Your funnel masterpiece may have turned out to actually be a dud.
If you’re like most modern entrepreneurs, you go back to the drawing board. You map out your entire conversion funnel, write a series of compelling emails to follow up with people who opt in, and even work your tail off to build an advertising campaign that generates plenty of traffic, but you still aren’t getting any new leads.
You’ve tried to determine what’s causing the problem, but you can’t figure out what’s working and what needs to be fixed. Your emails promoting the page are performing well. Your ads are getting plenty of impressions and clicks. The culprit must be your landing page – it’s not compelling enough to convince your audience to opt in.
So, you do more homework to make improvements to your page that will motivate page visitors to share their contact info with you. You’ve read that changing your form button from green to red will help, so you give that a shot. You try changing the color of the text on your page, altering the length of your headline, and even modifying your form fields. After trying as many landing page hacks as you can find, you still don’t see a worthwhile number of leads coming in from your page.
Why?
Most Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners Are in the Same Boat As You.
Only about 22% of businesses are happy with their conversion rates, according to Unbounce. While 54% of businesses said that lack of resources was their biggest obstacle to improving conversion rates, 35% blamed lack of budget. There are plenty of obstacles that make it hard to get those conversion rates where they should be.
In addition to those hurdles, most businesses struggle to improve their landing page game because they believe that fixing an ineffective landing page simply means making a few small tweaks that will suddenly unlock the floodgates and start bringing in new leads. According to landing page expert Larry Kim, Founder of WordStream, “Much of what marketers have learned about landing page conversion is wrong. Worse, the optimizations promoted across industry blogs, courses and at conferences as game changers are really just best practices every marketer should have implemented already.”
If you’ve bought into the myth that you can fix your page by making quick surface-level changes, you’ve likely been disappointed when the fairy tale conversion rates touted by the bloggers and so-called “experts” never actually came true.
Stop Focusing on a “Quick Fix.”
While there’s no quick fix for poor landing page conversion rates, with a little bit of work upfront, you can create pages that are set up for long-term and lasting success. Those who have built successful landing pages know this to be true and that it’s not actually as complicated as it seems. Rather than focusing on making small tweaks to the design or layout of their page, experts focus on delivering the right message to the right person. Instead of focusing primarily on button colors or page layout (a quick fix), they focus on really understanding who’s visiting their page and crafting a compelling offer and call to action that will motivate the page visitor to respond in a specific way. And they focus on constantly testing their pages to ensure their conversion rates are the best they can be.
According to The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization, the problem with your landing page is likely that “…your message isn’t specific enough and people aren’t connecting with the page they’ve been sent to. You aren’t targeting a specific audience with a specific message.” Why focus on tweaking small details of your page if its basic message isn’t actually compelling to your potential customers?
Luckily, the messaging methods and split testing strategies you need to craft a landing page that will resonate with your target audience are pretty simple. You’ll need a basic understanding of customer personas and segments, a simple strategy to test your page, and a clear, targeted call to action. These simple methods aren’t necessarily magic beans (i.e., they won’t do the work for you), but they’re easy enough that anyone can pull them off with a bit of know-how.
Still Not Convinced?
Consider these stats (don’t worry, we’ll translate from “marketing-speak” to English). Search Engine Land states that the average landing page conversion rate across all industries is 2.35%. The top 25% of pages convert at 5.31% or higher, and the top 10% convert at 11.45% or higher. That means that out of 100 visitors, more than 11 of them chose to respond to the call-to-action. With a page that reliably turned visitors into leads at a rate like that, you could ramp up your ad campaigns and see a massive increase in leads.
Focusing on testing and segmentation, rather than so-called “landing page hacks,” can actually make a difference in your business. MarketingCharts reports that in a study that compared unsuccessful and successful landing page strategists, the successful ones were nearly twice as likely to name testing and segmentation as important goals. Learn to view your landing page from the perspective of your audience, and you’ll start to see page visitors turning into real, live customers.
The Benefits of Creating Landing Pages That Resonate With Your Audience
If you choose to spend your time getting inside your customers’ heads with tests to segment them and craft targeted, compelling messages, what payoff can you expect to see?
Here’s what you’ll get out of writing a page that really resonates with its audience:
- A reliably high conversion rate so you can be confident that your ad spend won’t be wasted
- A steady stream of warm leads from your landing page so you don’t have to continually launch new campaigns to sustain your business
- Pages that are irresistible to your target market so your incoming leads will be super high quality
- A unique offer that has a strong appeal to your potential customers so your customers will get excited about you from day one
- Actionable insights from easy-to-execute A/B tests so you don’t miss any opportunities to improve your page
To learn more about defeating depressing conversion rates once and for all, take a look at The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Landing Page Optimization now.
