6 Conversion Crimes of Landing Page Design

A huge measure of your success in affiliate marketing or product sales depends on your landing page. Its ability to convert visitors to your MDA (Most Desired Action) is directly proportional to the amount you are able to invest to acquire a new customer.

This entails opening up new traffic sources that would not be profitable with low conversion rates. Thus conversion efficiency is one of the most determining factors in the scalability of your operation.

Yet a large part of the internet population focuses almost entirely on traffic acquisition, throwing ever more resources (be they time, content, links, etc) at it rather than building from the ground up and making sure whatever traffic you do get creates money in your pockets. If you’re not able to generate returns on PPC advertising, this is the main culprit.

Here are the most encountered conversion killers:

1) Navigation and Other Elements:

A landing page, by definition, should aim at a single purpose. Do you want your customer to sign up for your potato peeling newsletter or is it ok if they decide to browse your collection of potato based recipes?

If the answer is not clear to you, you have serious sales funnel issues. Aka, you don’t know what you want, so you won’t get it. Sales are a process that needs to start somewhere. That somewhere is your landing page. Its purpose is to direct the customer to the next level of the funnel.

Any navigation that does not directly further this objective is superfluous. Take it out entirely; you are flushing money down the toilet.

2) Fancy Fonts and Graphics:

Font choice should be geared toward readability only. You have mere milliseconds to get a favorable response from your visitor. That favorable response will be based on the relevancy of what you can provide.

Fancy fonts distract from your message. People are not coming by to see how creative you are. They want to know what you can do for them and essentially, if they came to the right place to solve their problem. And they are judging you. Fast.

Graphics-wise, the only truly acceptable and proven images are hero shots. In other words, a visual rendition of the offer that attracted the visitor to your page in the first place.

3) Wee-Wee Talk:

Actually, make that we-we talk. The first thing your visitor cares about is him or herself. They have built in defense mechanisms to protect their time and money. The only reason they would shake a stick at you if you were drowning is because you can do something for them.

Something they want now. Give it to them or show them how they can get it. Depending on the level of commitment your conversion entails, they may or may not want to know any more about you at all.

“We are the leading manufacturer of wee-wee wipes. What we really care about is ourselves. That’s why we can’t stop saying we.”

Trite, boring, bye bye.

4) Lack of Relevance

Your page needs to be a direct extension of what caused the customer to be there in the first place. Get right to the point and focus tightly on your potential customer.

Google rewards you for separating your Adgroups into the smallest possible unit of coverage. They want to see your keyword in the ad, in the page title and in the page copy if possible. This is simply an algorithmically correct way of serving visitors optimally.

Give them exactly what they want. Let them try a sample of what you have to offer. The same product can be presented to people in different ways with different landing pages. Trying to use the same page on all your visitors is like pulling a glove on your foot.

5) Length of Page and Sales Copy:

Generally speaking, free offers like email report, free newsletter or download don’t need much convincing. A short page demonstrates better than any words that the commitment level required is low.

When selling something (and the more expensive your offering, the truer this is) the customer needs to be presented with sufficient elements to validate a positive decision: that to buy.

The long copy will turn off the browsers and people that wouldn’t buy anyways. But it will allow the real prospects to educate themselves and make a buying decision.

6) Not testing and tweaking:

For most people, this stops at putting up a page and deciding a week later that it worked or didn’t work. History demonstrates that this is not a valid way of thinking.

Reportedly, Edison failed 1000 times at making a functional light bulb. The first 999 attempts did not demonstrate that light bulbs don’t work; they showed that it doesn’t work that way.

So it is for almost anything worth creating. First attempts are guesswork, chance and chaos: chances are very slim you can hit the nail right on the head…

Other Notables:

• Intimidating Forms that request too much information
• Use of audio elements that start automatically
• Including a big logo. Believe it or not, unless you have major brand recognition, no one cares.
• Adsense. Yes, some geniuses put Adsense on their squeeze pages and conversion pieces.