Struggling to get conversions on your landing page? Read the 4 myths we see brands take as gossip and that could be hurting your conversion rate. Building a high converting landing pages in 7 days IS possible.

What does it takes to build a high converting landing page? There are a lot of myths and misinformation out there on the internet. Some from landing page vendors and others from marketers who are reading this information and taking it as gospel. Some of the things I hear and read are:

  1. Shorter forms are better
  2. You should only send paid traffic to a landing page
  3. Don’t put outbound links on your landing page
  4. Landing pages launch with a high conversion rate

I want to break down why each of these are wrong individually, but also as a whole package when you are building landing pages in Unbounce, your WordPress CMS or with your development team.

You always need to make sure you are building the right experience for the people you are targeting with your paid ads. Very few things in marketing are binary. Lets dig into each of these myths and see what’s going on.

Shorter Forms Win

Short forms may have a higher conversion rate but that does not mean it’s a better converting page. You have to look at the long term effect of paying customers and your life time value.

Sometimes having a slightly longer form that asks a few more questions can improve your lead quality and thus the type of customer you acquire. Isn’t that worth the effort? Asking the right questions gets the right type of customer in the door.

Design the right experience on your landing page and form from day one. Doing this means your form can be as long as it needs to be. If someone wants to buy from you they will fill out the form.

Only Use Landing Pages

I posted a tweet about this in January. I love landing pages. Hell, I worked at Unbounce for 2 years. However, sometimes it’s ok to send traffic to your homepage or a different page on your site. There could be a host of reasons why you would do this.

A major one we find for clients is that a brand campaign on Google converts better on their site than on anything we could custom build. For a lot of startups we work with, customers want to be able to learn more about your brand and company. Even if you send them to your landing page, the person is still going to check out your site before converting.

Landing pages are not a binary all or nothing choice. For most clients, it makes sense to have a mix of paid advertising traffic go to customer landing pages and your site.

Your biggest opportunity is going to be non-brand traffic, which makes sense to send to a customer landing page. That way you can run a/b tests on your landing page and improve performance.

No Outbound Links

The other big myth about landing page is the idea that you should never link out from your landing page to your site. The reason being if people leave for your landing page, then you’ll lose them as a customer.

This is simply not true. The reason you don’t lose a customer is because we have better tracking in place today vs 2007. Your landing page is part of a bigger puzzle that includes your site and other digital touch points.

Trying to focus people to only look at your landing page is a wasted effort. If someone wants to go to your main site, there are going to do that. You need to design and experience and landing page that takes to customer journey into account.

Pages Start Out High Converting

This is probably the biggest myth we see from even seasoned marketers across industries.

Many marketers assume that if you can build high converting landing pages, then each landing page you build starts out as a high converting landing page. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The average conversion rate we see for a lot of pages is 1% – 2% across-the-board. These can be both lead gen, webinar and newsletter signup landing pages. If you’re starting out at 3% – 5%, then you’re doing even better than the average PPCer. Anything above that and your page is truly outperforming the industry.

What sets good pages from the amazing pages is testing your way to better performance over 3 – 6 months.

Testing can be as simple as a/b testing something on your page (i.e. your title headline or hero shot) or can be more complex where you’re doing conversion rate optimization (CRO).

CRO is really about interviewing and understanding your customers to build a knowledge library of insights that you can use to run tests on your pages. Testing your way to  a better conversion rate is a process and doesn’t happen overnight. That is it for this week. See you next time.