Most website pages do not have much by way of a ‘call to action’ and even your dedicated Landing Pages – the pages you use to convince visitors to your site to take their interest further  – can be far from perfect.

How often have you seen words such as “ Click Here” or “ Go to this website” or “Call us on 0123 123 0123” or even “ Use the Contact Form”  Instructions like these to your website visitors can seem quite prescriptive and unwittingly you have managed to create a ‘point of resistance’ between you and your customer.  If your visitor does not see that the benefits of taking the prescribed action will significantly outweigh the inconvenience of taking the action, they will not do it!

If you want to improve the performance of your landing pages, and who doesn’t, you need to try and make the process of buying from you as pleasant and intuitive as possible.  Good Landing Pages, put together by professionals who understand conversion architecture can help overcome many of the common problems.

Let me try and give you an example we came across recently.  We were reading a blog – yes, we do read other blogs about internet marketing issues.  The blog topic was about increasing online response rates to an offer to download free trial software.  We followed the link given in the blog post to look at the offer for ourselves.  Here is a summary of our experience:

The instructions to download were not clearly stated

When we clicked through to the email to register to receive the software download we then had to go through a quite laborious set of instructions covering the four-step download process.

Information was not presented in a logical order

Once we had clicked through from the blog to the offer site the landing page immediately asked us for an email address – there was absolutely no mention of the offer and we were left wondering if we had reached the correct site.  The actual link to the trial software download was much further down the page and in practice we would expect the vast majority of people who clicked on the link to simply click away and ignore the offer altogether.

Multiple offers were available on the download page

Most Sales coaches will tell you that you should present any options to a customer only after they have made the decision that they want the product.  You would not, for example decide you want a blue car with a black leather interior until after you had decided which car you wanted to buy. 

The download landing page offered different download options immediately – even before we had decided whether we wanted it or not.   This made our buying decision more complicated  than it should have been and our guess is that this download page has quite a high ‘bail-out’ or bounce rate.

If we were working with the people who were offering the trial software download we would be recommending a new landing page design to include:

• A large image of the product’s packaging
• A drop-down menu pre-loaded with the most popular version
• A field for an email address with a brief explanation of benefits
• A large “download now” button

Remember, the Point of dedicated Landing Pages is to clarify and simplify.

If you want people to buy from you online – or take the action that you want them to take you must remove any roadblocks that might get in their way. Make it easy and intuitive for them and you just might boost your conversion rates!

It is always a good idea to work with professionals and online experts such as WSI IMS, who can quickly analyse and work with you to increase the effectiveness of your online presence.  Please leave a comment below or visit WSI IMS for more information.