You’re probably familiar with all the usual suggestions from blogs and eBooks on improving landing page performance. Make sure that your value proposition is seen at a glance. Show social proof. Use videos. Change your CTA colour. The list goes on.
They say that you can increase your leads by X percent if you just follow these tips and best practices—and you follow them you have. But for some reason, you just aren’t reaping the kind of results you think you should be.
What those blogs and ebooks might not have been clear about is that each of these best practices is only the best in certain situations. While they can be useful and steer you to the right direction, they’re not enough to drastically improve your conversion rates. To reliably improve conversion rates, you have to establish and evaluate a methodology for conversion rate optimization.
Many companies make the mistake of jumping into and conducting A/B testing without actually fleshing out a hypothesis. The moment they determine whether A or B works better they stop--without bothering to understand why that choice worked as well as it did.
If you want to make the most out of the changes that you make, you need to have an A/B test hypothesis. Having a hypothesis forces you to come up with test variables that are more relevant to your buyer personas’ concerns. These, in turn, are more likely to affect your conversion rates.
Not having a hypothesis means that you are simply wasting valuable time and effort by aimlessly trying out different designs. Any success you achieve in this way is merely accidental.
Focus not on what but on why and how. When thinking about what to change in your conversion funnels, ask yourself why that might be a good idea, and how you can test it to be sure.
Some of you may already know this, so let’s take a step further.
The road to continuous improvement is all about tests, and tests are about well-considered hypotheses and valid means of testing them. Having a framework for this process will make the testing process easier.
In his breakout session at INBOUND16, Chris Goward, conversion optimization expert and CEO of WiderFunnel, highlighted six factors that affect conversion on a landing page. These six factors can be used as variables in your experiments: consider which factors are tied to each element on your landing page and make changes according to results.
1. Value Proposition
This first factor is the reason your visitors are on your landing page in the first place and, therefore, is what the other factors are hinged on. How you communicate your value proposition determines how your visitors will respond--make sure they’re clear on what they stand to gain.
The factors that inhibit conversion are:
2. Anxiety
For a conversion to happen, your visitor has to trust you and your offer. Are there any second thoughts they might have about entering their information? Does your payment page look secure?
Each encounter with your site should have built up their trust in you. Use subtle signals to bring this to mind and put them at ease.
3. Distraction
Things like unnecessary images and links or disorganized organized text could be drawing your visitors’ attention away from the value proposition and decreasing your conversion rates.
Stick to the essentials: place just one main visual input and action option for your visitor to focus on.
The factors that drive conversion are:
4. Relevance
Your visitors’ expectations of your landing page will depend on what brought them there--whether these are links from your site, social media pages, or other sources.
Keep a close eye on your value proposition’s consistency with these sources. Relevance to a visitor’s problem will entice them to follow through. Digression and evasiveness, on the other hand, will harm your conversion rates.
5. Clarity
Your value proposition, even if relevant, won’t matter if it’s not shown and explained clearly enough.
Clarity comes from both content and design: both text and images should lend themselves to quick and thorough comprehension. An easily understandable solution is more persuasive than that’s vague or confusing.
Your goal should be to make your page click with your reader and fit naturally in their line of inquiry.
6. Urgency
Lastly, Urgency is what pushes the entire conversion vehicle forward. Does your landing page indicate that the action needs to be taken immediately? Selecting the right action word and time indicator to present your offer will improve conversion rates. Consider the differences between “Subscribe Now” and “I Want To Change Today”.
Remember, though, that each element on your landing page, whether verbal or otherwise visual, can affect more than one of these factors. Optimising your pages will likely require several small tests across various landing pages. However, since these factors are relevant to all landing pages, every bit of knowledge you gain will mean a little more success in each landing page you design.
As your stock of landing pages grows, you will find that optimisation will become more and more determined by how effectively you can monitor and manage those pages. HubSpot, the eponymous marketing platform of the hosts of INBOUND16, provides an efficient means of doing so, while also integrating conversion workflows with other digital marketing processes.
For more on trends in marketing and sales practices and technology, download the full State of Inbound 2016 report:
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