As an internet marketer, the primary function of your job is to drive high quality traffic to your site, with the ultimate goal of converting that traffic to either a sale, completed lead form, newsletter subscription or some other conversion point. So for your site to generate more revenue, you need more relevant traffic, right?
Not necessarily. We often overlook one of the most important factors that we have complete control over and can provide instant results: our landing pages. Whether you’re a small business with a tight advertising budget or a large company spending tens of thousands of dollars on search engine marketing, making very simple changes to your landing page can show tremendous boosts to your ROI. This means you can increase your sales from the same amount of traffic you have coming to your site today. Take it from us, we made a series of changes to our already high converting pages, and further boosted our conversion by 42%, in a matter of weeks!
When it comes to maximizing the design of your site and landing pages, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with where to even start. An entire site redesign can be expensive and time consuming, so instead, focus on your landing pages and where the majority of your conversions occur (for example, the shopping basket or contact us page). Start with the key points below and you’ll quickly be on your way to capitalizing on more conversions without having to increase your advertising budget!
1. Trust – In today’s day and age, where our inboxes constantly get filled with spam and identity theft is a major issue, it’s no wonder why you must “sell” the trustworthiness of your site and your brand. Do you have a security seal through a third party? Make sure it’s prominently displayed on all pages, especially during checkout. Are you BBB accredited? What about any awards and accolades? Don’t forget about including testimonials or visually showing the logos of some of the companies that you work with. Remember, once someone is interested in your product or service, they need to know you’re legitimate, so show them you are.
2. Consistency – In my opinion, this is the most overlooked factor. Your site must show consistency, from fonts, to colors, layouts, images, copy, etc. If you’re landing page has many different style fonts, in different sizes and colors, to you it may look good, but to a user it can be confusing, which is never a good thing.
3. Call to Action – We all know that your call to action must be clearly defined, right? (If you didn’t know that, now you do!). Not only should your call to action be clearly defined, it should stick out and be easy to find, preferably above the fold. Try changing the color of the call to action, the location and the copy associated with it. In addition, is your phone number easy to find on your site? What about your contact us page? If you’re an organization that receives calls, make sure your phone number is prominently shown at the top of the page and your contact us page can quickly be found.
4. Conversion Testing – Now that you’ve made changes to your landing page, you have to test them to make sure they work! A/B testing should be an ongoing practice for every website. There are tools that make this very easy for you, such as Google Website Optimizer. Test every element you can, including sales copy, colors, call to action location and page layout. This is exactly how we boosted our conversion rate by 42% in a matter of weeks. We tested, analyzed data, made adjustments, and repeated the process over, and over, and over (matter fact, we’re still testing!).
The incremental increases in conversion rates can and will add up to a large boost for your website. Remember, the process is simple: make changes, test, analyze and repeat.