Why you need to create product-specific landing pages.
Let’s say you have a website and obviously want to get some more new clients. Whichever advertising platform you are going to use to bring in more users, you will face the same truth: only a tiny portion of people who clicked your advertisement do what you want them to do.
The average landing page conversion rate (% of people who land on your page and then perform your desired action, E.G. Submitting a form) falls around 2.35%. If you redirect users from paid traffic sources directly to your website (I.E. Without using a specifically designed landing page), your conversion rate will be even lower.
I have seen pages with conversion rate around 17.5%. The difference is crazy, isn’t?
Of course, the conversion rate depends heavily on the traffic source, the things you offer to your potential clients and conversion type, but this is not my field of expertise. I am a designer, I can’t tell how to get more visitors, I will share how to use design to convert visitors into clients more efficiently.
Why create a stand-alone product landing page?
Users can get there only via search systems or an advertisement. This creates a separate traffic flow that you will be able to more accurately manage and analyse.
A stand-alone landing page is a promo page dedicated to a single product (or line of products) or service.
Make the page very specific. Include only the essential information related to the product or service you are paying to advertise.
In the ideal case, the text copy on this page should 100% match with your ad keywords (as recommended by your Digital Marketing Specialist).
It is essential to include:
- Nice eye-catching graphics
- A clear call to action
- No unwanted distractions
So that the page is easy to interact with. For example, I wouldn’t even place the navigation menu on my landing pages.
Changing the landing page in any way shouldn’t affect your main website and that is important because you are going to change it a lot.
Complete experiments.
Assume that you don’t know your potential clients and the reasons behind their motivation. The only way to learn their motivations is to experiment to find the solution ideal for you and your clients.
This is an iterative process. For each iteration you should:
- Define the goal of the advertisement / landing page and their KPI
- Choose ONE element to experiment on. You still can run multiple experiments on different elements or do micro alterations
- Get some traffic (Advertise!)
- Sit back and wait for the results
A case study from my experience:
I wanted to increase the registration conversion rate of a site (Step 1). The first thing I did was to create a set of stand-alone landing pages. That alone had a notable effect (never send users you have paid for to your main website). The pages looked the same and shared traffic from the same sources (Step 3). The only difference was the registration form (Step 2).
I had a gut feeling that no one likes to fill in large forms and, to start with, we had about ten text fields and dropdowns (but still I tested few variations with expanding full form/form in a popup etc).
After initial tests, it was clear that we needed to reduce the number of fields (Step 4). All following tests were aimed to improve the registration form. At the same time, we were changing the entire registration process, which let us smooth user experience on a more global scale (E.G. No more “Please confirm your email address” emails sent to users, but we still got user email confirmed).
The final form was actually extremely simple (two text fields for full name and email and checkbox “I am over 18 and I have read Terms and Conditions”). This was tested against the full registration form, that was still on the website, and showed remarkable results in terms of an increase in registering users.
Have a break, analyse the results and repeat.
Once again, there are countless things to test:
- Marketing microcopy changes
- Different layouts
- Traffic from different sources
- Even the CTA-button colour
- Etc…
Use cohort analysis to examine the results.
Find the winner, shred the rest.
Useful tools for testing: HotJar, VWO, Optimizely.
Product-specific landing pages are the best option possible (in my humble opinion) to attract new clients for:
- New to the market, or unique products
- Highly competitive markets (Just do better than your competitors – the winner takes all)
- Aggressive ad campaigns
- Instant lead generation (E.G. “Call me back now” button or online registration form)
- Local goods and services
- Situations where all of your new customers (or a huge part of them) find you on the internet
Final tips and recommendations:
- Don’t trust your judgement, trust the test results.
- Appearance matters. For already tested solution make a copy with completely different design and test against the working page.
- Use cohort analysis. This will show if there was improvement during experiments.
- Even the craziest hypothesis can lead to awesome results.
