6 Landing Page Optimization Best Practices [With Examples]

Why to optimize any landing page

There is a lot that has been written about creating better landing pages and you have most probably read a lot about landing page optimization tips to create better landing pages that gets higher conversion. So why the heck should you read this post as well? Because it underlines one important aspect, one secret that marketers like you and me forget when crunching numbers – listening to what the customer says.

You have converted customers before you optimized for conversion and you will be losing customers ever after optimization. The point is, you have been doing a few things right which has brought the customers in and the objective is to do the right things more in order to convert more visitors.

Table Of Contents:

1. Listen to your customers
2. Observe your customer
3. Create an engaging landing page
4. Do not sell in the headline
5. Play with the content
6. Make the sign-up easy

1. Listen to your customers

Nobody would know about the positives and negatives of your website/landing page better than your customers. As mentioned already, you have to increase the positives and decrease the negatives and to do that; you need to know what they are. The easiest way of knowing them is asking your visitors about it.

• Ask the converted customer; what made him convert.
• Ask your non-paying customer; what irked him.
• Gauge their need; ask them about their purpose of visit.

Something like this (Alert: self-promotion coming in):

2. Observe your customer

There are a few things that you can neither ask your customer nor he could tell you. They are his responses to the different visual stimuli on your landing page. You can track that with the help of the modern tools like:

• A/B Testing: You could play with the headlines of your pages and track the responses and use the better one, simple. Need to know more? See this.
• Multivariate Testing: It isn’t different from A/B testing but allows you to carry out many such tests concurrently. There can be a lot of different landing pages with different combinations of headline, video, pictures, CTAs and you can track all the responses.
• Heat Maps: It allow you to determine which elements on your landing page are grabbing your visitor’s attention, and which elements are being ignored. On the basis of the results, you highlight or dumb down the parts of the page required.

The process is called as Implicit Feedback and a combination of explicit and implicit proves out to be more reliable than one of them used exclusively.

Once you have the insights, you have an idea of what your visitors want. Now it is the time to deliver it to them. I have listed down the 5 most important things to remember while optimizing for conversion.

3. Create an engaging landing page

People generally play with the look, feel and length of the landing page. I agree all the three are important but, what’s more, important is the combination of the three resulting into an engaging experience for your user. The conversion-rate-experts did an awesome job for Moz.com.

It can be long and graphic or short and to the point but it must be able to explain the most important things the customer gets after buying your product. A visitor comes to a landing page in search of something. If he has landed on your page, you have been successful in getting his interest, now strive to keep it.

Sue me for self-promotion, but tell me honestly, don’t you admire our landing page for lead generation?

4. Do not sell in the headline

While you can very well check the effectiveness of your headline by an A/B test, it is a consensus amongst the conversion rate experts that hard selling in the headline seldom works.

Instead, you should try to make the visitor curious and engaged about your offer, giving him a sneak peak about your clients or things your offering can do for the user.

5. Play with the content

Do not get bound by constraints of just text, pictures or videos. Mix them up. Different people feel comfortable with different media. You never know what can work for you. You can also use multivariate analysis to get to the perfect combination but till then play with what you can.

With the right mix of design, video and testimonials, CodeAcademy made me fall in love at first sight:

6. Make the sign-up easy

Not just the CTA but everything else. For example, many people are not comfortable with sharing their credit card info for a free trial, remove the requirements. Make the signup form short and easy; involve social sign ups if they help.

This is how we simplified our sign-up form.

Reiterate – Revaluate – Recreate

Conversion rate optimization, as wisely put by Rand Fishkin is a combination of science and arts. You can never be sure of what will work and what won’t. The idea is to take an informed decision and if it doesn’t work, implement changes.

Wish you more conversions every day, Happy Marketing!

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