You have a great product but struggling to convert your prospects into leads? Chances are your landing pages are not set up properly. There are many components to the success of this deceptively simple-looking webpage, but the three fundamental blunders that can ruin your efforts occur before you even set it up.
Spending some time with the preparation, and outlining exactly what your goals and context are, will not only save time and money in later stages, but enhance all other actions you take from there.
A good landing page is:
Focused. Are you selling or introducing yourself? You need to pick one.
Decisive. Have you made sure your prospects can say “yes” easily?
Measurable. Know what to look for, and eliminate everything else.
These three pillars will not only inform your design decisions as you build the landing page, but also re-focus your higher-level perspective of your entire lead generation strategy.
Let’s break down the top three reasons why your landing page never had a chance.
1. It tries to both position you and sell your product
Landing pages, as the name suggests, are data collection platforms - at the end of your marketing funnel.
If you have to explain your product while selling it, you won’t.
Recap and highlight are important of course, but if you distract your prospects from the action you want them to take, you can’t blame them for not acting.
Why?
Your marketing activity starts out as generic and inactive, and as prospects make decisions at set waypoints, you gain information and are able to guide them through a series of increasingly targeted steps, and onto the final one: your landing page.
By the time your prospects reach your landing page, they’re already educated and invested.
Educated, because whether they found your page through a search engine using your carefully cultivated keywords, or arrived on the back of a well-executed advertising campaign, their minds are already made up. All you need to do is summarize the most attractive features of your product, and give them an action to take.
Invested, because landing pages are not part of your content marketing ecosystem. To view them, prospects need to take action, whether that’s one or multiple, that directs them to a landing page that’s appropriate to that action.
Use your landing page to deliver the final “push”, not a lecture.
2. It offers multiple choices
It may be tempting to offer multiple options for your customers in the hope of them selecting at least one, it actually hurts your efforts in guiding them toward your sales funnel.
Landing pages are on-ramps for your sales highway, not intersections in your marketing street map.
Put it in context: if your landing page has more than one call-to-action, your prospects will have a lower conversion rate.
Why?
Similarly to having a clear purpose as detailed above, multiple calls-to-action distract your prospects.
The purpose of your various marketing efforts that has come before (let them be blog posts, email newsletters, advertisements, etc.) all act as qualifiers, narrowing your funnel and guiding your prospects toward a singular action. When they arrive at your landing page, they’re ready to make that decision.
If you present them with multiple choices, the landing page becomes just another step in your marketing funnel, instead of being the handoff to sales. Your prospect can take the action offered or bail out, but either way there’s a single decision on their part.
Multiple choices also upset the analytics of the page, and lead to results ranging from skewed to downright unusable.
3. It gathers prospects from multiple sources
By not letting cross-contaminated metrics to appear, you avoid skewed results, misguided decisions, and will have a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t.
Profitable decisions are made from clean data.
That’s not to say you have to create a uniquely design for every endpoint, but you need to make sure they’re configured and routed properly. Just as your landing page’s effectiveness decreases with more than a single action present, so does the opportunity diminish to deliver metrics that help you optimize your efforts when you lead all sources to a single endpoint.
Why?
As mentioned earlier, your marketing funnel is designed to constantly qualify and re-qualify your prospects as they make various decisions along the way.
By the time they arrive to the decision offered by your landing page, you clearly know where they’ve came from, what they’re looking for, and what information they received already.
If they take the action offered by your landing page, this means your sales team knows how to talk to them. If they don’t, you know where to look for optimization in your marketing assets.
On the other hand if your landing pages pull in prospects from multiple sources, you may not always see this clearly. If they convert, your sales team won’t have the advantage of knowing these leads, and if they don’t, you won’t have clear information on what went wrong and how to fix it.
Each landing page is an opportunity to gather clear, decisive metrics - and every such opportunity wasted weakens your present and future efforts in marketing and selling your product.