More Popular Conversion Tactics That Won’t Always Hit
There’s no such thing as a dead-cert and many popular conversion tactics, commonly thought to increase click-through rates, can actually go horribly wrong and blow up in your face.
That’s not to say all those ‘best practices’ and ‘landing page musts’ are a complete waste of time – it’s all a matter of proper execution. So with that being said, here’s 3 popular conversion tactics that won’t always hit the mark, but can be of great value when you do them right.
1. Expensive Things Won’t Buy You Love
Including a ‘giveaway’ or prize draw as part of your landing page offer can often be an effective way of incentivizing visitors to sign up and complete conversion. After all, people are far more inclined to hand over their personal details if they think they’re getting something in return. It can also help establish trust, especially if your testimonial includes previous recipients who can attest to the legitimacy of your prize draw and above all, the reputability of your company.
So how can this possibly be a bad thing? Well, used correctly, additional incentives can certainly improve your click-through rate. But sometimes these additional offers/value-points can overpower the original intent of the landing page, creating a conflict of purpose. And this can lead to confusion.
Let’s take a look at an example:
Image: Landing page incentive confuses the overall purpose of the page and the original memorandum is lost.
Here you can see that the incentive to ‘Win a Tablet Computer’ is auxiliary to the initial reason for visitors to hand over their details – the ‘Free Evaluation & Offer Estimation’. Not only is it visually distracting, it also makes the original purpose of this landing page less clear, and that can confuse visitors as to the relevancy of the page to their needs. Here’s your checklist for avoiding this problem:
- Avoid using incentives altogether, if you are already offering something for ‘Free’ (such as a Free Trial, Free Delivery, Free Consultation, etc). Visitors have arrived at your landing page because they’re already interested in your offer/product, you don’t want to lose that interest by diluting your original memorandum with additional offers and value-points.
- Introduce incentives at appropriate sections of the page, preferably after you’ve established the meaning of your landing page. You may also want to include mention of such incentives in your call-to-action copy, so long as it doesn’t prevent users from understanding where they need to go and what to do in order to complete conversion.
2. Paid Traffic Doesn’t Always Pay For Itself
Buying traffic through the likes of Google AdWords and Bing is a quick, easy way of getting your landing pages seen by relevant customers interested in your services/products. Obviously you’re going to have to pay for each click a potential customer needs to make to get from your ad to your landing page, but that cost is covered by successful conversions made, right?
Unless you’re utilizing keywords correctly, they can sometimes do more harm than good, and in some cases exhaust your budget for advertising. Here’s how to prevent this from happening to you:
- Segment your landing pages so that each variant has been optimized for each keyword group you are currently bidding on. One version of your landing page (with one specific headline, copy text and use of imagery) will not be sufficient for all possible search queries and keyword combinations, so you need to diversify your efforts. This is probably the single-most important piece of info to remember when it comes to syncing your keyword bidding with your marketing output. So don’t forget it!
- Avoid Broad keyword matching options, as they draw a wide variety of loosely related search queries (most of which will be irrelevant) and this can put a serious dent in your advertising budget. Instead, concentrate your efforts on exact key phrases, which are more focused and likelier to attract relevant visitors.
- Remember to add negative keywords to your campaign. This will prevent irrelevant searches arriving at your landing page and skewing your click-through to bounce rate ratio. The higher your bounce rate, the more Google will charge for competitive keywords.
3. Social Media Won’t Always Work in Your Favor
Social proof is a surefire way of getting your visitors to recognize the benefits of your offer, showing them how it has already proved to be of benefit to other people. Taking it to the next level, including Facebook widgets on your landing page, lets visitors see the multitudes of satisfied customers on a much grander scale.
This is what’s known as ‘Wisdom of The Crowd’ social proof, and relies on the concept that people will trust and conform to the actions of a majority under the assumption that those actions are reflective of correct behavior. Augment this with the sense of ‘unity’, ’participation’ and user-engagement that social network invokes and it can be a very persuasive tool to have on your landing page.
The problem here is that social media can be ‘too engaging’. Facebook icons alone can distract visitors from their initial reason for landing on your page, serving as a reminder they could be checking their newsfeed or looking through friends pictures instead. Whilst buttons and other clickable icons only convolute what should be a straightforward user-engagement procedure. To put it simply, social media can be a major cause of leakage.
At the end of the day, you need to weigh the pros of intergrating social media into your landing page against the cons. And it will depend entirely on what you want to achieve – perhaps getting more ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ is part of your conversion goal – if so, then Social Media is perfect for spreading brand awareness. Otherwise you need to give it some careful thought.
Try the Clickthroo Landing Page Marketing Solution: Free For 14 Days
(Landing page builder, integrated tracking platform, A/B split testing, traffic segmentation, template and image libraries, integrated traffic sources, optional affiliate marketing module, and much more…)
