Your landing page is the silent salesman of your site charged with the duties of presenting and promoting your product and convincing the readers to become customers.
A successful salesperson is trained to make the experience for the customer smooth, painless and informative but also conducive to achieving the end goal of making the sale.
Your landing (or sales) page should do the same thing.
Every competent salesman avoids doing things which will decrease the chances of a sale and similarly every good landing page will do the same.
Hence, in this article we want to point out some common landing page mistakes people make which inhibit their chances of a successful conversion and thus why you should avoid doing the same thing(s) on your landing page.
1) Obscure, unclear or ambiguous call to action
The primary purpose of your landing page is to get people to perform a certain action. In most cases this action involves making a purchase. Therefore the “call to action” element on your page which might be a button or image or link should be as clear and conspicuous as possible.
If people have willingly come to your landing page to find out more about your product, it probably means they might be interested in buying it, so why make the next step harder by obscuring your call to action somewhere on your page where it’s hard to find?
Your buttons and other call to actions should be easy to find and totally unambiguous in their purpose with a clear message for what you want your reader to do.
2) Presenting too much information or information which is not relevant to the purpose of the landing page
Studies have shown that in general most website visitors spend about 20 seconds on a web page before they decide to leave it or continue reading.
Thus if your page is cluttered with too much information which is verbose and not directly relevant to the landing page, the reader will become confused or irritated, or they’ll simply lose patience and leave your site.
Your landing page should only contain clear, concise and relevant information which will assist your readers in finding out about your product and its benefits and how they can buy it.
3) The wording of your headline is poor
When someone arrives on your sales page, the first thing they’ll see and read is the headline. The handful of words contained within the headline will usually determine if a visitor wants to continue reading your page or not.
Headlines should draw the reader into the page by making it near irresistible for people not to continue reading to find out more about what is being said in the headline.
Writing good headlines is crucial to your landing page’s effectiveness and you should take the time to learn how to do this.
4) You mislead your readers or break a promise
People willingly come to your landing page expecting to see something specific. For example they might have clicked on one of your marketing emails which insinuated that you have a product which helps people save 30% off their energy bill. However when they finally arrive on your landing page you are pitching something totally different.
Breaking the trust of your readers so early on in the marketing phase is a fatal mistake and one which you should avoid not only for ethical reasons but also because it negatively affects your business success.
Always make sure that the content of your landing page provides exactly what you promised the reader when they clicked the ad or link before arriving at your page.
5) Not providing enough clarity or information about your product on your landing page
This point is somewhat conversely related to point 2) in that the opposite of providing too much (irrelevant) info is also bad for your landing page.
That is, if you readers are left wanting more information about your product then they will not be prepared to risk shelling out their hard earned cash to pay for something they don’t know enough about.
Your landing page should give enough confidence to the reader that when they click on the “buy now” button they will get exactly what they were looking for. The best way to instil this confidence in your prospective buyers is to provide them with enough information about the benefits and advantages of your product in your landing page.
6) Your landing page or site in general is very slow-loading
If you want to conduct a successful internet business then you have to ensure that the tools of your trade work properly. One of the most important tools you will ever own is your website and the host on which your website resides.
If you have a very slow landing page which takes too long to load then this flaw will adversely affect your business.
Avoid increasing the load time of your page by stuffing too many streaming videos or other content which slows the page down.
You should take the time to test your landing page load time and correct any issues if you want it to be a successful tool for your business.
There are some fairly simple things you can do to optimize your site’s load speed such as installing a caching plugin or ensuring that you avoid putting components on your page which cause it to load too slowly.
There may also come the time when you will have to pay for a better hosting provider or move from a shared to dedicated server in order to improve your site’s speed.
The main thing is that if you can avoid a slow loading landing page, you will improve your chances of letting it convert your visitors into new customers.
