Are Landing Pages Killing Your Conversion Rate?

If you’re stuck in low single digits and celebrating every .5 percent increase as a big win, I’m inclined to say that landing pages are, in fact, killing your conversions. See, if you’re doing the same old things you’ve always done but expecting different results… well, there’s an old saying about the definition of insanity that fits that bill.

However, if you want to make the types of meaningful landing page optimizations that can boost your conversion rates by 3x, 5x or 10x, check out these 5 conversion hacks:

1. Use Call Extensions Instead of Landing Pages

Click-to-call is a game-changer. The normal desktop conversion funnel requires four steps minimum: see the ad, click on the ad, visit the landing page, and convert to become a lead.

But with call extensions, you can get rid of the leaky landing page. Users see the ad, call the business, and you capture the lead. In fact, calls to businesses are worth 3x more than clicks to websites.

Click-to-call can help you dramatically increase your contact and qualification rates. Don’t even display the URL in your ad; just point people straight to your business with click-to-call:

You can use click-to-call on Facebook, too, which makes a lot of sense since 86% of monthly users are accessing the site from a mobile device.

This way, you’re only paying for calls to your business, so there’s no more budgeting for a ton of ad clicks that don’t convert on your landing page.

Of course, click-to-call doesn’t make sense for everyone all the time. It’s a great thing for businesses where a prospect is likely to want to speak with someone. But you might also want to…

2. Use New Ad Formats and Ditch the Landing Page

Google AdWords, Facebook and Twitter all have lead capture ad formats and when you put these to work, you can skip the landing page altogether.

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards, for example, display your offer and CTA to users, with their contact information already pre-populated on the form.

One click sends their name, email address and Twitter handle to you for export to a CSV spreadsheet. Alternately, you can integrate with your CRM system if you use one of their approved providers.

Again, this enables you to get rid of one whole stage of the conversion funnel. Why send people from an ad to a landing page when you can convert on the ad itself? You can do this on Facebook, too!

3. Compel More Site Visitors to Convert with Sneaky Ninja Tricks

Alright, there are no sneaky ninja tricks, but I hadn’t heard anyone use “ninja” in a digital marketing context in about 5 minutes and was starting to miss it.

Here are three things you absolutely can do to compel more site visitors to convert that require no sneakiness whatsoever:

1. Use Shopping Ads or the new industry-specific ad formats for hotels, automotive, mortgages etc. if applicable. Depending on the ad format, there are some crazy awesome features, like image carousels, one click directions or booking, pricing, local inventory integration, and more.
2. Use Ad Customizers to create urgency and a fear of missing out. Ad customizers let you do things like countdowns, eg.: “Only X Days Left at 40% Off!” In fact, you can even use them to run perpetual sales, over and over, always tapping into that psychological need not to miss out on a deal. Urgency has a huge impact on conversion and in client accounts, we’ve seen that CVR increases up to 3x as the sale comes to a close.
3. Use Similar Audiences to find visitors more likely to convert. Focus on getting the right people to your site in the first place. Facebook and Twitter both enable you to upload a list of emails and phone numbers (for example, your customer list) to find more people with traits like them. This is like using the power of Twitter and Facebook to find the needle in the haystack for you! Getting in front of people similar to your existing customers and subscribers with relevant messaging increases the likelihood they’ll be interested in what you have to offer.

4. Convert Abandoners with Remarketing

Getting people to your site, and even getting them to place items in the cart, is no guarantee you’ll win a customer. In fact, 70 percent of carts with items in them are abandoned and 96 percent of website visitors will leave without taking the marketer’s desired action. So what can you do about it?

I am a huge fan of remarketing. If you aren’t investing in remarketing, you’re killing the effectiveness of all of your other efforts. Think about how much you budget for PPC, content creation, social media… and then you try to get in front of a person once and give up?

No.

You understand that once a person has expressed that initial interest in your business, they’re more receptive to relevant messaging. Remarketing allows you to get in front of them again on social channels with display ads all over the web, in their email, or wherever they are at the time.

And here’s the thing, people don’t actually hate remarketing.

I know that’s what you’ve probably heard over the last few years, but it’s just not true. People hate creepy, irrelevant remarketing, so don’t do that. But the truth is, people expect companies to use the data available to them to personalize content and ads.

They’re not turned off. People are actually more apt to convert, the more they see an ad. Truth!

So be bold. Set your membership duration for 3x the average length of your sales cycle, run multiple ads per campaign and make your impression caps unlimited. Most importantly, run awesome ads! Get creative and be relevant; good remarketing makes people think, “Oh yeah!” instead of, “Ugh, not again.”

5. Change Your Sign Up Flow

If your landing page conversion rates aren’t quite where you want them to be, forget about mucking around with button size and font color. Those might get you some tiny movements, but they’re never going to move the needle in a big way.

Instead, try a new sign up flow. Consider your ask: is it too much, too soon?

Consider the typical software trial sign up form, for example. Almost without fail, companies ask users to, “Please register here for your trial.” There’s an implied promise that giving away info means that something awesome will happen

The problem is that your visitor isn’t yet invested in the offer. They haven’t yet received anything of value from you, just the promise of value. For a lot of people, that’s not enough to compel them to put the effort into signing up.

So change the flow:

Here, we’re getting them to download the trial first, then register to complete the process rather than putting the software download behind a registration form. By the time we ask them to register, they’re already invested 3-5 minutes in this whole process and we’ve given them something of value. Completing the registration is just the logical next step.

Another way to seriously switch up the flow is to give users a choice. This is even more compelling if the choice has an emotional element to it, like this:

You can also increase the number of steps instead of requiring one lengthy one. People can see they’re making progress and are more likely to complete smaller, consecutive asks than one big one.

Key Landing Page CRO Takeaways

This is not your grandmother’s CRO. Alright, so your grandma probably doesn’t know what CRO means, but you can’t even do landing page optimization the way you did five years ago. Throw away all of that junk you’ve been squirreling away for years as “best practice” and remember:

1. You have the power to change the funnel. You can completely bypass entire stages of it by using smarter ad formats and extensions.
2. Big changes produce big results. Changing buttons, fonts, spacing, etc. might make you feel like you’re busy optimizing, but that’s about all they’ll do. Re-examine your offer and flow for meaningful improvements.
3. Average isn’t good enough. Puttering along doing the same thing as everyone else will never result in your rising above. Forget about .5 percent increases. Aim for exponential improvements and focus on the tactics with the potential to improve your conversion rates, 3x, 5x or even 10x. Be a unicorn in a sea of donkeys!