Just to be clear, we’re not talking about pictures of fluffy bunnies or teddy bears; we’re talking about four very basic rules to follow when creating landing pages. Not that we have anything against fluffy bunnies or teddy bears – you can see above that we actually have a few in the office to prove it.
Here at Colewood we speak to thousands of website owners every year that are facing issues such as high bounce rates and low conversion rates. And quite often it’s down to many factors; such as poorly targeted PPC visitation or that email blast that they sent out to 50,000 people from a bought mailing list. However, more frequently we find that their poor landing page performance is due to a failure in effectively engaging and informing visitors as to the who they are, what they offer and a failure in outlining a clear route to taking a desired action.
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the percentage of people that take a desired action on a webpage. And there’s a lot involved. However, on a basic level, ensuring that you follow the four primary rules below you will be going some of the way to offering a good landing page experience for your visitors.
Four steps to fluffy enlightenment
Call to action. A call to action (CTA) is often a button or a link which directs users as to what they need to do in order to carry out a key action on your webpage. This could be “buy now” , “download” , “register”, “enquire” or even “call now” . Whatever your call to action, this needs to be placed in a prominent position on your webpage which is easily identifiable to the user. The use of colour, font size and imagery are often essential to clear, concise calls to action.
Unique selling points. What is going to turn your visitor in to a customer? Site persistent, clearly defined USP’s which can be absorbed in a matter of seconds without the need to read paragraphs of text is a great way to capture the users attention and improve engagement. Understanding your audience and analysing your competition will help you to create hard hitting USP’s. A common mistake which is made by webmasters is to show off fantastic USP’s on their homepage which, quite often, will not be the landing page for many users if their PPC and SEO campaigns are working effectively.
Trust signals. Often overlooked to the detriment of many online businesses. Trust signals come in many forms and can often tie in with USP’s. The use of secure site certifications, social buttons, third party reviews and a clear telephone number or live chat are a great way to give a user confidence that you’re a genuine, trustworthy business with a history or providing good service. Anything showing positive sentiment towards your brand should be clearly identifiable and showcased throughout the entire user journey.
Ease of navigation. A user should always be fully aware of where they are and how they can navigate deeper in to the site, or go back to where they came from. Your navigation should be consistent in style and position, and should not be overcrowded – quite often less is more. The use of colour to highlight the category or webpage the user is on is helpful, along with a clearly identifiable breadcrumb. You should always aim to prevent the user from having to user the back button. Category names should accurately describe the content within them, so the more descriptive your category names the better. As best practise, your website logo should always navigate back to the homepage.
Sure, this CUTE landing page methodology is fairly simple, however, I’m sure that you can think of many examples yourself of websites that fall short in respect of at least one of these areas. Sometimes the smallest changes can have the biggest impact.
If you have concerns that your landing pages are not performing as they should, applying our CUTE theory may improve things. There are of course many other considerations to take in to account when optimising your landing pages, one of the biggest being mobile and tablet compatibility. With so many considerations, sometimes it’s best to chat to people in the know – so feel free to comment, drop us a line or give us a call if you have any questions for our CRO team.
