Landing pages often serve as one of the first points of interaction between your company and potential buyers. Because first impressions can make or break the sale, its vital that your landing page optimization and test strategy works to funnel visitors toward the conversion action.
While many companies base their landing page design on what has worked in the past or what has worked for other companies, these strategies can lead at best to an average conversion rate and at worst to plummeting sales. Why? Because without specific knowledge of what works and what doesn’t for your target market, you must make design decisions based on guesswork.
In order to achieve maximum conversion rates and keep visitors clicking, you’ll need to implement a landing page design and test program that will optimize your landing page based on what works best in your specific market.
Turn Guesswork into Knowledge
Testing is the only surefire way to develop a landing page that performs at the highest possible rate of conversion. Best practices used by other companies can take you only so far since you operate under a different set of company objectives and you serve a different market. That s why testing can help you make the decisions that work best for you rather than relying on what worked for someone else.
When you develop an effective landing page design and test for usability and conversion, you build a page that funnels each visitor toward the call to action and urges him to take the desired action.
Pinpoint Problem Areas
Let’s say you have a poorly converting landing page. Is the problem your call to action button? Your navigation menu? Your copy? Without testing, you’ll never know.
You can guess at which one of those elements has the greatest effect on your conversion rate, but what if you choose the wrong one? What if it’s none of the above, but something else entirely?
Testing enables you not only to determine that your call to action button is too small, but also that it might be more visible with three-dimensional design and that people tend to click more often on a round button than a square button. Or vice versa.
The beauty of testing is that it tells you what will work for you right now, in this economic climate, with your audience.