What are the landing page best practices for 2019? How can you make major improvements to your existing landing pages to improve conversion rates?

The answer to these questions is... it depends.

There are no definite answers when it comes to what will improve your landing page conversion rates. There are, however, two definite constants:

• Inbound lead generation depends on driving traffic to your landing page.
• The average landing page conversion rate is 35% and the top 10% have conversion rates of 11.45% or higher. This gives you plenty of room for improvement if you are closer to the average.

What are the top things marketers miss when they build a landing page? Here are the top landing page best practices I’ve had success with:

1. Create and Test Compelling Offers

While I’ll discuss some more technical and incremental changes you can make to your landing pages, one of the best things you can do is to have an offer your target audience will find valuable. Improving the copy or design of a landing page for an offer that nobody is interested in won’t make as big of a difference.

Make sure you aren’t relying on a single white paper for all your lead generation. Presenting the most compelling offers possible usually involves creating a lot of offers and testing out which ones perform best. Experiment with different formats, pain points and approaches to learn what your audience responds to.

2. Maintain Consistency Through All Engagement

What expectations do visitors to your landing page already have? If your Facebook ad or website CTA promised a way to revolutionize their business and then your landing page copy talks about making small changes, your presenting a confusing, disoriented and possibly dishonest experience.

Make sure everything related to your offer is consistent with precursor pages, CTAs and advertising. Design elements and copy should be related and build off each other to continue to tell a seamless story. If you are tailoring CTAs or ads to specific social networks or other communities, consider creating variants on your landing page that continue this tailored messaging.

3. Use a Dedicated Landing Page Template

While it is simpler to add a form to a standard web page, this leaves too many choices for your landing page visitors. If they are distracted by your menu navigation, footer links and sidebars, they are more likely to get distracted from the main goal of filling out your form.

Removing all navigation and links other than your main CTA has been shown to improve conversion rates significantly. In fact, an Unbounce case study found landing page conversions increased 336% when they removed navigation.

4. Limit Conversion Friction

Not only should you remove any potential distractions, you should also make the submission process as simple as possible to avoid visitors abandoning your landing page. Try to reduce the amount of information you ask for on your form to the absolute minimum to reduce abandonment.

QuickSprout found reducing the number of form fields from 11 to 4 can result in a 120% increase in conversions. Their study showed the ideal number of form fields for optimum conversion rates is 3.

5. Add Chatbots and Messaging Apps For Instant Assistance

Another great way to reduce friction and fast track the lead generation process is through messaging apps. HubSpot found 71% of people willing to use messaging apps to get customer assistance. 

Consider adding chat to your landing pages and precursor pages to short-circuit the whole landing page process. While bots can answer some questions, you should also have staff ready to start immediately offering service.

6. Use Retargeting to Re-engage Visitors

Even for landing pages with the best conversion rates, you are still going to lose 90-95% of your first-time visitors. However, using retargeting allows you to continue the conversation and increase your chances of converting them at a later date.

comScore research reported a 726% lift in site visitation after just four weeks of retargeted ad exposure.

7. Continue to A/B Test and Optimize

As I said at the beginning, its difficult to tell exactly what will work for your specific business and audience. The most important thing you can do is to test everything you do and continue to optimize your landing pages. Even small changes can result in hundreds of extra leads a month.

Never be satisfied with your top offer landing pages. A/B test every element and continue to produce new offers based on which ones have converted best so far.

Want to dive deeper on making your website a lead generation machine? To discuss more landing page best practices, book an exploratory call with me here.