We’ve talked about the importance of landing pages and how they fit into a holistic marketing strategy for your website. Let’s say you’ve taken our advice and set up a landing page. But you’ve noticed it hasn’t done its job; you haven’t conversions significantly increase, particularly from that source. If that describes your situation, then take a look at these four best practices for your landing page that may help improve your success rate.

Your page must be very specific.

The purpose of a general website is to share information about your company, products, and/or services. Conversely, the purpose of a landing page is narrowly focused on a single goal. That goal should be as specific as possible. (Don’t use your landing page to try to sell any product—use it to sell a specific product.)

The idea is that focusing on a singular product, service, or campaign objective cuts down on choice (“analysis paralysis”) which therefore improves conversion.

But what if you want to sell more than one thing? Set up multiple landing pages with a separate campaign for each page. For example, if you sell clothes, you could set up one campaign for socks and a separate one for shirts. If you offer lawncare services, set up one campaign for mowing and another for gardening. Your ads or post that direct to these landing pages should be equally specific; in a sense, you’re qualifying your traffic for your specific campaign and focusing on those visitors that are most likely to convert.

In fact, according to Hubspot companies that increase their landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in the number of leads from their landing pages in aggregate. That’s incredible!

CTAs should be both physically large and action-oriented.

The Call To Action, or CTA, is the button that visitors press in order to perform the objective of the landing page. These two best practices for CTAs are all about encouraging page visitors to take the action and click.

Having small buttons with boring styles that blend into the page are a problem because they can literally get lost in the page design. Remember that you typically have only a few seconds of a browser’s attention so it’s important to make it very obvious and easy to take action or visitors are liable to simply stop trying. Large buttons that pop out of the design are the best way to illustrate to visitors what to do next.

Not an attractive button.

The text on the button is extremely important because visitors should immediately understand what the button will do. Buttons like “Submit” or “Sign Up” or “Go” are all technically action words, but they’re generic, ambiguous, and unmeaningful. Your CTA text should be precise. Some studies have also shown an improvement in conversion by using first-person text. For example, you might CTAs like “Add Me To Your Newsletter,” “Start My Free Trial,” or “See Why Our Vacuum Cleaner is the Best.”

The CTAs that work best will vary from industry to industry, company to company, and campaign to campaign. As a result, our advice is to consider these best practices as a place to start, and A/B test different versions of your CTAs until you find the best performing option.

Keep your opt-in form as short as humanly possible.

Your landing page probably has a form. In fact, that’s one of the biggest reasons to have a landing page in the first place. Your objective likely involves collecting some type of information from your visitors. Keep the information that you need to collect on this page to an absolute bare minimum. Remember, you can always collect more information later.

If your landing page’s purpose is to increase sign-ups for your email newsletter, the only thing you really need is the email address. Would name, company information, and phone number be helpful? Sure, but no one wants to provide those things just to sign up for a newsletter or see your lead magnet.  You will decrease your conversions when you increase the friction.

Additionally, if your form is optimized for a general contact inquiry, you are missing out on valuable conversions. Most people don’t know what to say in an open-ended text field and don’t want to feel like they’re doing the work to give you the information about them. At Empower Ideas, our contact page (empowerideas.com/contact-us) makes it easy to take a specific action with a contact rather than asking visitors for a general note. Each form on each of our landing pages is specific to that page and only requests the information necessary for the form’s success at that moment. In our example above, if your objective is sign-ups for an email newsletter, you can always ask for additional information in your newsletter (perhaps in your welcome series?) after you capture the initial sign-up. There’s no need to condense the entire sales cycle into a single form.

Conversely, if your landing page exists to sell something right on the page, you’ll need to collect more information such as a credit card number. It’s okay to have a longer form when those fields are necessary, but we still recommend removing any extraneous fields. Additionally, keep all fields visible from the beginning so that users know exactly what information they need to provide. You shouldn’t need 2 or 3 pages of form fields, which will simply frustrate users. (This is one problem with Typeform and, while they look pretty, this is a reason we don’t often recommend them.)

To summarize, keep your forms as concise as possible and collect only the most essential information to complete your landing page’s objective.

Testimonials and social proof are imperative.

According to BigCommerce 92% of customers read reviews before buying and 88% of consumers trust online testimonials and reviews as much as recommendations from friends or family. It’s a huge number that drives home the importance of social proof.

Request and showcase detailed and colorful testimonials, use tools that show how others are concurrently making purchases on your site, or link to third-party reviews across the internet.

A word of caution is that any reviews you show on your site should be genuine. Never write fake reviews or testimonials. Because of these blackhat techniques, third-party proof systems (for instance, verified purchaser reviews) can be more trustworthy to visitors, even if the platform costs you some money. If you don’t see a lift in conversions from your landing page merely from adding simple text testimonials, consider investing in one of these third-party platforms to help.

Ready for more customers?

Now that you know the best practices, consider implementing them on your own landing pages to increase conversion. When you know it’s important to make your website a priority but you don’t have the time or knowledge to even get started, Empower Ideas can help. For a limited time, we’re offering our retainers with unlimited work, so you can submit as many landing page requests as you can think of. We’ll apply these best practices to your existing landing pages or make brand new ones from scratch.