Wayne Lockwood: 6 Easy Ways to Perfect Your Landing Pages

Thursday, 6 April 2017

6 Easy Ways to Perfect Your Landing Pages

Author: Stacey Thornberry

Landing pages may feel as second nature to a marketer as it is for Steph Curry to make a 3-point basket. But, just like Steph, sometimes you can miss the mark. So, it’s important for all of us to brush up on the latest best practices to help us continually improve our skills.

I recently downloaded the ebook The Secrets to a Successful Landing Page, from the marketing agency Roger West, which held some helpful tidbits on how to ensure your assets are impactful. If you’re looking to become the master of landing pages, here are some of the highlights from this piece as well as a few of my own tricks that will ensure your success:

First, let’s start with advice from the ebook:

1. Use Quick-to-Fill-out Forms

Yes, it’s nice to get the full details about a person upon first engagement, but we all know that people like to keep their personal information, well, personal—not to mention how little time we like to spend filling out forms. Only ask for the information you need RIGHT NOW. What information is key to your database? Try to keep it simple like the form below: first name, last name, email address, company name, and job title. Can you handle that? example of quick-to-fill-out form

Then, consider gathering more details next time they engage by using progressive profiling. This technology allows you to take baby steps in your relationship with each buyer by gradually gaining lead intelligence. Have their basic information already? Next time, you can ask for their location, phone number, etc. Ease your way into a more detailed view of your buyers.

2. Include a Perfect-Fit Call-to-Action (CTA)

Skip the generic “Click Here.” What do you really want someone to do? Tell them! Choose active verbs to let them know just what their action will result in. For our Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation, we prompt visitors to “Get Guide Now.”

clear call-to-action

Other examples of active verbs include:

RSVP for Event
Get Free Ebook
Download Whitepaper
Register for Webinar

Engage on an authentic level by telling people exactly what they’ll get by filling out your form. And remember–stick to one CTA. Don’t overwhelm your audience with multiple choices when you have one directive in mind.

3. Provide Social Proof

As a good marketer, you’re constantly reviewing your programs both quantitatively and qualitatively, so use that feedback to your advantage! Emphasize the value of your offer by using word-of-mouth marketing.

This includes examples like:

95% of past attendees said they’d recommend this event to a colleague or a friend
“The last Definitive Guide I read provided invaluable nuggets that help me every day in my job–can’t wait to read the next one!”

If you have permission from those folk that offered your examples of social proof, it’s even more advantageous to include their titles or company names. Establish as much street cred. as you can—people love to keep up with the Joneses. For example, Smart Meetings highlights an attendee’s quote with her name and information.

use social proof

And now, some additional landing page tips:

4. Define Your Audience

Are you throwing off landing page visitors with your language? Maybe you’re calling an asset an “Executive Brief” but it’s not just intended for executives. To address this, define what audience you are trying to reach beforehand.

For example, for one of our more tactical programs, we explained who should attend. This helped ensure that we drove the right people to attend so we didn’t disappoint or set unrealistic expectations for the program and used the appropriate messaging.

targeted landing page

5. Try Trigger Emails

This is a GREAT way to get more bang for your buck. Do you have an upcoming webinar that directly relates to the topic of you latest ebook? Trigger an email to send shortly after someone downloads the ebook to promote the webinar! This person is clearly interested in this topic, so they will likely be interested in another opportunity to learn more. Try it out and see what your response rate is–it could potentially double your typical registration rate!

6. Test for Success

We’ve all done it before. Launched a landing page and wondered, “Why aren’t any leads coming in from this?” Make sure that you’ve set up all the right tracking in the back-end. Use your test leads to ensure that you’re receiving confirmation emails (for events), trigger emails are firing (per the suggestion above), your leads are routing to the right lists, etc. Test, test again, and ask your colleagues to test, too! You’ll give yourself another opportunity to catch any little errors that you may have overlooked. I promise, it happens to the best of us, even the perfectionists…

All in all, there are many best practices for creating the best landing pages to drive conversions. Check out the many resources available to you, and try some of these tips to see if they work for your company! It’s always worth taking a shot to see if you can score those extra points!

What other tactics have helped you improve your conversion rates? Comment below so we can try them out!