Nail Your First Impressions by Designing Landing Pages That Convert

Across various markets, the average conversion rates for business landing pages sit around 2% with the top quarter performers having a slightly higher percent, hovering at +1-2% higher.

Those numbers serve the businesses well but you can do even better! The top 10% are hitting over 11% and that is what you want. If you strategize and design effectively you can land even higher!

Conversion rate is a very important metric when it comes to sales and marketing strategy. The rate measures the percentage of visitors that complete an intended goal, most often closing a sale, but also includes:

By optimizing this rate a business can lower the cost of acquiring customers leading to an increase in value per customer. This ultimately increases overall revenue while decreasing overhead.

A site has 200 visitors and a 4% conversion rate with an average “value” of 20$ per conversion. This will generate 160$ of revenue from the website.

With a 2% increase in conversion rate, the revenue jumps by 80$ to 240$ even if the traffic to the website remains at 200 visitors because the number of conversions increases to 12.

Small changes add up relatively quickly and with conversion rates increasing the traffic will likely be increasing with word of mouth and effective marketing changes.

By and large, humans are visual creatures. The brain registers and learns new information up to 60,000 times faster than reading over text!

To incorporate relevant information and topics through image and video will increase conversion rate, time on page, and information retention dramatically.

This concept becomes very important when it comes to emphasizing key information or engagement points, most importantly the CTAs or Call-to-Actions that get placed on the page.

An interesting visual design is possible while also being clean and minimal. The most important thing for the page is your key business message, so keep this front and center. This is the first impression and the boldest item visitor sees.

Yet, space can be just as effective as what fills the page. When there is nothing on the page, the message is what the mind will focus on. The viewer will have a single thing on their mind, and they are not distracted at that point.

Understanding the intended audience is a huge part of the design aesthetic here. Knowing what imagery to use, what style down to the color choices and language. Small adjustments to color and arrangement of images can make measurable change.

It is important to continually utilize A/B testing because of this. This approach has a basic structure with only one step changing until complete:

The process will encounter slight changes depending on workflow but the general concept remains as such. With small changes and not an entire rebuild, each change needs to be observed and recorded against a control design.

Given enough resources, it is wise and very effective to design a new landing page for new marketing campaigns and promotions. This allows you to bring focus to targeted CTAs and campaign details.

Active engagement is very important. Any page can add an email button or a contact page. If you allow for multiple methods of contact, even better a live chat option, your guests will convert far easier.

Problems need must be solved and they need must be solved immediately. Even if there is not a problem, there are questions to answer. The nature of the world is a place of instantaneous contact.

Guests enter a page with this mindset and expect the same results. If you provide that you are fulfilling the newest business need of a growing internet community. Constant Contact.

The call to action itself will be very clear and accessible. However, the page itself is designed around the real object.

What this means is, the layout of the page and even specific bodies of text can be aligned and arranged to pull focus to the CTA and to make it more obvious to the viewer.

There is a layout concept named the “Inverted Pyramid” that essentially directs the visitor right to where you intended them to go.

The layout of the content gets designed in such a way that it points them, while they view and read, down to the page where they eventually arrive at the CTA item.

Choices surrounding language are important, so you need to make active and immediate selections. “Email Us” while technically a CTA doesn’t work like “Send Us an Email Now!” or “Don’t Delay! Get Your Free Trial”!

An effective CTA will stress the timeframe and, when applicable, will stress the importance and limited numbers of supply.

You have a short period to prove your worth to a visitor once they land on your page. The average time that a guest makes this decision sits at 15 seconds.

The unique selling point will show them what you have to offer over all others providing similar products in your market and answer why they need to partner with your business.

You need to pair this definition with the message of your business and returned to throughout showing the guest what they stand to gain by engaging with the business.

Do you want to make a huge number of friends? Get a huge number of people interested in what you have to say? Give away free things that they can use.

Provide them with helpful resources for free. It sounds like the opposite of your goal as a business, you want to close the sale. These are the people you want to make money off.

These free items will make sure those numbers and so many more.

Visitors want to know what you can do for them before they give up any of their time and money. They want to know a business or professional is legit.

By providing them with a service with no investment on their part you are building trust, proving your credibility, and already starting your relationship on a very positive note.

You are offering a resource to these people and because of that word of mouth will spread as you prove your worth to the community. Quality leads to mean higher conversion and ultimately higher revenue.

Testimonials are some of the strongest marketing tools that any business can use. They grow an immense amount of trust between a business and its audience.

These experiences are coming from the community that incoming customers are a part of. Potential buyers are hearing about the experience from a third-party that had already invested in the business.

The reviewers have nothing to gain by posting a positive review. A business that addresses negative reviews shows they are willing to admit mistakes and address and improve.

Engagement with customers shows them that they are not just another number or business transaction but someone who matters.

This has become more and more important with the digital community wanting more active engagement before committing to a business relationship in recent years.

As technology improves and develops more and more visitors become more and more impatient. The longer that a page takes to deliver content the less likely they are going to wait or be willing to fully consume.

The numbers are quite low even taking longer than 1 second up to three seconds can increase the probability of bounce rates by up to 32%.

Starting so quickly stresses the need for backend optimization. A lot of this is technical, relating to code and server-side information. Even if you are not directly working on this you can keep a watchful eye and test it.

Make sure to use quality hosting services, to use clean code, to use optimized media and images, scripting and plugins are kept to a minimum (if at all).

Don’t let long load times be the downfall of your top quality content!

You have a great product and great services, the customers are out there, and now it is time to get them to close that sale! Design and strategize your marketing while keeping these tips on landing pages in mind.

Remember A/B testing is an essential piece of the process. Get moving and stop by eBPearls for further help optimizing your conversion efforts even further!