The Importance of Testing Your Landing Pages

— December 11, 2017

The Importance of Testing Your Landing Pages

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The conversion rates of landing pages can vary anywhere between less than 1% to about 24.5%. Part of the reason behind this large variation is that conversion rates aren’t the same across different industries. For example, an excellent conversion rate for e-commerce is mediocre for the finance industry. However, another reason for this disparity in conversion rates is that some businesses actively improve their conversion rates by testing their landing pages while many others don’t.

It is basically a method of strategic optimization to increase leads and sales without spending money on attracting visitors on low bounce rate.

Conversion testing involves making changes to various page elements and measuring the effect on conversions. It is basically a method of strategic optimization to increase leads and sales. If the change causes an improvement, it’s kept. Otherwise, the change isn’t used. Testing requires some work, which dissuades many businesses from doing it. This is a mistake because businesses should regard testing as an investment of time or money.

Testing can increase your conversion rate by 300 or even 500 percent, depending on your industry. That’s a three to five-fold increase in your sales, lead acquisition, or email sign-ups. To get similar increases without testing would require a three to five-fold increase in the traffic to your landing page. More likely than not, increasing traffic will be far more costly than testing.

Here are five landing page testing tips:

Use Statistically Significant Numbers of Traffic Visits

An Internet search for an “A/B testing significance calculator” will provide the tool to make this determination. A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a landing page to determine which performs the best. The more traffic your page gets, the more rapidly you can test it, since it will take less time to get statistically significant visits.

Test Your Headline

Your headline is one of the first things visitors will see when they land on your page, so it makes sense to test this element. It also helps create that important first impression for your audience. Will they stay and see what you’re offering or leave and never return?

A headline that doesn’t immediately grab your audience’s attention can kill your conversion rate and make all the time, money, and effort you invested go right down the drain.

Design Matters

Where should you place the call-to-action on your landing page? What color should it be? How about size? While you can guess or use your own preferences, simply testing the site with different variations can show how big improvements can be made.

Test the Important Landing Page Elements

Don’t get lost testing endless variations of subtle elements that most people barely notice. The improvements won’t amount to much after a lot of work. Instead, focus on the big elements such as the headline, benefits, call to action, images, form fields, and the overall layout (such as a short page vs long page).

Tone is something you need to test for yourself. Many businesses will already have a recognized business persona on social media, but haven’t yet considered incorporating it into their sales funnel. Test it within different verticals, among different demographics, and for different objectives.

Use Automated Marketing Software

Without automation, testing your landing pages thoroughly may be cost prohibitive. Manually redesigning your pages may divert too much of your scarce resources. In addition, you will need analytics that track your traffic behavior.

Automated marketing software is available that starts with high converting landing page designs, and allows you to quickly edit and customize them for testing purposes. Quality automated marketing software should include analytics and reports that give you a clear picture of your testing results.

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Author: Steve Hamm

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