When creating a landing page to promote your new service or offer, it’s easy to think a bold image, a few lines of text and a form to fill out will suffice. But there is far more to it than that. Read about the 10 common mistakes people make with their landing pages and ensure you’re not making any of them.
1. No Benefit Headline
The benefit of your product/ service/offer to a potential client isn’t spelt out clearly in a top headline. If your visitor can’t see why they should sign up/download/purchase from you when they first land on the page, they’ll head off elsewhere.
2. Too Much Content
You’re overwhelming people with too much content. You’re going too far into the nitty gritty without enticing people to sign up for your offer with some concise, punchy points. A page with too much content will appear overwhelming and people won’t bother trying to wade through it all.
3. Poor Design
Your content is poorly laid out. Again if your words and visuals aren’t laid out professionally – in easy-to-read chunks with plenty of breathing space between sections, the overall look with be chaotic, and certainly not going to give the right impression to potential clients.
4. Unpopular Image
Your main image doesn’t resonate with your visitors. Even if you think it sums up your message perfectly, that’s unimportant. What do your visitors think of it? That’s why it’s important to undertake A/B testing of your landing page, trying out very different designs, and monitoring which is most effective in lead generation.
5. Busy Form
Your data capture form has too many fields all of which are obligatory. Keep form fields to a minimum – so long as you have a name, email and phone number, anything else you need can be teased out in any future conversations.
6. Invisible CTA
Your CTA (call to action) button isn’t highly visible. Perhaps you’ve gone with subtle so it blends in beautifully with the background. A button that is a different colour to the rest of the page is one which calls attention to itself and begs to be clicked.
7. Bland CTA
The standard “submit”, “sign up”, “contact us” buttons are so yesterday. Many marketers have found that different wording can increase click through rates significantly. For example, think
- trial ie.no obligation = try
- personalisation =my
- no commitment = free
- sense of urgency = today
to give a button text “Try My Free Trial Today”
More examples are given in this great article.
8. Too Many Choices
Perhaps you’ve included buttons to download an ebook, sign up for a enewsletter and contact us – best to cover all bases, right? Wrong. Too much choice is a bad idea – people can’t make up their minds what to do and so do nothing – a potential lead has left the building!
9. Escape Route
Perhaps you included a link to your website. This is always tempting – perhaps you want people to see all the wonderful things you offer. But if you’re serious about generating leads, your landing page must not allow visitors to escape elsewhere. Everything they need to know about this particular offer should be easy to find within the page.
10. No Credibility
Even with a beautiful design, carefully thought out, persuasive text and bright CTA buttons, why should a visitor believe in your offer? You must include testimonials to build credibility. And not just some wishy-washy statements “Company X is really good”. Choose some hard-hitting testimonials that show exactly how you’ve helped other clients eg. “When we started using this software, our lead generation shot up by 300%!”
So in a nutshell, there’s far more to creating an effective landing page than cobbling together a great image and a sign-up form. Avoid the common mistakes above, and you’ll find that your landing page is well on the way to being a lead generation magnet.
If you’d like us to create a landing page for your campaign to improve lead generation and sign-ups, please contact us for a no-obligation chat.
