Focus is Key for Landing Pages - Close the Sale (Page 4 of 4 )
What must you do to convince your visitors to convert? Consumers buy from those they trust. They should have a reason to trust you. Still, the landing page is where you should be pushing your product, not your company so much.
But you can at least avoid doing the wrong thing. When it comes time for them to fill out a form, ask for as little information as possible. You may need an address or a phone number; do you really need to know how many people belong to their organization or the size of their department’s budget? If you ask for this information when you don’t have a clear reason for needing it, you will find that many of your customers are giving you false answers – and many others will choose not to buy from you.
Even a little thing can make a difference. Does your registration form have a reset button? Does it really need one? Often this button is set where it is close to the submit button, and easy to hit by mistake. This leads to frustration, which is often enough to make someone abandon the purchase.
Make your call to action, and make it specific. You’re going to have to test this, though. Some swear by solid phrases like “Buy” or “Add to shopping cart;” others, like Jonathan Mendez at Optimize and Prophesize, suggest taking a softer approach. He specifically recommends using “Try it now,” giving visitors a soft impression with a message of immediacy (“now”). He also suggests you combine that with big red buttons and a persuasive message directly above the call to action to increase conversions.
Indeed, it might not hurt to have several calls to action, at the top, middle, and bottom of the page. In this way, your visitor can convert whenever they’re ready. And you should track these links – as well as any links you have if your landing page is part of a multi-stage process – to find out when visitors convert, and where they abandon the process so you can improve it.
Just as you got rid of the reset button to avoid having visitors leave in frustration if they accidentally hit it, you should also not make it easy to leave your landing page. I don’t mean you should make your landing page take over your visitor’s computer with special effects; I mean you shouldn’t offer them so many options that they get distracted or move along a path other than the one you intended. Once again, it’s a matter of maintaining focus.
Once your visitor has seen the process through to the end, you’re done, right? Not necessarily. If you’ve set it up right, a confirmation or “encore” page will appear reiterating what they have just done and thanking them for buying from you. This is a perfect opportunity to further engage with them. If they bought a product, offer them a free subscription to your newsletter. Or offer them another product, perhaps at a discount (“Like our Gadget X? Buy our book on 100 great things you can do with Gadget X for 20 percent off!”). You could even ask them to take a survey.
Your landing page should keep your visitors focused; one way to do that is to keep them engaged. Give them something to do – no, better; give them something to do that’s exactly what you want them to do. Make sure they have good reasons to do it, and watch your conversions increase.
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