4 Reasons Your Landing Pages Suck
Landing pages are designed to engage, convince, and convert users. The purpose is to make website visitors paying customers. Unfortunately, very few brands actually do an efficient job of developing high-converting landing pages. Instead, they’re unknowingly throwing money down the drain by paying to send traffic to pages that aren’t properly developed or formatted.
4 Reasons Your Landing Pages are Underperforming
Do you have low conversion rates across the board? If so, you’ve probably tried to identify the root causes of these underperforming landing pages to no avail. Well, we have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that your landing pages are probably very poorly designed. The good news is that you can fix these problems without much trouble.
You must start by uncovering the problems and finding ways to correct them. Here are a few possible reasons for your poor conversion rates, as well as some examples for reference.
1. No Clear CTA
Every landing page needs a clear and concise call to action. You can’t assume that your visitors are going to reach the conclusion you want without specifically asking them to follow through with a particular action.
The good news is that you don’t have to spend lots of time brainstorming the best possible call to action that’s clever and unique. Simple works best. Take Spotify, the popular music streaming service, for example. Their landing page features two very simple call to action buttons that read: “Get Spotify Free” and “Get Spotify Premium.” If you do a good job with the rest of the landing page, your call to action can be extremely simple.
2. No Validation
Internet users are very savvy and understand the purpose of landing pages. Your goal isn’t to confuse them into thinking they’re on some third-party page that’s vouching for your product or service. They know they’re on a branded landing page. So instead of selling them with sales copy, use this space to validate your product offering through social proof.
Take Orion College as an example. This landing page for their business adminstration degree program features recognizable logos of their accreditations and memberships in order to instill confidence and credibility in the minds of visitors. When visitors see these logos, they automatically develop a sense of trust. Other forms of social proof include client testimonials, reviews and ratings, case studies, and sales figures.
3. Too Much Information
The goal of a landing page is not to tell the user about every little detail and aspect of your product offering. Instead, you’re trying to persuade them by using the most important information. If they want to learn more, than can contact you or visit various other pages on your website. Keep landing page content to a minimum – such as in this example by Path.
4. Slow Page Loading Time
Nothing kills a landing page from the beginning quite like slow loading time. According to this infographic by KISSmetrics, 67 percent of website visitors will abandon a page if it takes longer than 6-10 seconds to load. And for each one-second delay in page response, there is a seven percent reduction in conversions. This clearly shows the need for designing lightweight landing pages that are fast and responsive.
Improve Your Conversion Rates
Many brands and marketers tend to look at improving conversion rates as an impossible task that requires months of investigative work and careful strategizing. In reality, identifying the source of poor performance is actually pretty easy. However, you must know what you’re looking for. Consider the four causes referenced in this article and focus on improving your conversion rates starting today.