Imagine you’re launching a new marketing campaign. You’ve worked hard to pick the right marketing channels, target the right audience and craft the right ads.
But when you look at your analytics and see the first visitors come to your landing page, you realize none of them are converting.
At first, you think it might be bad luck. You let your marketing campaign go on, waiting to see how many people opt in and become your leads.
Only they never do.
Instead, hundreds of page views in, you realize the landing page is converting poorly – or not at all.
This means that your campaign is now losing you money in 3 ways:
- You’re missing out on potential sales because you’re failing to convert page visitors to leads.
- You’re running a marketing campaign that costs money. This is true for organic traffic as well, since you’re wasting time that could be used to generate revenue.
- You’re cheapening your brand’s reputation and image by showing users underwhelming marketing messages.
When these problems go unchecked, they can turn into a long-term nightmare for your business. A landing page that doesn’t convert is a black hole for your money and a stopgap for all your marketing efforts.
And even if you’re losing cents on a page that isn’t converting as well as it could, that money adds up over time, butchering your bottom line again and again.
To help you stop and prevent this from ever happening to you, we’re going to share 10 of the most common landing page mistakes that burn up ad spend and kill conversions.
We’ll start with…
1. The Page Isn’t Consistent With Your Marketing Messages
Let’s say you’re on an e-mail list for dog toys. One day, you get a particularly interesting letter with a link that reads: Get 50% Off On All Our Chew Toys Today.
Now, you want to buy some new chew toys for your pet. You click the link. And when you do, guess what?
You get directed to a landing page that has nothing to do with chew toys.
What do you do?
If you’re like most people, the answer is obvious. “Close the tab immediately and trust the brand less going forward.”
Of course, real-life marketers rarely make mistakes this obvious. It is common, however, to pick different messages for traffic generation and the landing page – and that’s never optimal, even when it’s subtle.
The fix is to think of your marketing messages and your landing page copy as two inseparable elements that must be consistent with each other. The smoother the transition, the less money you waste on disappointed customers that don’t convert.
Oh, and while we’re on the subject – here’s another common mistake that can literally make people leave your page while it’s still loading.
2. Your Page Takes Too Long to Load
In the current age of fast internet connections and unlimited bandwidth, many marketers forget that a page with complex elements, large images and animations can take ages to load.
This is a problem, because a study by Akamai and Gomez.com found that 40% of all visitors leave a site if it takes 3+ seconds to load. The same study found that more than half of all users think a site should load in under 2 seconds.
This means that if your website’s taking 3 or more seconds to load, you’re instantly throwing 2/5 of your ad budget out of the window.
That’s the bad news.
The good news is that this problem has an easy fix.
Go to a site like Pingdom or WebPagetest and check your site’s loading time:
If it’s over 3 seconds, see which elements are taking the longest to load – and find ways to edit or remove them. For example:
- If a plugin takes ages to load on your page, replace it with the light version.
- If an image is “heavy” in terms of size, replace it with a lower-res one.
- Replace short videos where audio isn’t important with gifs.
- Completely remove elements that aren’t essential to have on a landing page.
Once you’ve made sure your load speed is below 3 seconds – or 2 seconds if possible – move on to fixing the highly dangerous mistake #4.
But first, make sure that you don’t have…
3. Weak Headline & CTA Copy
The headline is the first thing people read, and 90% of those who do also read your call to action. If these two elements are strong, you’ll see some conversions no matter what…But if they’re weak, you’ll end up burning through your ad budget without getting much in return.
But if they’re weak, you’ll end up burning through your ad budget without getting much in return.The first common mistake is to have
The first common mistake is to have copy that’s vague, misleading or overly salesey. Some marketers think that headlines and CTAs need to be fancy – but in reality, they just need to clearly state what you’re about. For example, check out the opt-in form copy on Hubspot’s current landing page:
Simple, straightforward and easy to understand – which is what you should be aiming for on your pages, too.
Another thing that can turn people off your landing page copy is…
4. Failing to Understand What Your Customer Knows
If you’re a marketer, manager or business owner, you’re used to thinking from a provider’s point of view. You’ve developed an expertise in serving your customers – and that’s fantastic.
The problem is, the things that matter to a business may not matter to an end consumer at all.
Case in point: before Coca-Cola launched its New Coke formula, it thought that people want the best flavor. As a result, it ran blind tests that pitted Coke, New Coke and Pepsi against each other. New Coke was the new winner – so the formula was launched nation-wide.
Unfortunately, it turned out that people cared about the flavor they were used to; not the old flavor. Coca-Cola lost tens of millions of dollars and had to roll back to the old formula.
This is the kind of snafu you want to avoid. Make sure to know what your customers want, and focus your page on that. Never just assume.
(Also, for the love of all that’s good in the world, don’t load your copy up with jargon and tech-speak. Make it understandable to your end users, even if you feel that means “dumbing down” your content.)
Something else you want to avoid is…
5. Letting Page Visitors Leave Unimpeded
Getting a visitor to stay on-page is always cheaper than finding a new one because you’ve already paid for the traffic. For this reason, you don’t want to make it easy for people to leave your landing page on an impulse.
Instead, you want users to think twice before hitting that red X button – and fortunately for you, there’s a smart and simple way to do just that.
The first is exit pops. You’ve probably seen a bunch of these in the past, and while they’ve been misused by spammy, unscrupulous marketers, they’re also highly effective. Today’s technology allows you to make “soft” exit pop-ups that don’t disrupt a user’s web experience, which is an added benefit. Here’s an example:
As you can see, this pop-up goes inside the webpage rather than outside of it. This eliminates user frustration and maximizes conversions.
The really cool thing is, from now on you can make popups like this one inside Landingi platform. No external tools needed! Just log in to your account, select Popups tab and then you can create, edit and publish popups on all your landing pages!
6. Failing to Test
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “none of these tips are going to work unless you do”. These words directly apply to landing pages – because unless you’re out there in the field, constantly optimizing your landing pages for conversions, you’re going to waste a lot of money on missed conversions.
If you’re already testing and experimenting, you may well think: this point is way too obvious… But guess what? 1 in 5 businesses still don’t have a strategy for landing page testing, and 61% run fewer than 5 tests each month.
Needless to say, if either of these statistics applies to you, you may as well be burning a significant portion of your ad spend. Make sure to fix this mistake by running an A/B test, which is common in all landing page builders (including ours):
Let’s recap by going over the 6 landing page mistakes that’ll burn right through your ad budget:
- Landing Page and Its Marketing Messages are Inconsistent
- Landing Page(s) Takes Too Long to Load
- A Weak Headline & Poor CTA Copy
- Failing to Understand Your Customers
- Letting Page Visitors Walk Free
- Failing to Test
Now that you know these mistakes, you can avoid them, paying less per lead and getting more money in return.
