3 Tips for Knockout Landing Pages

If you are an email marketer or Infusionsoft user I am sure you have put a lot of thought into your email subject lines and messages. If you are like me, you obsess over the open and click through rates of your emails. But how much time have you put into thinking about the landing pages?

Creating a killer email is only half the battle. Once you are able to get your audience to click on your link, it is up to the landing page to convert them.

As an Infusionsoft consultant, I manage the email marketing campaigns for many Infusionsoft users. My clients are always excited to promote their offer to their list. We work really hard to construct a compelling email with an eye catching subject line and a strong call to action. We monitor the Infusionsoft stats and optimize the emails.

This is all great stuff indeed. The problem is that, I rarely see clients calculating the conversion rate of their landing page and optimizing it for better performance!

This got me doing some research. I needed to know some quick and dirty tips for getting higher conversion rates for every email campaign we do.

I found this awesome article by Ginny Soskey over at HubSpot’s inbound marketing blog, Want to Get More Leads? Stop Making These 12 Landing Page Mistakes. All of her tips are spot on but three of them that really stood out to me. I see these mistakes all the time, here is how to avoid them:

1.Your landing page must pass the blink test.
This could be the hardest but most important part of making a landing page that actually converts. Studies have shown that people make their first impression of a website within 50 milliseconds of seeing it. In the time it takes you to blink your eyes people have made their decision whether they are interested enough to keep reading or bounce right off your site!

Most importantly, you need a strong headline that immediately answers the question, “what’s in it for me?” You then should use visuals to explain the rest. A little supporting copy and a call to action is all that’s left. Less is more!

2.Your landing page must be mobile friendly.
Although most people probably have been checking their email on their phone for at least five years now, somehow marketing techniques have still not quite adjusted to this. Many test studies have been done on this but while the numbers vary for each demographic, they all show that email on a smartphone or tablet is on the rise.

Make sure that the 25%-50% of people who open your email on their smartphone are able to view and interact with your landing page. You want to consider the responsiveness of your page. You do not want the user to have to scroll from side to side to read your copy. Make sure the call to action is obvious without scrolling. Also, your forms need to be short and easy fill out.

3.Test, Test, Test!
This goes for every type of marketing you will ever do—always test! I can’t stress it enough. Marketing is always a little bit of a gamble: some intuition mixed with A LOT of risk. But you can hedge your risks by testing. You will never know what is going to work for a specific audience without doing some trial and error.

For instance, when creating your landing page if you are unsure the best way to phrase your headline or if you should do a discounted offer or throw in freebies, these are the types of things that you should test. Create both landing pages and send each of them to just 100 people in your list. The one that converts the best should then be sent to the rest of your list.

Follow these three steps and you will have knockout landing pages every single time!