What to Check for When QA’ing Your Own Landing Pages
Create mobile friendly pages
According to a web traffic analysis service Statcounter, mobile Internet traffic has surpassed desktop traffic in October of 2016. That month, global mobile Internet traffic accounted for 51.3% of all website visits and desktop traffic accounted for 48.7%. Other web traffic analytics platforms have data that supports the trend of mobile traffic increasing and desktop traffic decreasing. For example, statista.com reported that in the third quarter of 2017, 52.99% of global Internet traffic was from mobile devices, an about 20% increase compared to the same quarter in 2016.
This data means one thing: your landing pages absolutely have to be mobile friendly. Mobile-friendly pages are no longer an option, they are a must-have.
You should use an analytics service such as Google Analytics with your website to track how many users visit your landing pages from mobile devices.
Most email management platforms also show you how many people on your list open your emails on their mobile devices. Typically, even busy professionals that spend the majority of their time working on desktop computers with large screens check personal emails on their phones and the percentage of mobile traffic is going to be significant. It is going to be even higher if you are selling products or services to the general audience that is likely to use a smartphone more than a computer.
In addition to being aware of the desktop vs mobile stats for your business, you should check how your landing pages look on mobile devices before you publish a page, especially if you create it using a desktop or a laptop. A page may look great on a 14-inch screen, but on a smaller screen a font may be hard to read, or, on the opposite, feel too big, formatting may look off or an opt-in box may not stand out as well as you’d like.
Have compelling sales copy
While the Internet is a relatively new form of media and smartphones, laptops, desktops, and tablets are a relatively new form of technology, to get results in your marketing you will need to learn human psychology that doesn’t change simply because a person is interacting with a device. Your landing pages should follow good, old, classic rules of copywriting and creating effective sales copy. Most of these rules are not just valid, they are more important than ever. For example, one of the rules of copywriting is to have effective, attention-grabbing headlines. It is even more important to have a high-quality, high-impact headline on a landing page or a website than in a print ad. When a person is looking at an ad in a magazine or a newspaper, he or she is reading just one magazine or a newspaper. When someone is looking at your website or landing page, it is very likely that they have a number of tabs open with a variety of different websites. For this reason, having an interesting headline that will grab the attention of the visitor to your landing page and make them interested enough to stay on the page, is more important than ever. It is also more important than ever to have great testimonials about your product, a compelling story, a list of features and benefits, and other elements of strong, effective sales copy.
Have a great offer and calls to action
It is possible that the offer you have on your landing page is a freebie. Many people think that when they are offering something for free, they do not have to sell and the offer doesn’t have to be outstanding. After all, it is a freebie.
Thinking this way is a big mistake because the Internet today has tons of everything for free. You can’t really surprise anyone with free. Also, when you offer something for free, people often get skeptical about why someone would give them something for free and if there’s any catch with the offer.
For this reason, no matter what you are offering on your landing page, you need to sell it, you need to sell it well and you need to have a great offer. It is even better if you offer is absolutely irresistible to your target audience. If you pay attention to most advertising and marketing around you, including landing pages, you will see a lot of talk about products and services, but not a lot of great offers for responding immediately. Even businesses that do get the importance of offers and capture of visitor information often have bland, boring offers such as “10% off your first order.”
Alfred Taubman was one of the most successful developers of shopping malls in North America. His company has built and operated such malls as the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey, Queens Center in Queens, New York and Arborland Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
In his speeches and his book, Taubman talked a lot about the concept of threshold resistance as it applied to someone looking at a store from a street and deciding to either enter the store or skip it. The same concept applies to landing pages, too. You may be thinking that giving someone a coupon for a free visit to your office is a great offer, but in reality, your landing page visitors may not know you well enough to feel comfortable to come to your office. Also, they may think that when they arrive at the office, they will have to deal with a salesperson that will try to sell them something. This is just one example of how an offer may seem great to a business but has too much threshold resistance from the perspective or a potential or current customer.
A great, irresistible offer should not evoke any threshold resistance. Offers with the lowest possible threshold resistance are offers for free content or information, where you give your customers something of high value and easy to consume in exchange for their information.
Make sure your message is relevant to your users
No matter how great your offer, it will not be effective if you present it to a wrong market. For example, you may have a landing page with a free cookbook that contains the easiest, tastiest recipes in the world, yet if your target audience is busy single urban professionals who never cook, your offer will never be successful. You may have the best course on dog training in the world, yet showing it to people who do not have or do not intend on getting a dog will be absolutely useless.
One of the best ways to create a compelling offer is to survey your market first. Learn about challenges and problems that your prospects have to deal with on a regular basis, then create products and offers that solve these problems. What you will often discover is that there will be a set of problems surrounding the main issue. For example, if you are selling to business owners, they may need and want better marketing, but in order to create better marketing they need time that they never seem to have. This means that before you get to offering marketing, you could offer time management tips and solutions to help your audience free some time.
Track important numbers such as click-through rate and conversions using analytics
In order to get your landing pages to perform, you need to measure and monitor performance. Important numbers include the number of visitors, time on the page, click-through rates on your ads and conversions. On a landing a page, conversion is a percentage of people that come to the page and take the desired action. For example, if you are offering to send a free video to visitors that give you their email address and 20 out of 200 visitors give you their email, your conversion is 20 divided by 200, which is 0.1 or 10%.
Once you know your numbers, you should try and beat them by creating a variation of your landing page and then splitting traffic between several pages. Today, there are a lot of tools available that make the process of tracking and measuring conversions simple and visual. You can measure virtually anything about your page by using a free suite of tools from Google called Google Analytics. To split test the performance of different pages, you can use A/B split-testing feature of Google Analytics. If a large part of your audience is on Facebook, you can use Facebook Pixel, which is also free. Once you collect some data about the performance of your pages, you can use a free split test calculator such as http://www.splittestcalculator.com/
