6 Ways to Optimize Landing Pages and Capture More Leads

A landing page is the page where your customer will arrive after clicking on a banner ad, a search engine result link or any other internet marketing offer or effort
and, if all goes well,  you’ll be able to garner contact information—one of the first steps towards a possible sale in the future. Landing pages should be targeted towards specific offers and can be easily measured, tested and optimized--so why are so many marketers still in their same old landing page rut?

Despite their obvious importance, too many marketers aren’t using landing pages to their best advantage. According to a MarketingSherpa study, 50% of web visitors will click away from your landing page in the first 8 seconds after arriving because the offers don’t appeal to them. With statistics like that, it’s clear that your landing pages need to be the best that they can be—are yours up to snuff? If not, here are 6 quick tips on how you can optimize your landing pages and capture more leads:

1. First impressions are everything! In order to capture your visitors’ attention, it is best to have a simple offer that is attention-grabbing and relevant. Keep the most important information above the fold so that your customers can see it quickly and easily and make sure that your call to action and offer are easily distinguishable.
   
   
2. Communicate the value of your offer. It is crucial to make sure that your offer is clear and specifically targeted to your campaign’s main audience and that your landing page quickly explains how the offer will benefit the visitor; this means that your offer needs to be attractive and easy to take advantage of. 
   
   
3. Keep it simple. Your visitors, no matter how interested they are in your offer, don’t want to be bogged down with complicated navigation, hidden calls to action, or long registration forms. Navigation should be clean and simple to minimize confusion; calls to action should be clearly stated and easy to accept; forms should be simple and only request relevant contact information.
   
   
4. Make your conversion button as obvious as possible. This point relates to the point above—not only should your call to action to simple and easy to accept, you should make your “submit” or conversion button the most prominent thing on the landing page. Make it painfully easy for your visitors to turn themselves into conversions.
   
   
5. Build trust by communicating your privacy policy. No one is going to give you their contact information if they don’t trust you. Make sure that your visitors know what they are filling out, where the information is going and how it will be used.
   
   
6. Measure, hone, repeat. So your landing page is capturing leads—but is it capturing all the leads that it can? You should always test multiple versions of landing pages so that you can learn what works best and refine your page.  Always measure the results of your landing pages, hone the page to perfection and then repeat.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at February 2, 2010 12:15 PM

Comments

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I think the optimization of carefully planned out landing pages is an untapped area of SEO providers. By tweaking landing pages and analyzing keyword data and conversions rates, we can determine better ways to convert visitors to leads to clients. I've been using unbounce lately to test conversions, pretty slick tool. There's some others out there as well including Google's free Website Optimizer which is pretty slick but does require you to understand coding. Thanks for the post!