5 Real Reasons Why Your Landing Page Isn’t Working

Your “perfect” landing page isn’t going anywhere

I know, I get it, trust me…I do. Don’t worry, this is not just another landing page post. Well technically, yes, it is about landing pages. But in all fairness, yours isn’t working and it needs fixing.

You won’t find talk of headlines, copy, images, CTAs, thank you pages, or a/b testing here. They don’t need more discussion, they don’t.

Besides, most everyone has weighed in on them and it is all pretty straightforward

The strength of the posts, infographics, and guides that discuss them is also their weakness: the guidelines that you can mindlessly apply. You can follow them to a “T” and your conversions still won’t lift, then what? Let’s grab a flashlight and take a little trip…

…down the rabbit hole

1. Know when to say when

Your landing page can be technically perfect and it still won’t create conversions. Why? It might be that your offer is mistargeted. And no, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your buyer persona is inaccurate.

Where is the buyer within the marketing funnel?

Even if your buyer persona is dead on, there will be no conversion if your offer isn’t aligned to the buyer’s position within the funnel. Without timing, you may as well aimlessly walk through a parking lot and pin your offers beneath windshield wipers…it’ll be cheaper.

2. Does it travel well?

With accelerated mobile pages and progressive web apps, all bets are on mobile devices for the future of content consumption and ecommerce. Although apps are popular, users still use mobile web browsers because they can access their content from one place.

It follows that a large number of your buyers will likely enter your landing page through mobile web. Yes, load time is important; but, take it a step further. How are they interacting differently with the elements of your landing page when on mobile, such as with forms?

3. So you want my info?

Speaking of forms, you will be asking for info of a certain weight, whatever your conversion goal. When requesting that information, you need to consider four factors:

• the relevance of the information to your offer

Do you really need their phone number for your “free” white paper?

• the value of your offer

Is your offer a fair exchange for the information?

• the “privacy weight” of that information

The heavier the “weight”, the less comfortable they’ll be with your request.

• the timing of your request

When are you asking for the information with the most “weight”? Should you ease them into it with an additional step?

4. Where’s the thread?

Seems simple enough, make sure that each step in the process is a logical extension of the previous step…apparently, it’s not. There needs to be an underlying thread from beginning to end, and one that is immediately recognizable.

Are your headlines different from one step to the next? What about your images, your color schemes? Hopefully, your answer is, “no.” If not, your buyer journey is likely ending in confusion, not conversion.

5. If at first you don’t succeed…

Let’s face it, your landing page will not always end in conversion. Potential buyers may not be ready to act on your offer (see point 1), become hesitant at the last moment, get distracted, and can just be plain flakey.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t mean that they weren’t initially interested or are now disinterested. Allocate a portion of your budget to retargeting so that you can maintain presence of mind.

 

Start with context or you won’t know up from down

Look…I’m not arguing that great headlines, engaging copy, attractive design, and moving CTAs are unimportant…they are.

But, your landing page operates within a context.

When evaluating its performance, start with the context before you even consider adjusting the design elements. Otherwise, you will be changing the page’s design elements in the dark and any lift in conversions will at best be pure coincidence.