If you’re growing an email list or selling a product or a service on your website, you’ll probably know how inevitable landing pages are for your business.
Everyone knows that landing pages are built for one single purpose—to convert your visitors into leads or customers.
The best part is landing page helps you to keep the focus of your visitors on the opt-in forms or call-to-action buttons placed in it. By this way, you can persuade them to take the desired action on landing pages—like filling up the form or clicking the ‘buy now’ button.
If you’re looking to build a landing page for the first time, likely you will be making most of these common mistakes that most beginners commit.
In this post, aside from showing you the common landing page mistakes, I’ll also include you some practical tips to avoid committing them when designing your next landing page.
Let’s take a look.
Mistake #1: Not removing distraction
I don’t know about you, but I used to see countless numbers of distracting landing pages every day.
Now, you might be wondering what it means by a distracting landing page.
A landing page is distracting if it comprises elements like navigation menu, outbound links, etc. that doesn’t contribute to the core purpose—to convert visitors into leads or customers.
Maybe you want to provide an external link on your landing page for convincing your visitors to take the desired action. In that case, you may need to make those links open in a new window so that you can retain your visitors.
Below are some other actionable tips to ensure that your landing page doesn’t comprise any distracting elements that take the focus of your visitors away from your page.
- Use an explainer video: For some of your visitors, a landing page with the long copy can be distracting. By creating an explainer video, you can make your copy shorter.
- Create a microsite: If you need to add more links on a landing page with lots of content, you might consider creating a microsite that consists of multiple pages instead of creating a single landing page with many external links.
Mistake #2: Not building killer landing pages
The downside of creating a landing page using one of the templates of your existing WordPress theme is that the ability to customize your landing page will be limited. That means chances are you can’t actually build a high conversion landing page using your existing theme. This is especially true if your existing theme is not a multipurpose theme or a landing page creator theme like OptimizePress.
That being said, just because you need a landing page on your website, doesn’t mean that you should necessarily change your existing theme. In fact, there are lots of WordPress landing page plugins that help you build a killer landing page right from your current theme.
Enstine recommends you to use Thrive landing page plugin. You may read his complete review before choosing the right one for your site.
Alternatively, if you’re good at HTML coding, you can create an HTML landing page and host it on your domain, so you don’t need to spend an extra penny for purchasing a dedicated theme or plugin for creating killer landing pages.
Pro tip: If you prefer building an HTML landing page, you may need to use it as a custom template of your WordPress theme. This strategy helps you to make any edits on your HTML page right from your WordPress admin panel.
Mistake #3: Not collecting emails
The visitors of your landing page might not be ready to purchase from your site during their first visit. On average, it takes about five visits before they could make a purchasing decision.
So during the first visit, instead of collecting the emails of your potential prospects if you’re trying to sell them, chances are you’re not going to make many sales and are probably leaving a lot of money on the table.
Make sure you build an email list, so you can contact your potential prospects and encourage them to visits your website often.
Pro tip: In your landing page, add an email subscription form instead of a contact form. This strategy helps you to send automated personalized messages to your prospects.
Mistake #4: Using the default forms
One of the common mistakes I often see on landing pages is marketers used to use default opt-in forms in their landing page that are created from their email marketing tools like AWeber or MailChimp etc.
The downside of using a default opt-in form in your landing page is that they’re boring and can’t grab the attention of your leads easily. In fact, because they are default forms, those designs are not unique.
If you’re looking to drive in more sign ups or sales, make sure to create a beautifully designed, high converting opt-in form in your landing page.
Pro tip: For creating beautiful customized opt-in forms, try using a free plugin like Optin forms.
Mistake #5: Selling features instead of benefits
When it comes to writing copy for your landing page, the general rule of thumb is to sell the benefits not features of your product. And since benefits are what your customer is looking for from your product, it is better to start the sales copy with benefits.
For example, if you’re selling a weight loss ebook on your landing page, this is how a sales copy will look like that try to sell features of your product.
- A complete guide with 150+ pages
- List of foods you shouldn’t eat
- Exercises with illustrations
And here’s how a sales copy will look like if they are selling benefits.
- Lose up to 5 pounds in a week
- Techniques to lose weight naturally by boosting metabolism
- 5 exercises to burn your fat
Pro tip: Studies show that you’ve got only 6 seconds to capture the attention of your landing page visitors. Make sure your content is well organized, so it doesn’t distract your readers. Break up long landing pages with subheadings, bullet points and short paragraphs. This will help your audiences to grab the message you want to convey quickly.
Mistake #6: Not AB testing
We all know that A/B testing is a must when it comes to converting more visitors to customers. Surprisingly, many marketers do not AB test their landing pages. If you’re spending money on advertising for bringing traffic to your landing page, you’ll definitely need to A/B test different elements of your landing page.
In fact, A/B testing your landing page doesn’t cost you a lot. And you shouldn’t necessarily sign up for a premium subscription based A/B testing service. If you’re on WordPress, you can install a free plugin like Simple Page Tester that lets you run split tests on your WordPress website without having you to edit the code. Alternatively, for complete solution AB Press Optimizer could be the right choice if you need a premium plugin that doesn’t tie you with a recurring fee.
Pro tip: If you’re looking for inspiration to conduct A/B tests on your landing page, you can read 71 AB testing ideas from Optimizely.
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