Of the mistakes made by marketers, seven of them are repeat offenses. Many of these are obvious and sometimes simply forgotten when creating a landing page, but still not excusable given the digital age we live in. Luckily, you can significantly boost your chances of attracting the right audiences by becoming aware of these common errors and taking steps to avoid them.
1. Skimping on Navigation
There still seems to be a disconnect between the ways the landing page is perceived by consumers and by marketers. This can explain why many advertisers forgo navigation tools in the first place. However, user friendly navigation on landing pages is critical to the success of lead generation and therefore should be carefully constructed.A landing page is a web page that captures a visitor’s information through a lead-capture form (AKA a conversion form). If this “sign up” is difficult to find or complete, your efforts are useless. Visitors will also jet quickly if they don’t know how to find where you’re telling them to go.
2. Publishing Bad Content
The average page visit lasts a little less than 59 seconds with most users bailing in 10 to 20 seconds unless their needs are being met. If you haven’t peaked their interests or answered their questions, 9 times out of 10 they’re going elsewhere.Keep it simple and guide users through your page. Time on site is a valuable metric that helps raise your ranking, but bounce rate is determined by pages viewed, not the length of time on one page. If your content is boring, it doesn’t help your bounce rate and certainly doesn’t garnish conversions.
3. Misusing Hyperlinks and Anchor Tags
Hyperlinks, hypertext, or hot links consist of a word or phrase in online content that when clicked, takes you to another web page with related content. An anchor tag is a link on a page that takes you to a different section of that same page. Anchor links are helpful when you want to direct a website visitor to a specific spot on a page. Anchors are sometimes considered one of the most important landing page navigation tools.Hyperlinks should be used with caution when it comes to landing pages and performance marketing. Interlinked pages of a single website can work well, however on landing pages you don’t want to distract your user from your path of conversion. On the contrary, anchors can shorten this path helping a consumer move to the next step of your funnel.
4. Annoying Exit Pop-ups
Like banner blindness, pop-up pass over is rampant. Pesky pop-ups have more people zeroing in on the X to quickly get rid of the annoyance. Even though most exit pop-up sign-ups are by mistake because the users don’t realize they have a choice, some marketers keep using them because exit pop-ups still ‘perform’.Nonetheless, people hate pop-ups, especially on their smartphones where oversized boxes are hiding content. Please, limit your use of pop-ups. They are more likely to puncture your reputation than increase sales.
5. Sending Your Audience Down a Dark Path
This goes along with navigation but has more to do with design. You need to clearly and cleverly point out where you want your users to go. You can have amazing navigation tools but if your print is too small or hyperlinks hidden by shoddy design, your users will feel lost and leave. Too much text will make your landing page too complicated and uninviting. There are a million other sites for them to go to with appealing graphics and clear depictions of what’s expected. Don’t skimp on design.6. Neglecting Landing Page Localization
Landing pages that are not linguistically and culturally ‘local’ will be met with suspicion and caution in most mono-cultural countries. Invest some time to explore and adjust the language, the currency, the measurements, even the faces and names of people providing testimonials. Otherwise your new market expansion can fail very quickly.7. Forgetting to Research or A/B Test
A/B testing is when you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version works best, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously.You never truly ever know what’s going to work with your audience until you A/B test it. Savvy marketers use it to gain insight into visitor behavior and to increase conversion rates. And the smallest test can have profound results like simply moving the form on a landing page from the standard right side, to the center of the LP.
Of course, before implementing A/B testing you should research the two best versions worth trying out. This can all be easily done in house or by a hired third party that does A/B and research full-time.
