Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  March 18, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

Landing pages play a key role in the success of any technology marketing program and the objective is a no-brainer – get the visitor to take a specific action. What percentage of visitors to your landing pages do what you want them to do? (By the way, this number is your conversion rate for those pages).

Most technology marketers are happy if 20% of their visitors take action, but we find with the right landing page you can easily hit 40%. MarketSherpa, a marketing research firm that tracks what works and what doesn’t work in marketing, has a Landing Page Study that contains examples showing a 55% conversion rate.

So, how do you get your rates up that high? Trial, testing and tweaking.

MarketingSherpa’s study includes a review of the top 5 landing page tests that really pay off. Here they are in the order in which I think you should address them.

1. Tweak your registration forms. Limit the amount of information you request — severely. Every single field you put on a registration form will cause more of your visitors to bail. We recommend asking only for information that you must have in order to take the next step. This change is easy and brings immediate positive results. Oh, and remove that Reset button. It’s lowering conversion and you really don’t need it.
2. Test creative elements. The point here is to simplify and clarify the page. Landing pages with a lot going on make it too hard for the visitor to figure out what to do. Here are a few “rules” that generally help conversion rates. Fewer columns are better – usually no more than two. For text, black type on a white background is best. Use type that is 12 points or larger. Do not center copy – especially if it’s multiple lines. With action buttons, bigger is better. Bigger buttons = more clicks.
3. Optimize organic search landing pages for action. If your search engine optimization efforts are working, you’ve put a lot of effort toward ranking high for certain keywords. This is sending you valuable traffic. Your web analytics report will show you which pages of your website are getting the most organic traffic. What is the conversion rate on these pages and how can you improve it?
4. Redesign landing pages for mobile users. This is especially important for business technology marketers. We know that 64% of business technology buyers looked at email on a mobile device as long as a year ago. Now more and more of them are also visiting websites. This trend is only going to continue and a mobile-user version of your landing pages will certainly increase the number of visitors who take action.
5. Dynamic landing pages in pay-per-click campaigns. Dynamic landing pages change (subtly) based on what key words and search engine the visitor used to get there. For example, the page might say “You searched for accounting software on Google” According to MarketSherpa this tactic is resulting in enormous increases in results especially for online retailers.

MarketingSherpa found that each of the above tests resulted in more productive landing pages for well over 50% of the companies who tried them. Among marketers who don’t test anything, only 20% get better results. What does that tell you?