Top 3 Landing Page Mistakes for Ecommerce Companies
By Ramon Ray, editor, Smart Hustle Magazine
An effective landing page can convert a visitor into a paying customer, whether a business is trying to drive traffic from search engines, email marketing messages, or other sources. Yet there are a few common mistakes brands make when designing a landing page that could be driving traffic away. If your business is working hard to create landing pages that get results, here are a few things to avoid.
Clutter
If you’re sending visitors to your landing page to encourage them to take action, that page should be clutter-free, with the emphasis on what you want them to do. If there’s a form you want them to complete, avoid hiding that form in a page full of other content. Most importantly, avoid incorporating your call to action into some carousel slider. As popular as those have become in recent years, experts have found that consumers tend to ignore them. You can still create calls to action that are visually appealing without drawing customer focus to other areas of the page.
Asking for Too Much Information
If you’ve directed your customer to a specific page for sign-ups, a form is understandable. However, you should only collect the smallest amount of information you need in order to follow up with the new lead. Many sites make the mistake of launching annoying pop-ups that customers must then close before they can get to the content. If those pop-ups require customers to enter information or sign in with an online account to close them, most of your visitors will simply hit the back button. As much as you want to collect information on the customers who check out your page, they’ll need to learn more about you before they’ll hand over personal information like an email address or first and last name.
Slow Load Times
Even the best content can’t convert if customers won’t wait around to read it. If visitors are clicking through from a list of search results, they’ll likely only give you a few seconds to deliver your content. Research shows that even a one-second page load time delay results in 11 percent fewer page views, a 16-percent loss in customer satisfaction, and a seven-percent reduction in conversions. Don’t assume you need an expert web developer to fix your website issues. In fact, there are a few small things you can do to speed up your site on your own. If you’re one of the many businesses that host its site through WordPress, you can use a caching plug-in that can speed up your page load times by up to 10 times their current speed. It’s also important to take a look at how your site performs on mobile devices, as more Google searches are done on mobile devices than desktop computers and visitors may leave your page if it doesn’t load quickly on their phone.
Landing pages are a great way for businesses to direct email and search engine traffic to a page that converts. But if your page scares visitors away, they won’t read your content, let alone take action on it. Keep your pages simple and direct to avoid sending visitors directly to the back button, where they’ll choose one of your competitors’ sites instead.
About the author: Ramon Ray has been educating business owners and entrepreneurs for over 20 years. Whether speaking on stage, interviewing celebrity entrepreneurs being interviewed by a journalist, Ramon is always excited about small business success. Check him out at www.ramonray.com.