How to get more opt-ins and increase your conversions.
Landing page optimisation will increase your ROI (return on investment) with the injection of little to no additional budget. Optimisation goes hand in hand with traffic, making sure your efforts to improve the cost per click are rewarded by converting that traffic to leads at a higher rate. Simply put getting more opt-ins with less clicks.
Here are 11 ways to help your lead generation by optimising your landing pages to get more opt-ins and increase your profits.
1. Have a dedicated landing page
Do not direct them to your homepage or your product page. Create a new, dedicated landing page with a specific, focussed message for each offer. It doesn’t matter if you’re directing to a blog post with a CTA or a squeeze page to ask someone to opt in, you must have a clear singular message for your buying persona (that ideal customer).
2. Optimise the page load speed
Your landing page needs to load fast! – particularly in the geolocations where the majority of your traffic is generated. It’s that simple.
57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes three seconds or more to load. That’s over half your visitors leaving before your message has been read and after you’ve paid for their click. The amount of revenue you could be missing out on because of this 1 factor is jaw-dropping.
TIP: Ignore trends for large background images, slideshows or anything that takes up a lot of memory and reduces page load speed.
3. Personalising Content / Behavioural Marketing
All of your marketing needs to be customer-centric, therefore the more you can personalise your ad and landing page to the customer’s behaviour, the higher your click through rates and conversion rates will be.
Two of the more simple ways to achieve this customer personalisation:
a) Send traffic from each ad to a different landing page with a message specific to that ad.
b) Or, a more advanced technique – Use UTM’s to set up a specification within the landing page URL that identifies which ad the prospect is coming from. This then provides the prospect with a landing page message congruent with that specific ad (it can switch out images and words). If you are not tech savvy, get your developer to manage this. Once set up, these are relatively easy to manage. (If you don’t know what a UTM is use option (a) for now and add UTM’s to your list of to-find-out-about)
Personalising your ad and landing page does require a little bit more effort but you’ll be rewarded with a higher ROI.
You will see a dramatic increase in conversions and get many more opt-ins when you place the right content with the right message in front of the right audience, all based on what content your customer initially clicked through from.
4. Page Design
You will secure more opt-ins when your page is laid out in a way that is both visually appealing and easy to read. Your call to action needs to be in a visual hotspot. So does your ‘hero’ shot.
For the more advanced marketer, there are tools you can buy and plugin to your website to check where your traffic is looking, clicking and scrolling using eye and click tracking tests. These are super smart and effective tools!
Two of the best are Hotjar and Crazy Egg If you decide to use one of these and you find your call to action is in a dead zone, it’s time for a redesign!
PRO TIP: Make sure you check that your page looks good on a mobile.
5. Congruency – Create an Ad-Scent
Create a linear progression between the ad and the landing page to ensure you meet the marketing axiom, “No Surprises.” If you use a different message and imagery in the ad to the landing page, your prospect is likely to hit the back button.
A few ways you can ensure ad to landing page congruency are:
a. Use similar copy from the ad to the landing page. Using the exact same copy is a viable option.
b. Use similar design elements – colour themes
c. The offer on the landing page must be clearly explained in the ad. There needs to be a symmetry between your ad and your landing page.
Remember that curiosity clicks (cheap clicks) are not as good as quality clicks. If you bait a potential lead to a page with an offer that’s not directly aligned to your offer, you’ve just wasted your money and burned that lead. You want the right people to opt in. Make the ad/message/offer match and you’re far more likely to convert and you will definitely get more opt-ins
6. Clear, singular call to action, CTA
Increase the focus on your call to action by minimising the amount of choices the prospect has on your landing page. Remove all un-necessary links and images, such as navigation bars, and conflicting advertising, which will dilute your message.
Did you know you can test your call to action clarity?
There are a few ways you can test the effectiveness of your landing page, two easy and fun ones:
a) Squint test: the low-tech approach. Take a few steps back from your screen. Squint. What stands out? If it’s the call to action button, you’ve done your job right.
b) Usability Hub: This cool website shows your page to test users for five seconds, then takes the page away. They then get asked a question or two about something you want tested on the page like your CTA. If they can’t answer correctly or not at all then you know you need to re-look at your design and copy.
7. Meeting compliance requirements.
If you’re planning on sending any paid traffic to your pages (and we suggest you should be) you must make your pages compliant. If you are not compliant then the traffic may not be sent to that page or will be restricted or worst case scenario you get slapped by Google or Facebook. Simply no traffic no more opt-ins!
Facebook and Google both have advertising policies you must adhere to.
Here are their links to help you out.
Google: AdWords Policies click here
Understanding Landing Page Experience
Facebook: Advertising Policies click here
8. Illustrate your offer or content
Design impacts trust factors. The visitor needs to instantly see what you are offering when they land on your landing page. This will often be achieved through a ‘hero’ shot and a great headline. There should be immediate visual clues that they have landed in the right place.
9. Benefit oriented copy
With everything you write about you need to ask yourself, “why does the person reading this care?”
Talking about features, for example, is just you talking about yourself, or your product. Try to relate each feature to a positive outcome for the reader. What does this feature do for them, how does it make them feel?
On the flip side, don’t just use benefits; you need to explain how these benefits will be achieved through features.
For example “We show you how to optimise landing pages so you can get more opt-ins”
9. Trust Building
You have to build trust to convert. This is especially important on-line. This is a cold audience who don’t know you, or have an affinity with your brand. They are likely to have their guard up as soon as they see an advertised post and will feel dubious they can achieve what the ad is promising.
Show legitimacy online by using testimonials and reviews on your site and having a professional looking design. This will help build trust and remove some of the readers doubt. Having a good Social Media presence will further cement your know, like, trust factor.
11. Content to Page Length
How much content should you have on the landing page? This is a simple and common mistake in marketing. The amount of content on your page should be directly related to the perceived value of the information you’re asking for. If you’re asking for something small, like an email and name, you don’t need a thousand word long sales pitch to get that email. If however you want a fully qualified lead form filled out with multiple fields (name, address, phone number, etc) you will need to provide enough content to convince these people that they will receive value in exchange for their information.
Lead generation is a beautiful mix of traffic and landing page optimisation. They go hand in hand, and are steps 1 & 2 of our 3 step process – click here to read about the 3rd.
Working on just a few of these 10 tips can help you get more opt-ins and achieve a better ROI on your ad spend. However there’s no point in generating more traffic if page visitors are bouncing straight off your page without seeing your message because you’ve forgotten to cover one of the points above.
Use our 16 Point Checklist that 4x Our Leads so you can super charge your optimisation and create landing pages that pop then watch your lead generation and ROI grow.
