Wondering if landing pages are effective, but don’t know where to start? Here’s what you need to consider.
Let’s cut right to the point—the effectiveness of a landing page depends on many factors such as how the page was built, wehther it was optimized for conversions, your traffic source, your offer, etc.
However, there are a few quick wins that can be done in order to tilt the odds of success in your favor. And as you’ll see, not all landing pages are created equal. But once you get an effective landing page, you can significantly improve the profitability of your business.
How to measure the effectiveness of a landing page
Every landing page out there has a purpose—typically it is a single purpose that can be defined. For instance, a product page has the purpose of generating a sale, and a squeeze page is usually all about gathering the email addresses of the visitors, etc.
Therefore, the simplest way of figuring out how effective a landing page is to measure the conversion rate. This is basically the percentage of people that take up the offer of the landing page.
However, you may need to dig a little deeper into the numbers in order to determine how effective the landing page is, because the conversion rate may not tell the entire story.
It might be the case that a landing page with a high conversion rate in terms of generating an email address might result in a poor sales number on the back end. Therefore, you should aim to gather the relevant conversion details at every step of the sales funnel after the landing page.
Make the most of your traffic
Generating traffic can be one of the most difficult aspects of a business. It can cost money, time, or a combination of both. Therefore, you need to ensure that you’re able to generate as much high-quality traffic as possible while remaining within budget and scope.
A landing page is the best way of generating the most possible interest in an offer because each design element is aimed at achieving a conversion. When the conversion rate is poor you can always make use of A/B testing or qualitative analysis in order to improve it. This gives you control over the performance of your website without leaving things up to chance.
Oh, and make sure that the landing page and the place where you receive the traffic has a level of consistency. For instance, if the traffic is generated via pay-per-click ads, then the headline of the advertisement and the headline landing page should be identical or very similar. This is known as message match or ad scent.
How to increase the effectiveness of your landing pages:
- Keep them simple—Ideally, your landing page should only have the elements that contribute to a conversion. Keep all the other stuff for the website so that it does not distract from the offer and call-to-action.
- Testing—It is vital to execute regular testing to see what improvements can be made to the conversion rate. One of the best ways to test a landing page is with a simple A/B test. Or, if you’re not receiving enough traffic for A/B testing, you can use other qualitative testing methods instead. Using Hotjar is a great starting point.
- Excellent copywriting—The quality of your copywriting must be second to none. If you cannot write in a compelling manner then a suitable expert needs to be hired. With effective copywriting it’s all about persuading the audience to take advantage of the offer.
- Consider your audience—You need to match the landing page with your audience demographics. The type of language and level of jargon should be considered so that the customer can relate to the copywriting. Also, the offer must match up with what problems the target audience is likely to be having. You also need to clearly state the solutions that are to be had from taking advantage of the offer or buying the product.
Conclusion
The effectiveness of the landing page is completely dependent on how well it’s optimized. However, the potential of landing pages cannot be underestimated for pushing the offer onto your customer base.
Furthermore, you’ll typically need to go through a process of testing to achieve a good quality conversion rate. Otherwise, you’re basically shooting in the dark trying to get a well-optimized landing page.
You can also take a look at the various examples of successful landing pages out there to see how it is done. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when you can take inspiration from proven strategies.
We hope that now you have a better idea of how to create an effective landing page and the value they possess for virtually every business.
If you want to learn more about what specific elements to put on your landing page, I encourage you to check out my FREE guide called The 7-Question Landing Page Framework.