RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

Secrets of a sticky landing page

Posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 3:11 AM by Jebadiah Roberts  |  Comments (0)

A friend recently confided over coffee that she’d had it with online dating. Her complaint: no one ever lives up to how they describe themselves online. It’s a gripe I’ve heard numerous times, but this time, weirdly enough, it got me thinking about landing pages. (We’re a bit preoccupied with the whole web thing here.)

If you’ve never found yourself daydreaming about a flawlessly executed landing page, perhaps you’re not aware of just how important the design and content of your landing page is to your conversion rates. Consider this scenario:

You’ve finally honed a masterful AdWords ad and you’re off and running with a polished email campaign. Prospects are visiting your site in droves, and it’s just a matter of time before your conversion rates match your click-throughs. Job well done, right?

Not by a long shot. Without an effective landing page—one that grips visitors once they’ve arrived and propels them through the conversion funnel—your potential customers will leave your site just as quickly as they arrived.

So what makes visitors stick?

Well, since we’re science nuts who get excited about doing research, we like to think of stickiness in terms of a nifty little equation reported in Marketing Experiments Journal. It goes something like this:

c = 4m + 3v + 2(i – f) – 2a

Got all that? Neither did we at first. But then we put it into words, with which we’re a bit more proficient than algebra. It essentially says that conversion is a function of the motivation of your visitor plus the clarity of your value proposition plus the net impact of your visitor’s incentive vs. the friction they encounter minus any anxiety created by your landing page.

In other words, for a landing page to be sticky, it has to communicate your site’s value immediately and clearly so that it counters visitors’ doubts (anxiety) without distracting them (friction) from the end goal—conversion.

To further unpack all this technical mumbo jumbo, let’s look closer at what you can do to guarantee your landing page actually lands you customers. The following tips should make things clearer.

Keep your promises

Like my single friend who got tired of clicking on one person and meeting another, prospects who click on your ads expect your landing page to be consistent with your claim. Make sure your landing page shares a purpose with the link that got them there—don’t just direct visitors to your site’s home page. An effective landing page will always make good on its call to action. If a visitor has clicked “learn more,” your landing page should have more detailed information. If you’ve lured them with “order now,” see that an order form is waiting for them. And if they’ve clicked “read the full article,” your landing page should have—you guessed it—the full article.

Make it easy

Any time you force a visitor to jump through hoops, you create friction. In other words, don’t make them work any harder than necessary, or prospective customers will move on. Friction can take any number of forms: visitors having to scroll to find a call to action, important content hidden by mouse-overs, links that don’t look clickable, non-natural content flow (up-and-down rather than left-to-right), distractions that dilute your offering, requests for personal information—all of these factors can cause visitors to become irritated and click off.

Display value

Research shows that when a prospect visits your landing page, you have just 13.2 seconds to convince them they’re in the right place. That’s a mere 13.2 seconds to effectively communicate your site’s value. The "benefits before features" mantra is always a safe bet, but it’s absolutely essential for a landing page to quickly and clearly let prospects know what you’re offering and why they need it—and to present a prominent call to action so they can get it—or you’ll risk losing them.

Be credible

It may sound like a tired tactic, but there’s a reason why promotional copy always mentions awards or relates the praises of satisfied customers—it works. Whether your landing page includes testimonials, certifications or even links to your privacy statement, these credibility indicators make you seem trustworthy. They also lend your site an air of authority and contribute to social proof—both of which act as powerful mechanisms of persuasion. 

It’s better to give

By offering incentives—special offers or gifts that encourage visitors to stick around—you’ll do more than keep visitors on your site longer: You’ll encourage reciprocity when it comes time to seal the deal. It’s a simple fact of human evolution that we feel compelled to return even the slightest favor. Give something to visitors, and you’ll significantly increase the odds that they’ll give back. At the very least, you can use the offer to obtain useful information (no more than a name and an email address) about them that could lead to conversion later on.

Find the motive

How motivated visitors are (and the type of motivation that drives them) will determine how much friction they’ll put up with before bouncing. Know their motivations, and you’ll know how to make them stick. This principle is especially applicable in deciding how much copy to include on your landing page. "Less is more" tends to be web gospel, but research has shown that the opposite is occasionally true. If a visitor is motivated from a rational/analytical perspective, longer copy is actually better. But if they’re coming from an emotional/impulse perspective, short copy is the way to go.

Look your best

Do I even need to say this? Does anyone doubt that design reigns supreme when it comes to capturing the attention of potential customers? But effective design involves more than just dazzling colors and captivating images and fonts—it should also be consistent and intuitive, with a common theme that keeps visitors from ever wondering where they are and how they got there. A landing page that is visually distinct from the rest of your site will cause friction when a prospect decides to delve deeper, so be sure to define a clear path from your link to your landing page and through the rest of your site to keep visitors on the road to conversion.

Still not sold on the value of an effective landing page? Consider one last fact: If your ads are already sending potential customers to a landing page, then any increase in your conversion rate is pure profit. Use these simple principles to refine your existing page, and your site will be stickier than you ever thought possible.

Tags: conversion, conversion optimization, featured, landing pages