Back to The Drawing Board – 3 signs your landing page needs a complete overhaul
Sometimes we have to admit our failures, as it’s the only way we could ever hope to move on to our successes. It’s exactly the same with landing page design – what may have seemed a good idea at the time has proven to be a bit of disaster.
But when is the right time to scrap your current landing page and go right back to drawing board? It’s a tricky question, because with a little tinkering and tweaking in places almost any landing page can be improved to increase click-through-rate. And lets not forget the time and energy it takes to start from scratch – just when is it worth it?
To give you guys a clearer idea, we’ve come up with 3 definite signs that your landing page designs needs a complete overhaul.
1. You’ve Lost Direction – metaphorically speaking
In other words, you don’t know where you’re going – and by ‘you’ we mean the designer… or the marketer… or whoever came up with the initial premise of your landing page.
Defining a ‘goal’ or ‘purpose’ to your online marketing efforts is probably the single most important aspect to establish before you set off, otherwise you’re likely to get lost along the way. This could be something as simple as deciding whether you want to increase brand awareness or initiate a sales tactic – even though you could try and pull them both off at the same time, the two are not truly symbiotic.
Let’s take a look at an example:
Image: Landing page example is not dedicvated to a single purpose and will not perform optimally.
Here you can see that this landing page is being used as both a tool for brand awareness (with the goal of getting visitors to sign up to a free trial) and to initiate sales (with the goal of getting visitors to download the product itself).
This is a very basic example, but it’s easy to see how a landing page that hasn’t been fully dedicated to a single purpose can cause problems:
- Two call-to-actions can compete for the visitor’s attention.
- Without a single purpose, there is no dedicated headline explaining the immediate benefits of sticking with the page.
- Targeting more than one demographic (in this case, customers of varying potential to buy) waters down the effectiveness of your pitch. You can only sell to one group of targeted customers at a time.
On top of this, having more than possible action on your landing page can muddy the waters when it comes to performance reporting. No two possible actions will equate to the same ‘value’ to a company. And when it comes to assessing the ‘value’ of your conversions in relation to monetary success, accuracy is crucial.
When to go back to the drawing board Certainly if you’re still unsure about what is you want to achieve (e.g. brand awareness or sales) through a single campaign. If you are already certain, make sure to abolish any objectives from your campaign altogether – perhaps create a separate campaign for brand awareness if your primary campaign is sales.
2. You’ve Lost Direction – physically speaking
Like the foundations of a solid house, the layout of your landing page (or structure) is what holds the entire thing together. Pretty simple, eh? Well, not always.
When it comes to landing page design, it can be very tempting to jump right in and throw everything you’ve got at the page without thinking about key fundamentals. This means overcoming every concern, every notion of doubt, and answering every question a visitor might ask the moment they arrive at your page – in a structurally-sound, easy to follow route that guides them all the way towards your call-to-action.
You can take a look at the 3 questions new landing page visitors ask and the best ways to tackle them right here.
It’s also worth thinking about where certain elements will perform best on your landing page. There’s no point in hiding your CTA below the fold, for instance, where people have to scroll down in order to find it. And have you thought carefully about what comes after your initial headline? Everything needs to coalesce in a clear, succinct fashion that provides a straightforward path to conversion.
Image: Landing page example is structurally-un-sound and too confusing to navigate.
When to go back to the drawing board There are too many issues with the composition of elements on your page to test, it’s often easier to knock the whole thing down and built again from the ground-up.
3. You’ve tested everything you can think of
Quite an obvious one, admittedly, but sometimes it’s best to acknowledge that something about your landing page just isn’t working and it’s probably best to go back to the drawing board.
Of course, before you do scrap all that hard work and start again from square one, make sure you’ve been conducting your A/B split testing correctly. There is a great deal of importance in maintaining consistent test conditions.
Chances are you’re probably putting out completely different variants at once. This is often too much data to truly establish what works and what doesn’t, so you need to test methodically before you decide what to do next.
When to go back to the drawing board You’ve conducted A/B split tests fairly and thoroughly, but have still yet to establish a reason for unsatisfactory performances.
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