If you’re seriously engaged in online marketing, you’re using landing pages with content offers to generate leads, and all of your web pages, emails, ads and SEO links lead to these landing pages.
How is your conversion rate? If it’s around 2 percent, your conversion rate is average. But who wants to be average?
Wordstream analyzed thousands of Google AdWords accounts with a combined $3 billion in annual spend and discovered that some advertisers are converting at rates two or three times the average. Then they identified the common traits of the most productive landing pages.
What made the biggest difference in conversion rates? The offer. “Across all of the high-performing landing pages, we saw massively creative and differentiated offers. Companies often have a default offer, their go-to, which may be the same or very similar to what all of their competitors are doing. Lawyers, for example, will offer a free consultation. Software companies will offer a free trial. They’re unimaginative and not very creative.”
Are your offers massively creative and differentiated?
What makes a great offer? Value. An offer that delivers immediate value is far more likely to convert. Brad Smith writes in the Kissmetrics blog about the Wordstream study and gives this example of a value-adding landing page from Lowes.
It immediately engages visitors lets them identify the problem they are trying to solve. Genius.
HubSpot’s Ginny Mineo points to Trulia’s killer landing page for people considering selling their homes. “This is a great example of a company giving value to their visitors from the get-go, while setting visitors’ expectations about what will happen as a result.”
It gives home sellers what they are probably most interested in and it is irresistibly simple.
Jordan Lore at Wishpond likes the Blog Headline Analyzer landing page offered by marketing planning tool CoSchedule.
What marketer doesn’t want to try this? It even gives you tips for how to improve. (Yes, I did change the title of this blog after using the headline analyzer. Be careful. It can be addicting.)
Wordstream, the company the conducted the research, even changed it’s landing pages based on what it learned. “How can you get creative with your offer? In our case, we realized that offering prospects a free trial of WordStream software really wasn’t very imaginative or compelling. We had to think outside the box (don’t you love that phrase?) and come up with something different and unique; something more tangible and compelling than just sending them to a software trial to find their way around.
“What we came up with was our free AdWords Grader, which actually gives people an account evaluation report, with recommendations to help them improve their AdWords strategy. This was a HUGE turning point for us. Prospects loved it and conversions went through the roof.”
The proliferation of content marketing has created an environment where the good isn’t good enough. Moz founder Rand Fishkin famously declared in 2015 that in order to rank and convert, new content needs to be 10 times better than what is already out there. The same is now true for landing pages. Creating a landing page that delivers value on the spot is a great way to create a truly exceptional page that will boost conversions beyond the ordinary.
