Search. The phrase such as "facts win cases" is a prime example of a pre-CTA fact (pun intended) that serves to introduce the product while also piquing curiosity.
One landing page mistake we see far too often is generic copy on CTA buttons. People rarely put much thought into the text on their Calls To Action and this can be a conversion killer. If you want to increase your CTA click-throughs, be descriptive and unambiguous. Also, don't worry about keeping CTA text super short since it really depends what you are offering.
[caption id="attachment_1769" align="aligncenter" width="482"]
An example of more descriptive CTA text[/caption]
-Jeremy McWilliams, My Little Big Web
Use Smart CTAs to ensure each visitor sees a CTA that's tailored to them based on previous interaction (or lack of), making it much more likely to be relevant to where they sit in the sales funnel.
-Rob Cleeve, Castleford
In an effort to help better understand our customers and speak their language, we analyze our AdWords data to identify the keywords and phrases behind our most successful ads, the search terms that triggered our ads as well as some demographic data.
By spending the time to analyze our data, we get a better understanding of who our customers are, which puts us in a position to create content for our landing pages that seem catered specifically to the audience we are targeting – in terms of copy, style, format, etc.
This ability to refine our customer-persona and write customer-centric copy helps to ensure that we’re addressing the pain points of future visitors to our landing pages and are showing how our Google Shopping management software is better able to help.
-Bryan Natter, Sales & Orders
No matter how nice or prominent it might look when you include them, we recommend removing all social media links from your landing pages. Those are conversion "leaks" that lead visitors away from your landing page!
-Dennis Velasco, Xtendly
See if you can naturally connect a social or environmental cause to your product. Buyers today care about whether companies are socially responsible and it influences their shopping behavior.
-Roberto Garvin, Co-founder, Mofluid
So, will you be trying any of these unique conversion rate optimization tips? Did we miss any of your favorite tips? Tell us below!
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