If you have ever created a landing page for your site, you probably know there are some basic guidelines to follow in order to create a truly converting landing page (some landing pages tips). The landing page is one of the first parts in the funnel in which users convert from and so it is extremely important to optimize it.

Since you want your landing page to be as converting as possible, you should build it based on your users’ needs, and the emotional triggers that will get them to convert, not based on what you think is right or they way you think you should market your product.

But how do these guidelines actually work in real life?

From theory to real life – Adobe’s landing page

You have less than 2 seconds to convince your visitors to stay on your page. After 2 seconds, up to 40% will abandon your website, which means you have to direct your efforts into keeping everything quick and simple.

 

1. Headlines

There are a number of things to remember about headlines:

• Headlines should be short and persuasive

• A good headline is one that makes visitors want to keep reading

• Headlines should describe the benefits to the user, not the features of the product. For example, take a look at this headline in the “capital one” site.

*taken from here.

The benefit to the user is very prominent and they even use the word “you” twice to make their statement more personalized.

Adobe’s headline on the other hand is simply “Adobe flash player”. With no personal take to it, it lacks the emotional advantage other landing pages have and its vast potential for hitting a home run.

 

2. Call To Action

The call to action is one of the most important things on your landing page. It’s what your users see when they wonder whether they should make a move or not. An efficient call to action button is big, bold, contrasted in color from the other elements of the landing page, and in other words – one that users can’t ignore. The text on the button should make an offer that the users won’t be able to refuse.

Get more tips on how to improve your CTA buttons here.

On one hand, Adobe’s call to action is a bold “update now” button. Its yellow-orange color stands out in comparison to the rest of the page which is in shades of grey. On the other hand, the most dominant feature on the landing page is Adobe’s logo and not the actual call to action button.

Take a look at skype’s landing page:

See the difference between the “get skype” call to action and the “learn more about skype” call to action. Which do you think is more converting? (see how SKYPE could change their colors to increase conversion) + See how the call to action button is smaller than the blue element on the page..

3. Trust

A simple trust icon can increase conversion tremendously. Not all sites choose to show trust icons, simply because they don’t understand the emotional impact such icons can have on us (more about the emotional triggers trust icons create). Social proof in the form of testimonials or reviews work the same way by providing proof of the legitimacy of your site.

Adobe have one priceless advantage as far as trust – their brand. Not all brands are as well known as Adobe, and even their logo can be a very useful trust icon for other companies.
They are also well known for their Flash Player logo, and its distinct presence in the page helps to make it more trustable. Also, the Mcafee trust icons is always a good icon to have on your page.

4. Choice of colors

Generally, it’s a good idea to have no more than 2-3 colors in your landing page. Adobe’s choice of colors is interesting. The dominant color in Adobe’s landing page is grey. Grey as a background color is generally good for highlighting other colors in the page. The more contrast your background has with the call to action button, the better. The second color Adobe chose is red. Red is associated with increased excitement, energy, passion, action and desire (emotional color guide). Its contrast from the grey background makes it stand out even more. The color of Adobe’s call to action button is yellow. Yellow is mostly associated with optimism, friendliness and enthusiasm, which makes this choice a very wise one.

 

5. Load time

Did you know that 47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less? As mentioned earlier, when a visitor hits your page you have less than 2 seconds to convince them to stay. This means that you need to make sure your landing page loads quickly otherwise your bounce rate will skyrocket.

On my browser Adobe’s load time is about 2.8 sec. Remember that every fraction of a second counts when we’re talking about conversion optimization. Load time depends on many factors and is different for every page, browser and operating system. Because load time isn’t the same for everyone, you should do your best to minimize it and QA before launching.

 

Conclusion

Adobe’s landing page is very different than others. Even the way they built of the page is different  - for example they divide their landing page into 3 sections – on the left they give some info about the flash player, the middle has an optional offer and on the right they placed their terms and conditions, a section of the site which is usually hidden and unnoticeable. It would be interesting to see what would happen with a different build of a page and an AB test. From headline to the position of the CTA and colors, Adobe’s page has many variables that can be tested.

 

When building a new landing page, or optimizing an existing one, remember to take your time in building your conversion optimization strategy first. To improve conversion rates consider both your company’s goals, but also your target audience needs and wishes – understand what your client is trying to gain from your product emotionally.

 

Learn more about landing page optimization here.

It’s your chance to determine who takes the next spotlight, which brands would you like us to analyse next?

Choosing the right place to start your optimization process is a super important decision. With so many conversion strategies and methods out there it’s hard to know where to start and how.

Where to start: It is customary to divide the user flow into Upper funnel (i.e banners, landing pages, lead generation) and lower funnel (registration forms and pricing pages etc.).  When choosing the starting point of your test you need to take into account that the “lower” the point is in the funnel the less traffic you’ll have for the test.

To help you get started and locate where you need to start optimizing, we’ve listed 3 basic metrics you should be following as soon as possible. These metrics will help you decide where to start optimizing and how.

 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric measures the amount of users who visit your site’s first page, and stop there. For example: if you have 10,000 visits a month to your site and 5000 users leave before doing anything else on your site, your bounce rate is 50%. If your visitors are leaving without taking any actions you may need to work on:

1. Call to action buttons – One of the most important parts of conversion is creating the right call to action buttons. You can find 3 tips to improve your call to action buttons here.
2. Messaging – Check your messaging. Using emotional conversion optimization can vastly improve your conversion optimization and get visitors to take the next step in your site. Check out these 3 emotional triggers to optimize your messaging.

From the screen capture below you can see our clients bounce rate throughout the course of a month. Once standing on over 60% bounce rate, has now changed to less than 10% by simply locating the leaks and addressing them.

One important thing to remember is that bounce rate is a natural part of a website and some people just don’t find what they’re looking for or have found what they were looking for and don’t need to continue on, so you won’t be able to minimize it to 0% but you can reduce it a lot and learn from it.  In many online campaigns even 95% bounce rate is good for certain media channels so it’s always good to compare this data versus any other traffic sources performance for a base line.

• Note that there is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate as Google explains here.

 

Funnel Visualization

Google analytics offers an option to follow your funnel and find the “leak”. Once you’ve set your goals on Google analytics the “Funnel visualization” option will be available. Following it will give you a lot of insight on the amount of visitors who have entered each part of the funnel, the amount of visitors who converted and their flow.

This is a wonderful tool to illustrate where is the most significant “leak” in your funnel, assisting you to take the right action in order to optimize it ( learn to avoid shopping cart abandonment).

For example, as you can see below, 50,516 visitors entered our client’s homepage, 52.56% clicked on the button to proceed. On the side you can see where users went to if they didn’t convert, like the pricing for example. This flow will help you understand where you need to optimize or where you can add conversion metrics.

Below we can see that many visitors end up on the pricing page instead of signing up, so we could add a call to action on the pricing page and increase conversion from there.

 

Technology

One metric you do not want to miss out on is the technology your visitors are using. On Google Analytics you will find (in the Audience category) the option to see which browsers your visitors are using, their version and whether they’re using mobile, desktop or tablets. Once you have this information you can:

• QA – Does your site work on all Chrome versions? Are you compatible to Safari? Run a string of tests on all browsers and make the corrections, do not lose customers because of bugs.

• True Story: In one of our recent tests we discovered that our client’s landing pages weren’t compatible with older versions of IE, which resulted in almost 0% conversion rate. This simple fix boosted their conversion rate by over 50%. Below you can see the difference from before we started optimizing and after, with over 250,000 visits via IE this was a massive optimization:

 

• Optimize: A new study shows that you could lose 40% of your visitors if your site isn’t mobile compatible. Is your site/product mobile responsive? Prepare yourself for your mobile traffic and do not lose it. A simple redirect to a mobile friendly page could save your conversion rate. Know your limitations and address them.
  • Tip: To know which pages you need to optimize for mobile add a secondary dimension in Google Analytics (while in mobile overview) – “landing page”, and see where those mobile visitors are going, that way you won’t need to optimise your entire site to mobile immediately but fix it on the go.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process that requires many conclusive tests and iterations. Testing too many variables at a time can cause a mess and testing the wrong variable can waste our time. Be sure to work out a test plan before starting out and use Google analytics to tackle the right areas.

What are the metrics you watch to help you decide where to optimize?

 

P.S. We would really appreciate it if you share this post and let us know what you think!

Statistics on registration forms are pretty grim: 86% (!) of users leave a page instantly when they’re required to fill out a form.
Thanks to hundreds of lead generation/signups tests we’ve done in the past 4 years, we’ve come up with various tips and tricks that can help reduce abandonment rate significantly and improve the quality of leads dramatically.

How to create converting registration forms:

1. Auto fill –  Don’t waste your user’s time and energy. Use auto complete to detect the their full name, address and email address. The less you ask of a user the more inclined they will be to fill in the form.
2. Minimize your requests – Remove all the unnecessary fields, they can complete them later on. Ask only for the most basic information and create a quicker process for the user. Give the user the feeling that your form is a 30 second fill out and no more.
   Facebook’s signup process: To make things simpler, facebook could create one field for first & last name and make it look shorter. They could also have just one field for the email address and only after the user clicks “Sign up” show a message that says: “we’re sending you an email, make sure your the address is correct.”Groupon does it in an great way, asking one short question at a time and slowly navigating the user towards the end.

   

3. Help the user – Add small question marks next to your fields including explanations of each field. You’d be surprised to learn the kind of questions that prevent users from filling out a form, things that might seems obvious to you, but aren’t clear to others.
4. Messaging – Be specific, use a title that explains exactly why the user needs to sign up, for example: Signup to get a free e-book!
5. Call to action – Don’t forget to end your form with a clear call to action that indicates the end of the form and the continuation of the next steps.
6. “Show password” – Instead of asking your user to fill in their new password twice for validation, give them the option to “show password” and go over it by themselves. This will reduce the amount of fields and will give a sense of an easy and quick form.By giving users the option to “show” the password, mailchimp reduces the sign up fields to the minimum required and still allows users to verify their email.

7. Social sign up – Make it quick and easy, allow users to sign up or log in via their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin account.
8. Mobile forms: One of the most important parts of filling out a form on mobile is to be able to see what you are actually doing, Don’t forget to zoom in on each field the user is updating. Another tip is to enable only the relevant keyboards in each field – i.e in the phone field to create the numbers as the default keyboard.
9. Mobility- some users like to use their mobile horizontally and some vertically, don’t forget to make your mobile forms accessible on both screen options and allow for easy usage.
10. Shipping and billing – Allow users to simply auto-fill their payment address from the shipping address instead of filling in their details twice.                 
11. Make required/optional fields clear to the user – If some info isn’t required, we advise you remove it completely. If you still want to keep it in the form make sure it is clear to users what’s mandatory and what’s not.
12. Clear errors – Errors a very important aspect of filling out forms. Locating the errors on the bottom or hidden will make it difficult for a user to understand why they can’t submit the form.

Filling out a form should be a simple step along the funnel. Make sure to test your registration forms as much as possible and of course, learn from your insights. If you want to get some more information, contact us here.