Make Your Landing Page a Runaway Success

Alright, quiz time.

How much time do you have to engage your prospect with your website?

How long do you have from the time your landing page loads to the time your prospects decide whether or not to add researching your business to their already-endless list of things to do today?

Thirty seconds? Ten? Nope.

50 milliseconds. That’s about the time it takes to blink your eyes.

Is your landing page ready for that kind of scrutiny? If not, read on.

At Larry Jacob Internet Marketing, we monitor stats and optimize emails for our clients. It’s easy to see how much time and effort email marketers and Infusionsoft users spend on their marketing emails, which makes sense because we all know that every click-through from email to website is a lead. We sigh over subject lines, worry about word count, slave over SEO, and carefully craft the call to action. Then we obsess over traffic and click-through rates, praying that all that hard work will pay off.

This is all as it should be, but it is not enough. If your prospects don’t stay on your landing page for long enough to see how much better you are than your competition, then that killer email you were so proud of might as well have been routed to Junk Mail.

Lucky for you, 2014 is almost here, and with it comes a new start. Take a minute to quiz your landing page, and resolve to improve its score in the new year:

1. Is your landing page fast enough? Try pulling up your website from home, or better, from your mom’s computer. Does it take forever to load all the graphics and content on the page? If you start to feel impatient, your potential customer will too.
2. Is it easy to access from a smart phone? You want the 20%-50% of people who check their email on a mobile device to access your landing page easily. Make sure your call to action is the first thing they see, that they can read everything well without scrolling from side to side, and that any forms you want them to fill out are short and easy to navigate.
3. Where is your search engine? Not everyone who engages with your excellent landing page will see what they came for right away, so be sure that when they look in the top-right corner for a search engine, they find one there. Some other aspects of your page need to be predictable as well. For example, your company logo should be in the top-left corner of the page, and the text should be primarily black and on a white background.
4. Could your headline convert on its own? This goes back to passing the blink test. Your headline needs to answer the question, “what’s in it for me?” so clearly and with enough compelling force that your prospect will stay to learn more about your business.
5. When is the last time you tested your landing page’s effectiveness? Testing is possibly the most important part of any marketing campaign. No matter how advanced or effective your marketing strategy is now, it could be better, and while it’s not possible to know exactly how well a new tactic or angle will work before you try it, testing it out on a few hundred email addresses before sending the same link to everyone will save you a lot of pain and heartache.

   One way to do this is to create two landing pages and send the link to 100 people each, then send the one that converts the best out to everyone else on your list. Another approach is to try out a landing page for a month, then change something about it and let it run for another month. This way, you hone and fine-tune your landing page continuously, so it converts more and more people over time.

   How did you score?

   If you could use a hand, we’d love to help, so stop by some time and have a look around.

   Wherever the holiday season finds you this year, we at Larry Jacob Internet Marketing wish you a happy and prosperous New Year.

   To your success!