One article to completely improve the conversion rate of landing pages!

The article is very long and you may not be able to finish reading it in a short time. You can save it or share it first.

When you see these titles, are you a little excited?

After opening the landing page ...

There is only the registration page for teachers of Chinese as a foreign language...

There are only gimmicky diet and meal replacement pills...

Advertising materials are the first step to customer acquisition, but many people are "diligently lazy" -

Everyone is competing to see whose short video is more creative, more extraordinary, and more outrageous, but they ignore the fact that it is the "landing page" that can guarantee your conversion rate.

A vicious cycle of high exposure rate, high click-through rate, and rising CTR, but ROI remains unchanged or gradually declines.

If there is no good landing page to follow up, users who click through will not be converted substantially, which not only wastes the advertising budget but may also damage the company's image. Now that we are aware of the importance of the issue, how should we create a good landing page and optimize it?

This article aims to answer your questions about landing page optimization from a universal perspective. Landing page optimization is equivalent to continuously pushing the user's decision-making process to make the hard decision-making process as effortless as a slide. This article will conduct an in-depth analysis from the definition of landing pages, the components, methods, indicators, etc. of landing page optimization, revealing why landing page optimization is crucial to tapping potential customers and overall business growth.

So first let’s start by understanding what landing page optimization is.

When it comes to increasing conversion rates, most marketers advocate implementing numerous, multiple types of marketing strategies to boost numbers in order to stay ahead of today’s thriving competition. In order to achieve this goal, optimizing the landing page is often the first and most critical link that an enterprise must solve.

A landing page is the webpage where visitors land and view your brand’s products. However, in marketing terms, it is usually a separate page from other website pages, including the website's homepage. Its function is to guide visitors directly and specifically to specific products or services and encourage them to take the desired action.

Landing page optimization can be defined as the process of improving the performance of various page elements to ensure that they enable your business to achieve the highest conversion rate from page visitors. It is a part of conversion rate optimization (CRO) and includes methods such as A/B testing to reduce customer acquisition costs and maximize the value of advertising spend.

Generally speaking, most businesses usually use five types of high-converting landing pages, which are as follows:

1. Click-through landing page

These are one of the simplest landing pages used in online marketing. Their sole purpose is to provide visitors with all the relevant information about your product or service and showcase the benefits and context of use to convince them to move to the next step in the sales process. The hope is that these pages will increase click-through rates and direct visitors to a specific landing page where they will find the full deal details.

2. Form-based landing page

The purpose of creating a form-based landing page is to collect data and create a potential customer database for marketing and sales teams. A good lead generation landing page does not have any exit paths, that is, these pages do not have any internal or external links and only have a call to action button to submit the user’s details. Generally, this type of page has a simple style, clear content, and focuses on collecting visitor data.

3. Viral landing page

As the name suggests, this is a page that helps companies promote their brands through word-of-mouth marketing. Typical application scenarios are the "fission" and "distribution" activities in WeChat Moments or communities, or the landing page of the App's new fission activities.

The purpose of a viral landing page is not just to get more visitors to sign up, but also to get them to spread the word about what they discovered to their friends, family, and peers. This type of landing page not only needs to have outstanding content, but also needs to have enough sharing channel links so that visitors can subscribe and share with confidence.

4. Microsite landing page

Microsites are complementary websites to larger websites. These landing pages usually have personalized URLs related to activities and events. Although they are more than one page, they are still classified as landing pages because they are the pages that visitors brought in by channels such as paid online advertising, print and TV commercials land on. Movie trailer websites are a good example of how movies use microsite landing pages to attract traffic and achieve good movie promotion effects.

5. Unsubscribe landing page

An unsubscribe landing page is a page that assures customers that they have successfully unsubscribed from one or more of your services. It serves the opposite purpose of other landing pages. However, merchants can use this independent page to perform some operations. In addition to providing reassurance, you can also use this page to give users a chance to reconsider their preferences and decisions, or to prompt them to visit the site again.

The unsubscribe landing page generally only retains the key parts of the website, such as the footer, navigation bar, main menu, etc. It should be noted that necessary brand information needs to be exposed to encourage visitors to browse the merchant website again.

Just because a user decides to unsubscribe from a merchant’s services doesn’t mean they may not be interested in browsing the official website. You can add a “Second Chance” button to your page to let users resubscribe in case they decide to reconsider.

6. Long Sales Landing Page

When creating a long-form sales landing page, put brevity on the back burner and make sure your long-form landing page’s content addresses every question your prospect might have, eliminates any foreseeable obstacles to the purchase, and communicates every benefit of your product or service through this page. Remember, the characteristic of a long single page is not that it is long, but that each part of the long page can hit a part of the users or a part of the pain points.

7. 404 Landing Page

404 error landing pages may turn visitors off, but why not use these pages to your advantage? They don’t have to be dull and boring. Instead, you can make them as interesting as possible and provide plenty of information. Add eye-catching images or GIFs along with text. Provide links to product detail pages or campaign landing pages to boost visitor engagement.

In addition to informing visitors that they have landed on a page that doesn’t exist, give them a chance to learn more about your business and products, pique their curiosity, use humor to offset the error, and guide visitors back to the homepage or other landing pages.

Marketers need to understand that landing pages are an important part of a website and an important marketing tool. When ensuring that they cater to the needs of the target audience and business goals, and are designed and optimized in an efficient manner, landing pages can significantly contribute to revenue growth, goal achievement, and aid in conversion rate optimization (CRO).

When doing landing page optimization tests, we generally follow the conversion pyramid process proposed by the Eisenberg brothers. The conversion pyramid consists of five stages:

1. Functionality

Functionality is the most basic level. The most basic function that landing pages should achieve is functionality. They should not have any technical issues and there should be no disagreements during the visitor's visit.

2. Accessibility

The landing page must be easily accessible. That is, visitors should not have difficulty finding your landing page, so excellent SEO marketing, PPC, and other advertising channels become crucial. More importantly, your landing page should be easily accessible no matter what device your visitors use to access it.

3. Usability

Once the landing page meets the requirements of the first two stages, it must then be usable. There shouldn’t be any reading or operating difficulties, ad blocking, or clutter. Smooth navigation is a must to encourage users to take action faster.

4. Intuitive

The page elements and hierarchy of the landing page must make sense and logic so that visitors can immediately grasp the key points of the page.

5. Persuasiveness

Finally, the efforts made in the previous steps are based on persuading visitors to convert into potential customers and further into loyal brand advocates.

Before you start optimizing your landing page, you need to consider two important steps in the sales conversion funnel: optimizing traffic sources and playing with page elements.

1. Optimize traffic sources

There is a big difference between traffic coming from different channels, such as potential website traffic coming from clicks on paid search ads and traffic coming from social media ads, so it is important to optimize your landing page to cater to the needs of each potential customer source.

2. Play with page elements

Use different landing page elements effectively. The short board effect requires us to fill all the shortcomings in time. Therefore, no matter what the existing landing page looks like, if you don’t find and fix the loopholes early, you will eventually lose most of your potential customers and revenue.

Therefore, it is necessary to always pay attention to and optimize each landing page element, test different value propositions, optimize and improve form fields, add more social circle recognition content (social proof), etc.

What are the main factors affecting the performance of landing pages?

The main function of a landing page is to provide a hyper-focused experience designed to achieve the effective conversion goals of a marketing campaign. In the quest to build a visually appealing landing page, try not to overdo it. An eye-catching image or a beautifully designed page may win some praise in the short term, but in the long run, they’re useless if they don’t convey the right message in a clear and concise manner.

When creating landing pages, you must focus on creating concise and easy-to-understand pages that will have the potential to achieve your desired conversion rate goals.

Here are nine key elements to focus on for a quality landing page:

1. Main title and subtitles

Headlines and subheadings are not only about selling your product or service to potential customers, they are also about connecting with them and convincing them to take action. So, optimizing them should be a top marketing priority. Creating attractive headlines and subheadings can keep visitors on the page and browse through product details. Many companies place eye-catching main and subheadings on their landing pages to retain visitors.

2. Pop-up page

The second step in optimizing your landing page is to pop up a page that attracts visitors. Make sure the page is concise and clear, and the information it conveys is concise and clear. Try to list out the main points to reduce the reading cost for visitors and allow them to digest the information better.

3. Images

Pictures are the most important factor that attracts attention on a web page. Therefore, images and tones that match the brand or product tone can leave a professional and neat impression on visitors. It is recommended that every company should have a unified VI, or at least choose pictures of a unified style and a theme color similar to the logo.

4. CTA

Attractive and convincing CTAs can continuously promote traffic conversion. When designing, you can focus on the following aspects:

CTA is not about shocking people, but about conveying the most appropriate emotions, values ​​and guidance in the right scenarios, so that the click-through rate can be higher. As shown in the figure, Lingxi’s homepage has been A/B tested many times and found that the most bland “free trial” at the beginning is the most effective:

5. Forms

Collecting sales leads is one of the important purposes of creating a landing page. When designing the landing page, you should also pay attention to the simplicity and understanding of the form, and display the most relevant and important information for your business, which can greatly increase the possibility of visitors filling out the form.

6. Customer or social media testimonials

Customer or social media testimonials include scores, reviews, and introductions on various review integration platforms, customer success stories, brand walls, usage reviews, etc. displayed to the outside world, and can also include daily interpersonal communication evaluation content.

But one thing to note is that if the content displayed is from a more influential and professional group within the target customer base, the persuasiveness will be stronger. Most of the successful companies in the world use this approach to their advantage.

In addition, some iconic awards in the industry, reports from authoritative media, social evaluations, recommendations from third-party organizations, etc. can all enhance the credibility of the company, its products and services, and improve its brand image and reputation.

7. Online Customer Service

If the content of the landing page is attractive to visitors, then the online customer service function on the page can add impetus to lead conversion. If you can provide real-time answers and help to visitors who are active on the site, you can greatly optimize the brand image and help the company build a trusting relationship with visitors. Through customer service's answers and guidance, you can also more quickly lead visitors to the next steps of the sales funnel and close deals more quickly.

In a study, eMarketer found that 63% of respondents who called online customer service were likely to return to the site, and 62% were likely to purchase from the site.

8. Color contrast

High-quality page designs often dare to use strong contrasting colors to attract visitors' attention. Combining color contrast, clarity and CTA terms can add icing on the cake.

9. Fold appropriately

When designing a page, people often emphasize leaving blank space on the page. When delivering content, this idea can sometimes be used appropriately. One screen certainly cannot hold all the information you want to express. In this case, please put the most important elements of the product first to encourage visitors to scroll and browse to get more information.

However, A/B testing is also needed during use to determine the most suitable way to place information.

It should be noted that the above factors cannot guarantee that the performance of your landing page will be significantly improved immediately. All improvements require analysis of page elements and relevant effect testing to achieve the desired effect.

Careful readers may have noticed that A/B testing has been mentioned many times in this article. If you are interested, you can leave a message in the comment section to tell us. If there are many comments, we will write a special article to explain to everyone how to do A/B testing most effectively.

Improving the effectiveness of a landing page requires the addition of multiple efforts. As long as you pay enough attention and attention to it, you can get closer to the desired results. In addition to the influencing factors mentioned above, there are many non-page components that can improve the effectiveness of the landing page.

1. Attractive offers and discounts

An excellent landing page is not only about beautiful page design, but also about providing attractive products and quotes, allowing visitors to get the information they want, and using sufficiently attractive quotes to urge visitors to take subsequent actions such as understanding or purchasing. You can choose provocative language such as direct quotes, exchange offers, etc.

When setting your offers and discounts, ask yourself questions like “Will my target audience benefit from my page?” and “Is my offer more attractive than my competitors’?” This will be very beneficial to the development of your company and products in the long run.

2. Reduce Page Loading Time

Page loading time is a seemingly insignificant but very important metric. For every extra second of page load time, you lose 7-11% of page views. Slow page loading can easily cause potential customers to feel dissatisfied and frustrated during the browsing process, thus affecting their impression of the company and products. Therefore, it is crucial to reduce page loading time as much as possible.

3. Design page content from the perspective of visitor needs

When visitors browse the landing page, it is necessary to analyze the visitor behavior, segment the needs of the target audience, and prepare page content for different sales conversion steps. It is important to clearly understand whether visitors are trying to solve a problem, find customer cases, or think about purchasing decisions on the current page, and use this as a goal to directly address visitor needs.

4. Create a seamless experience

Whether it is a landing page, official website, advertisement or email, the same wording should be delivered as much as possible, constantly emphasizing the advantages of the product so that target customers can receive seamless information and gain more conversion opportunities.

5. Use urgency and scarcity to drive action

Just like scarcity and urgency in the six principles of persuasion, emphasizing special benefits, exclusive information, or revealing the shortage of products during the persuasion process, urgency and scarcity will greatly stimulate the fear of losing or missing out, thereby making visitors feel the urge to take immediate action.

6. Focus on the SEO of your landing pages

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a secret weapon that can drive more traffic to your landing pages by improving their web search rankings. By adding relevant keywords to the page content, the content that visitors search on the Internet resonates with the content of the landing page, which can attract visits more quickly. The more relevant the keywords are to the visitor's search, the higher the search ranking of the web page is likely to be.

When it comes to the use of landing pages, creating one is always the beginning. It is more important to continuously measure important indicators and make adjustments afterwards. Although different businesses may have different metrics to measure the effectiveness of their landing pages, the following are some universal metrics.

1. Page visits

As the name suggests, page visits refer to the number of people who visited your page within a certain period of time. The higher the number of visitors, the higher the possibility of conversion. If this number is lower than you expected, try optimizing your promotion strategy to get more visits to your web page using email, social media platforms, optimized keywords, etc.

2. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who exit from your landing page (or website) without visiting a second page. There are many reasons why visitors bounce from your page. The most common reasons are as follows:

Landing page bounce rates are generally divided into the following three categories:

If the bounce rate of a page is higher than 70%, especially when traffic enters the page, it will have little effect on promoting marketing activities. The best way to reduce page bounce rate is to thoroughly check the page for vulnerabilities, use heat analysis charts, long-image analysis, and customer service records to profile visitor behavior and identify vulnerabilities and fix them.

3. Traffic Sources

Knowing the traffic sources that bring high-converting visitors can help you design your marketing campaigns better and drive more conversions. The more you understand the results that various traffic sources drive for your business, the better you’ll be at achieving your goals.

Here are some traffic sources to keep an eye on:

4. Submission Rate

This submission rate usually refers to the percentage of visitors who fill out and submit your lead collection form and reach the "thank you" page. The higher the number of submissions, the better the optimization of the landing page. If your conversion rate is low, it’s a good idea to make adjustments to the page and run A/B tests to check for problems so you can optimize accordingly.

5. Form abandonment rate

Form abandonment rate is the percentage of visitors who start the form filling process but leave without submitting. There are many reasons for this: perhaps your form is too long or involves private information of your visitors, the questions are difficult to answer or it is hard to navigate.

The best way to increase your form submission rate is to make sure your form questions are a perfect match for the product value you’re providing. Before placing the form, it is best to have it self-completed and evaluated by staff. Ask yourself: “Will I answer my residential address in the form?”, “Should I enter my credit card details when signing up for a free trial?”, “Should I provide my phone number?” If not, then consider removing such fields from the form or modifying the content to reduce form abandonment rate.

6. Proportion of potential customers

In addition to the above metrics, it is also critical to measure the proportion of potential customers. This metric helps determine the percentage of leads that convert into paying customers through your landing page.

If the goal is to improve the conversion rate of the landing page , it is not enough to just analyze how many people have landed on the page, registered an account, and talked to customer service. What is more important is to convert these potential customers into paying customers. Sometimes, landing page optimization is more than just tracking key metrics and writing down numbers.

It may involve redefining your target audience, or re-evaluating your sales and training programs. The ratio of leads to paying customers can provide you with insights to analyze the effectiveness of your efforts and make relevant improvements.

Please note that a good conversion rate depends on your offer and product, which can improve the quality of leads in the conversion or sales process. Typically, the average landing page conversion rate is 2.35%. However, a good landing page conversion rate is usually between 5% and 10%.

Stick to the end, the live class is waiting for you at the end of the article!

The next step after landing page optimization is to convert potential customers into loyal paying customers. Some of the ways to do this are as follows:

1. Optimize the “Thank You” Page

Even though we just optimized our landing page, it’s important to add a thank you page to our optimization list. A thank you page is not only the first step in the interaction after a potential customer conversion, but it also provides you with a window to increase the satisfaction of new customers and make them believe that they have made the right choice. Remember, your goal is to convince new customers that the item or service they purchased was worth the price and to get new customers interested in your other products and services as well.

A good thank you page should include:

2. Focus on the customer payment journey

While the conversion of a lead into a paying customer is influenced by a variety of factors, there are things you can do to influence the decisions they make during their paying journey. This journey consists of three main stages.

Stage 1: Awareness

Gather relevant information about your potential customers and note their doubts and pain points. Use this data to solve their problems by sending targeted information, white papers, review content, etc. to reachable platforms, ensuring that your content pages are optimized and prompting them to move to the next stage.

Stage 2: Interest Stage

When your prospects reach the interest stage, nudge them toward making the decision to choose your product or service. They’ve already interacted with your website, now direct them to a page with a product or service demo video, or prompt them for a one-on-one demo, Q&A to capture their interest.

Stage 3: Decision-making

Once your prospect has decided to buy, after weighing all the pros and cons, focus on making an attractive offer and pushing them to complete the purchase. Push landing pages with promotions, discounts, and even additional services to potential customers, especially new users, to continue to attract their interest.

Converting leads into paying customers can be a tedious task as staff need to nurture every detail before the lead form is submitted. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the characteristics of customers at each stage and address all their queries.

3. Stay Connected

Once a person signs up and receives information about your products or services, they become your potential customer. You need to work hard to build relationships with them and stay connected to ensure they convert into paying customers. The benefit of doing this is that you can address the problems and pain points faced by potential customers who are interested in your product or service, provide a product/service demo, and ensure that they are satisfied with what you have to offer.

Marketing Sherpa’s report points out that landing page optimization is one of the most effective pages in the marketing process. Many companies in the world are gradually elevating landing page optimization to an important strategic position and allocating budgets and resources for it. The specific optimization path and corresponding improvement rate are as follows.

Obviously, once you’ve tasted the sweetness of landing page optimization, you’ll want to test it again. A/B testing of different versions can help you build the perfect landing page and find the elements that are most attractive to customers and best introduce your products and services, thereby bringing more conversions.

Use different color combinations and different image styles to conduct a comprehensive analysis of each page element. For example, the following K12 education institution’s online low-cost course landing page has two versions that were A/B tested. Version A allows direct purchase without leaving a phone number, but the price is 59.9 yuan. Version B requires a phone number to purchase the course, but the price is only 9.9 yuan.

The final test results showed that version A had a 27% higher telephone retention rate than version B, and also brought better results. This is mainly because the two versions provide different information frameworks. In fact, the ultimate goal of the low-priced course landing page is to leave the customer's phone number and information, while version A gives people a feeling of getting a bargain, while version B uses a tougher tone, which may cause disgust among some customers.

Let’s take a look at a landing page of a major home improvement brand. They conducted A/B testing on different headlines and wordings, and made different designs for the users’ pain points of “fear of trouble” and “fear of being cheated”. The landing page that focused on solving the pain point of “fear of trouble” had a registration conversion rate that was nearly 30% higher than the other version.

It can be seen that A/B testing can exist in each step of landing page optimization. Be sure to always test different elements and components to achieve the optimal version.

Landing page optimization seems simple, but each step requires a lot of research and testing to avoid mistakes and achieve the desired effect. Please pay attention to the following errors.

Mistake 1: Too much text

In this day and age, no one has the time or patience to read endlessly just to learn about a product or service. If they don’t find what they’re looking for within 3-5 seconds of arriving on a page, they’ll definitely exit without hesitation.

Avoid filling your landing page with paragraphs. Use minimal text and simple graphics or images to make the page look impressive and impactful. Here is a good example.

A title that is too abstract will confuse people. Never assume that visitors can spend time reading all the text on the page and then interpret your product. Instead, simplify the visitor's thinking and convey the information to them with a direct and concise title.

A descriptive title also does another important job: it “sticks” in your visitor’s mind for as long as they stay on your website. In contrast, the lack of a useful, descriptive title can create a confusing experience for your visitors.

Listed below are some of the headline issues that you must avoid:

In short, your title should be short, clear, descriptive, and powerful enough to showcase what your product has to offer.

Mistake 3: Unclear CTA Message

After a visitor arrives at your page, sees the title, and reads some relevant instructions, what is the next action you want him to take? Immediately following the relevant content should be a call to action or CTA button.

If your landing page doesn’t have a prominent call to action, CTA button, or has too many calls to action, your visitors may be confused about what the next step should be. If the page has two prominent buttons, try reducing it to one and don’t force your visitors to make a choice.

Mistake 4: Lack of customer testimonials and other credibility enhancements

Even today, many marketers think that adding social proof or trust badges is unnecessary. They think that those things take up too much space on the page. But in today’s society, social proof is very important. Visitors will want to know who else is using your product or service and how they benefit from it. This information will also influence their final decision. Therefore, please add customer testimonials, success stories, awards, etc. on the landing page. This is a good opportunity to showcase the advantages of your product or company.

Mistake 5: Using too many online images

When designing a landing page, people often want to make the website more beautiful, but in fact, using real pictures can better optimize the effect of the landing page. A marketing experiment confirmed that a company using a photo of the founder as the image of the landing page was more beneficial to conversion rate than using a photo of a smiling girl wearing headphones. By doing so, the company's customer conversion rate increased by 35%. Because online images seem to be less effective than real pictures, using more realistic and relevant pictures is the right way to enhance the credibility of your company or product.

Mistake 6: Ignoring the primary and secondary distribution of pages

The content distribution of the landing page should follow the distribution of human attention and the order of reading. It should use different font sizes, different image sizes and content distribution to subtly guide visitors to read and think about the content, and ultimately lead them into the conversion channel. Put the content that visitors most want to see in the front to make it eye-catching, and place the CTA button correctly, so that your landing can also achieve the desired effect.

The landing page is an important part of the marketing process. The reason why it is called a "landing page" is that people place their hopes on the transaction. Therefore, this requires us to spend enough time and energy to develop it thoroughly. As the saying goes, once you get it right, you get a hundred things right. The subsequent marketing results may be completely different as a result.

In order to prevent the landing page from becoming a "farewell page", we need to truly start from the user's perspective and think about what problem the visitor wants to solve when opening the landing page. Next, the only thing we have to do is to respond to the visitors’ needs and answer the questions in their minds on the first screen of the landing page.

Author: Lingqi

Source: Never Sleep