5 Key Elements To Test On Your Landing Page
Usability 07 Jul 2014
You have a landing page focused on generating leads for your business. You have defined its objectives and set targets to be achieved. What happens when you discover that your landing page is not performing as per expectations? Your first instinct is to find out what’s wrong and try to fix it. But how do your figure what’s working and what’s not? You might be thinking that your headline isn’t catchy enough but the real problem might lie somewhere else!
Landing pages are web pages that allow marketers to capture information about visitors and help creating a simple pathway from a visitor to a lead or a customer.Creating a landing page is the easiest way to target the audience, offer them something valuable, and convert a higher percentage into leads. We already spoke about some conversion tips for mobile landing pages. Now, to make your life simpler, here’s a list of 5 key things that you must test to make sure that your landing page does well and delivers outstanding results.
1. Value Proposition
Defining a value proposition is like personifying your offer. Your product is no longer a set of tools, it exists to serve a purpose for your potential customer. Your landing page must convey this unique purpose of your product/service to your potential buyer in clear and simple words. Evernote defines its unique offering with “Remember Everything” instead of describing the product as a note-taking and archiving software.
Headline
The headline of your landing page is the key to getting visitor’s attention. A bold, catchy and relevant headline will keep your visitors hooked to the landing page. In addition to keeping it short and simple, you should focus on the primary benefit and say it clearly. More often than not, your online visitors are looking for a solution to their specific problem. Hence, the better your headline addresses their problem, the more likely they are going to stick around on your landing page. Here’s how Movexaincreased sales by 89.97% by making their landing page headline more specific.
Case study from https://vwo.com |
2. Short Form Vs Long Form
Do you often ask yourself whether your landing page is too long or not long enough? Well, there exists no universally applicable answer to your question. According to a study conducted at Brown University there are two kinds of consumers: one who are driven towards buying a product when they know more about it and others who are less willing to buy when confronted with additional details. Typically, for a complex product, your potential customers would require detailed information about the product before they make the final decision. Here’s an example of how a company generated 63% more conversions by using a long form landing page for their PPC campaign.
PPC landing page. Case study from http://contentverve.com/ |
In this other example, however, using a short form landing page resulted in 103% boost in conversions for Highrise.
Case study for Highrise from http://signalvnoise.com/ |
To clear the dilemma, try testing segments of your audience for different forms of landing pages. For example, social media referrals to your website are more likely to respond well to a short and catchy landing page than a long one. In case you have behavioral data for your existing audience, you can also design shorter landing pages for visitors who spend less time on your site.
3. Social Proof
According to a study by Google on consumers, Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT), 70% of Americans admit that they look at product reviews before making a purchase. Well, doesn’t that seem logical? How else would you assure yourself of the product quality if you are making a purchase online? This process of instilling trust among buyers is what we call social proof. If your customers are happy with your products and services, why not let them become your brand ambassadors? See how Betfair saw a 7% uplift in CTR by adding social proof to their landing page.
Social proof case study for Betfair from https://vwo.com/ |
A Word Of Caution
Though social proof adds immense credibility to your landing page, it still carries the risk of overshadowing your key offer. WorkZone ran an A/B test for customer testimonials using Visual Website Optimizer. They found that changing brand testimonials from color to grey scale increased their form fills by 33.93%.
Colour case study for Subway from https://vwo.com/ |
You can use eye-tracking studies to ensure that your social proof acts as a support to the main offer and is not obstructing the visual hierarchy of your page. Read this post to learn more about how you can use social proof effectively for your landing page.
4.Call-To-Action (CTA)
Placement, copy and design, all elements of your CTA have a significant impact on conversions. Whatever be the landing page, your ultimate objective is to get the visitor engaged with your offer by clicking on the CTA. Hence, you must always focus on optimizing your CTA to the greatest possible extent.
Placement
Here’s how Unbounce improved its pricing page’s conversion rate by 41% with an above the fold placement of CTA.
CTA placement case study for Unbounce |
However, above the fold is not necessarily the best position for your CTA. Your CTA should be placed at a position where it best compliments the visitor’s decision making process. If your landing page is depicting a story that leads to the final offer, following the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) approach makes much more sense.
Marketing Experiments discovered that placing the CTA below the fold can actuallyincrease conversions by 20%!
CTA location case study |
Copy
The relevance of your CTA copy influences decision making at the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). It essentially answers the most critical question “Why should I click this button?” Hence, the more value your CTA conveys, the more conversions you will get! See how pcmbtoday.com conducted a CTA copy test using Visual Website Optimizerand increased their conversion rate by 60%
Copy case study for MTF from https://vwo.com |
Design
The colour and size of your CTA acts as a visual cue for your visitors and helps them focus on taking the desired action. It answers the question “Where should I click?” There are no set rules for designing the perfect CTA. But, you should focus on letting the CTA stand-out from the rest of the page. Here’s how a European e-commerce website experienced a 35.81% increase in sales via product pages by changing design of the call-to-action.
Colour case study from http://contentverve.com/ |
5. Navigation
The navigation menu on your landing page will more often than not distract visitors from your primary offer. Having a single CTA on the landing page tells your audience what you want them to do on the landing page. Hence, you should only include navigation menu on the landing page if it is essential and is useful in giving additional information related to your offer. This will help you avoid clutter and keep the landing page focused and extremely relevant. Yuppiechef, a leading online store selling premium kitchen tools saw a 100% increase in conversions by removing navigation menu from their landing page.
Original page, with navigation |
Variation page (without navigation) |
We hope you have enough tips to start testing your landing pages. As we all know, landing pages are the best way to show our visitors the way to conversion, increasing Click through rates. Now that you know what to test on your landing page, go ahead and get started with testing your landing pages.
This is a guest post written by Smriti Chopra, marketer at Visual Website Optimizer,an A/B testing tool that will help your business to inmprove its conversions.
