Guest post by Lucy Davis.
You have curated an excellent email campaign after carefully building a list of qualified leads. You hit the Send button and wait for all of those people to act on your call to action, which might just be making a purchase through your website. But is your landing page design doing everything that it can to ensure you get those conversions? You could have spent a great deal of time and effort perfecting your campaign but lose out in terms of conversion rates due to a landing page design mistake.
Believe me, I’ve have seen this happen a lot. Most people don’t even know that they have a problem with their landing page design and can’t see the damage that it is doing. If you are getting a high bounce rate from your landing page design, then it is highly possible that your website could be a culprit of this.
Slow Loading Pages
Having a slow website in general and/or a slow loading landing page is website suicide. 40% of people abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So if your landing page takes a bit too long to load then you need to uncover the underlying reasons.
It could be that your hosting company isn’t able to cope with the amount of traffic your website is attracting, perhaps you went with a host that has a limited amount of bandwidth? Or you could have images that are slowing your page down if you haven’t optimized them properly. When it comes to online images, you need to strike the right balance between image quality and file size to ensure that you don’t have slow loading pages.
You can use different tools and software to help you to optimize your images and reduce your file size. You should also learn a bit about how the different image formats may impact how long it takes for a page to load. For example, vector images are good options because they are resolution-independent. You can test the page loading speed with tools like Pingdom and the tool will identify the major issues, flagging things like images that are taking too long to load.
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Landing Page Design Is Overcomplicated
Yes, it can be tempting to try and get as much information in front of your target audience as possible with a page filled with dazzling features, big images, loads of descriptive text, videos and anything else that promotes your business. However, giving your website users too much to look at can be a huge mistake. Especially when your main goal is to get them to act upon a call to action.
They can get confused if you give them too many options and just give up on your site completely. So sometimes it is much better to keep it simple and make sure that your CTA is easily visible and highly prominent. Don’t put distractions in the way of your users. There are other pages on your website that they can visit to get more information if they need to but just don’t overdo the landing page design. Try to stick to one main promotion for example, instead of bamboozling them with multiple offers.
Bad Call to Action
We already touched on the importance of being able to see a CTA in amongst the content of the landing page but you also need to ensure that your CTA is very specific. Often people go with a very generic call to action that doesn’t have enough power to persuade people to do what you want them to do. An effective CTA can be a button or even just a text link, when worked well. If you opt for a button, think about the colour contrast against the rest of the content on the page. Surrounding it with whitespace also helps to make it stand out.
A good CTA will highlight what the user will benefit from if they do the action. Use persuasive text to convince your website visitors that they really need what you have to offer.