32 powerful landing page optimization tips to increase conversions

Are you looking for tips to optimize your landing page? To help you create a highly-converting landing page, I’ve put together a list of 32 landing page optimization tips.

What is a landing page? A landing page is a page away from your site, where your visitors arrive by clicking on a link.

It is not your homepage or any other page that your visitors use to enter your website. It’s not the landing page you see mentioned in Google Analytics. If you check your analytics reports, you might have noticed that the website traffic report displays your landing pages. Don’t be confused: these pages are not the pages I am referring to in this article.

A landing page is a page you create specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign with the sole purpose of capturing a visitor’s information through a form.

It’s the page you use to turn visitors into leads, it’s where your conversions happen. That’s why you should do your best to have this page optimized 100%.

Let’s dive in!

1. When to use a landing page

You now know what a landing page is. When should you use a landing page?

Create a landing page for each marketing campaign your company is running.

Have duplicate landing pages for each of your ads so you can easily track which ad sources are working and generating more/better results.

Your company website is visited by two types of audiences: cold and warm. You don’t talk to your cold audiences as if they already knew you just like you don’t talk to your warm audiences as if it’s the first time they saw your brand. In the same way, you should have different landing pages for cold audiences and warm audiences.

Also, if you have influencer campaigns, use a customized landing page for each influencer.

2. Who is your landing page for?

Know your target audience inside out – the more you know about them, the better. Provide your visitors with a landing page that shows you know them. You will earn their trust.

Ask yourself questions like how would they react to my CTA or to the colour on the button or the overall colour scheme of the landing page.

3. Quick loading

Make sure your landing page loads quickly ideally under 3 sec. Also, check the images are also loading.

If your page takes more than a couple of seconds to load, you could be losing almost 50% of your potential traffic.

4. Aim for beautiful

Your landing page is a product like any other you have in your portfolio, so design a landing page that is aesthetically pleasing.

Keep in mind that your target audience will determine what kind of aesthetics will be the most effective.

5. Avoid catch-all landing pages

Don’t create “catch-all” landing pages that attempt to serve multiple goals. Take it one step at a time. You need their email so your landing page should ask for it only.

Don’t use the same landing page to convince them to buy. It’s not the time, nor the place. Depending on your buyer’s journey and the stage they’re at, you can ask them later on.

6. Consistency is key

Your landing page is not your website home page but it represents your company so it must be consistent with your personal or corporate branding.

Otherwise, your page will confuse your visitor who will become distrustful.

7. Remove visitors’ ability to navigate away from your landing page

Your landing page is a standalone page on your website and as I mentioned early on in this article, its sole purpose is to convince your visitor to click on your CTA button.

To help your visitors push that button, you need to eliminate any distractions preventing them from doing that.

So make sure your landing page doesn’t include a menu bar, hyperlinks, right or left column or any no other options except the one thing you are asking them to do.

8. CTA at the top of your landing page

Ideally, your call to action should be at the top of your landing page or at least before the fold. It should be the first thing your visitor sees.

9. Include a callback to action

So you placed your CTA at the top of your landing page. It’s also recommended to place the same CTA at the bottom of your landing page so your visitor doesn’t have to scroll back up to see it.

10. Only ask for what you need

If you want your visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, ask for their email addresses.

Don’t ask for their home address, telephone, age and company name. You can do that once you have established an email relationship.

11. Make your landing page shareable

What if your visitors want their family and friends to take advantage of what you have to offer on your landing page?

Having them copy/paste your page link is an unnecessary action. The rules of user experience state that your page visitors have to accomplish their goals in as few clicks as possible. Don’t make them work too hard!

12. Freebies

Reward your visitors for visiting your page right from the bat. Give them a gift for showing up even if they don’t convert (sign-up for your newsletter or buy tickets to your event).

Everyone enjoys receiving gifts. It’s a great way to warm them up and develop a relationship because it leverages reciprocity, one of the principles of influence. When you give people something, they will feel obligated to give you something in return.

13. Test multiple variables

Multivariate testing is a technique for testing a hypothesis in which multiple variables are modified. In regards to a landing page design, you test multiple CTAs, multiple headlines or multiple images.

14. Write an attention-grabbing headline

Attention-grabbing headlines do exactly what the name says: they have to be creative enough to surprise and grab the attention of your visitor and clear enough so they know right away what you are asking them to do. Don’t make them think!

15. Play Show and Tell

Show them what they get if they click on your CTA.

Include a print screen of the first page of your PDF document, or have your art director design a visually enticing image of it.

But showing them your offer is not enough. Tell them in concise and to-the-point words what they get.

Also, tell them what your content will do for them.

16. Introduce yourself to them, give them social proof, and add a countdown timer

Show them what makes your company the expert: certifications, years of experience, projects, results, achievements, number of clients etc.

Mention the number of people who already bought your offer. Also, add a countdown timer to create urgency.

17. Make your CTA button stand out

Your CTA button needs to stand out and grab the attention of your leads. It has to be of a different colour than any other element on the page.

Write a smart copy for your CTA button. Make your microcopy FOMO and apply the scarcity principle.

18. Focus on 1

A highly-converting landing page obeys the rule of 1: one message, one offer, one CTA.

If you have multiple offers for different audiences, create multiple landing pages focused on only one message.

19. The 3-sec rule

Your landing page should convey your message really clearly in less than 3 seconds: tell people what it is you provide, how that makes their lives better, and what they need to do to get it.

Put this content above the fold, if your leads want to know more they will find more when they scroll up.

20. Convey 3 key benefits

First of all, don’t confuse benefits with main features.

A product’s main features include technical info and data. Frame this dry and unappealing content into clear benefits. What’s in it for your leads?

Apple is the best example: instead of telling their customers their phone has a 5G memory storage capacity (which doesn’t mean much), they say 1000 songs in your pocket, which paints an entirely different picture. The storage is the feature, the number of songs is the benefit.

Need more examples and learn how to improve your copywriting? Read 4 techniques to write persuasive copy.

21. Include a strategic video

Add a short, strategic video to your landing page to help you convey your message easier: establish clearly the solution you are offering, how it solves your customer’s problem, and what your customer loses if they don’t take your offer.

End the video with the same CTA that is on the page.

22. Add a features list

After you have established your product’s benefits, you can include a features list which is a simple bullet-point list of what your leads get if they take your offer.

Do your best to make this list as eye-grabbing as you can: play with visual pointers, replace the boring bullets with checkmarks, smiley faces etc.

23. Landing page Dont’s

• Too much information
• Lack of credibility
• Different CTAs (it should be only one)
• Number of CTAs buttons: it depends on the length of the landing page. If it’s a three-paragraph page, one button should be enough. If it’s a single long scroll page, add a CTA button on every scroll
• Not stating clearly the pain points your solution solves
• Not stating clearly the benefits of your solution (what they get)

24. Landing page Dos

Your landing page should follow a logical flow: 

Powerful picture to illustrate your message

Attention-grabbing headline

Awesome and strong subheading

Essential info or data

Benefits 

Testimonials

CTA

It’s paramount that you let your landing page visitors know you are aware of their pain points or problem.

Identify the challenges they are struggling with and help them imagine how their lives could improve if they used your solution.

Give them a clear picture: Imagine you could measure your marketing campaign results easier or Imagine you could make a product video in one hour instead of five.

25. Relevant social proof

Testimonials should be authentic and accompanied by the photo, name and company of the person giving them. You have to make them as credible as possible. When asking for them, also ask your customers for permission to use their personal information to be GDPR compliant.

Also, make sure the testimonials are consistent with and relevant to your offer.

26. Add one or two methods of contact

What is everyone’s preferred means of communication? WhatsApp! We use WhatsApp to talk to our friends and family, to our team about daily tasks and to our customers whenever we have questions that need to be answered fast. So add two buttons: one for WhatsApp and the other one for email.

27. Add a guarantee (if suited to your business)

Adding a guarantee on your landing page increases the visitor’s trust. It makes it easier for them to pay for your solution, either with their money or their time.

Some landing pages offer a money-back guarantee, others guarantee a specific number of results or time frames. What guarantee can you offer?

28. Use power words in your CTA

As tip #17 states, you need to make your CTA stand out. One way to achieve this goal is through design and colour.

But that’s not enough. You must also use power words.

Here is a list of power words:

• today
• right now
• fast
• easy
• quick
• simple
• step by step
• new
• you
• free
• because
• imagine
• limited
• instantly
• winning

These words help people take action. Obviously, they need to apply to your offer.

Don’t ever write on your CTA button Learn more or Contact us! They have been overused and lost their power to drive action. Be creative, you can do better than that!

29. Trust indicators

Add client logos, affiliations and certifications that help boost your visitors’ trust.

Include those with explanations because people outside your industry might not understand what your certification means.

30. No ‘Hire me’ or ‘Buy this’ in your strategic video

Placed on your landing page, the strategic video could increase conversions two or three times.

As mentioned in tip #21, include videos related to your offer, but don’t sell, just be helpful. Explain what your product is about in your video but refrain from ending it with Hire me! or Buy this!

31. Tools to A/B test your landing page

If you are not ready to go all-in into multivariate testing (tip #13), you can use free or paid tools to A/B test your landing page.

32. Impeccable grammar is mandatory

If you are not an English native speaker, make sure you double-check your copy before hitting the publish button.

Use proofreading tools like Grammarly or Hemingway. It’s such a turn-off when you read a text with spelling or grammar mistakes. As a business, you lose credibility and authority.

How can behaviors be changed?

Marketers’ goal is to convince the consumer to choice his product or brand, to like it and become a fan of it, a loved brand. What can a marketer do when he needs to convince the consumer to change his behavior and change his favorite brand or change his daily routines? How can he reach his goal?

For once you can try doing it online. While all of us spend a great deal of time online,  the digital world has become a convenient gateway to the audience a marketer needs to reach. And because behavior change happens over a period of time, digital is an affordable way to stay in front of your targeted audience. “Behavior change marketing, also known as social marketing, involves adapting the principles of traditional marketing in order to effect a positive behavior change. It involves a deep understanding of an identified target audience in order to better understand the barriers that exist and what might be helpful in motivating them to change,” wrote Vont Performance Digital Marketing.

Moreover, according to the website, the message needs to be fun, easy and popular. Targeting is key and enables you to more closely reach your specific audience. Social media platforms offer you good targeting capabilities, ads are not targeted based on a keyword being searched, but rather on rich demographic and psychographic data known about social media users. Ads can promote content designed to inform and engage the target audience and, therefore, “capture” the wanted audience.

You can also do programmatic digital advertising and use Landing Page/Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).”Targeted ads with calls-to-action that lead to specific landing pages work in tandem to lead your audience to you – and to the specific action you wish them to take. Optimizing the landing page (CRO) further increases the likelihood that the action will be taken,” added Vont.

“Your target audience is (usually) not you. You may think you know them – but do you really? One of the most important pieces of Behavior Change Marketing is having a deep understanding of your target audience. How they think, feel, act…where they hang out, how they talk, who they trust, etc. Don’t assume – do your research. In-depth quantitative and qualitative research is critical in developing an effective behavior change campaign,” explained Ethos Marketing on its blog.

Moreover, the blog shows that when it comes right down to it, Behavior Change Marketing isn’t entirely different from traditional marketing, in which we attempt to convince people to buy a product or service. Behavior Change Marketing is also transactional, but instead of goods we barter with behaviors. “Before you can make someone change their behavior, you need to uncover what’s in it for them. What matters to them enough to change the way they act? Research tells us that this is different for different audiences. In order to affect behavior change you need to alter the perception of the desired action (or inaction). If the goal is to recruit those teenagers back over to Facebook (or away from social media in general), we need to convince them there is a fun, easy, and wicked cool reason to do so.”

Start step by step and keep it up.  Be in continuous connection with your target, follow it, research it, interact with it, use an integrated communication to make sure the consumer feels you are with him all the way.  Don’t just use digital and PR, digital, use traditional and interactive tools as well. Social media, video, direct mail, and experiential marketing all play a part in giving the target audience the knowledge, will and skill to change.

Moreover, make sure you are measuring all the time, in all the campaign’s stages. It’s the only way you can actually see if your process has results or not.