How to Improve Conversion Rates on a Promotional Landing Page

Conversions are the ultimate goal of most ad campaigns. Unless you are running ads purely for brand exposure and nothing else, (which is typically a game plan reserved for big businesses with plenty of capital) you will want to make sure your efforts are leading to as many conversions as possible. 

A conversion can take on many forms. You might want someone to make a purchase right away, or you may count something smaller like an email list signup as a conversion. Whatever the case, converting at the highest possible rate is always the goal, and we’d like to help move you in that direction with some advice in this article. Take your landing pages to new heights and watch as conversions increase!

The Basics of Conversion Rate

A good starting point is to look at what factors influence conversion rates and what kind of rates you can expect based on the industry that you are in. We’ll cover those fundamentals in this section before getting into the details of how you can make improvements.

So, what is it that influences how many of your visitors convert after they land on your site? There are a ton of variables in play, of course, so we can’t narrow down everything in the list below. However, these points have a lot to do with your conversion rate, so they are a great place to start. 

• Traffic quality. This is a big one, in that your conversion rate is always going to be closely tied to the quality of the traffic that you drive to a landing page. By “quality”, we mean the level of interest that the visitor will have in what you are offering. So, if your traffic is highly qualified and obtained through sources that are likely to correlate with your offer, you should find yourself with a solid conversion rate. On the other hand, if you are gathering traffic through sources that are only loosely connected to what you are offering, the conversion rate will be quite low – even if you do everything else right. When dealing with poor conversion rate statistics, the quality of your traffic sources should be one of your first priorities. 
• How good is your offer? There is no way around the impact that the offer itself will have on whether or not people convert at a high rate. If you aren’t offering them a good value proposition, why would they take the desired action? Value can mean many things, depending on your goals. Of course, if you are measuring conversions in terms of sales, you need to provide a product or service that is worth the price you are asking. But it can go deeper than that. For instance, if a conversion is going to be a signup to an email list, why would the visitor be compelled to sign up? What value are you providing in exchange for an email address? Often, this is some kind of free offer, like an info product that you will deliver when the user signs up. Whatever the case, make sure your offer is good enough to warrant conversions – otherwise your rate will always be low no matter what other steps you take. 
• The presentation. You need to have quality traffic and an offer that delivers value to your audience. But the other piece of this puzzle is how you deliver the message. That means you need to have a clear landing page that has quality copy and a clean design. It shouldn’t be cluttered or lead to any confusion about the steps you want the visitor to take. 

As a general rule of thumb, you can expect a conversion rate of somewhere between four and ten percent on your landing pages. Of course, that’s a huge range, and getting up near the 10% mark is going to make your efforts far more profitable than if you linger down around five percent. There is also some variability to be noticed between markets, as spaces such as sports and recreation and automotive tend to convert better legal services, home improvement, and dental services. 

Rather than comparing your numbers too closely to industry averages, it’s better to simply compare your performance to past levels. In other words, you should be trying to steadily improve, going from where your conversion rates are now to higher levels moving forward. If you can gradually inch up with your percentage of conversions, you’ll find yourself in a pretty good place in the long run. 

Tip #1.) Improve Your Targeting

Getting the right people to land on your landing pages may be the single most difficult part of this entire process. Many people who are new to digital marketing will fall into the trap of thinking that more is always better than less in terms of traffic – but that’s an easy way to spend a lot of money without getting much in return. You don’t want to focus on traffic volume as much as you want to make sure the right people are landing on your pages at the right time. 

A great way to improve the quality of your traffic is to work hard on targeting the right keywords in your ad campaigns. While there might be quite a range of keywords that are generally related to what you have to offer, only some of those are going to indicate a high level of intent on the part of the user. Let’s walk through an example to make this point as clearly as possible. 

Imagine you run an online store that sells hiking boots. There are sure to be plenty of different searches run on this general topic, but those searches will vary wildly from one to the next. For instance, a user searcher “what are hiking boots” is just looking for general, basic information – that person is probably not planning on making a purchase anytime soon. So, even if you do get them to your site, that visit won’t be worth much, and will be very unlikely to convert. 

Compare that with someone who is searching for “best men’s hiking boots size 11”. That’s a very specific search, and one that shows a high level of intent on the part of the user. This person has thought about buying hiking boots and wants to know which will be best. When the searcher is so specific, and uses words that indicate an intention to buy in the near future, the value of the traffic goes up significantly for the business. If you managed to get this person to land on your site on a page that sells hiking books, you’d stand a solid chance of securing a conversion.

So, think carefully about the keywords you target, and only spend your time and money on those that will position you nicely for conversions. It might take some experimentation to figure out which keywords in your niche are closely tied to converting at a high rate, but it will be worth the effort when you start to see improved results. 

Tip #2.) See the Big Picture

It is tempting, when faced with lagging conversion rates, to focus all of your attention on the landing page itself. You’ll experiment with different colors, new button shapes, fresh page layouts, and on and on. And, to some extent, that kind of experimentation can be useful – but you don’t want to lose sight of the forest for the trees. 

As you work on conversion rates on your landing pages, keep the whole customer journey at the front of your mind. How does your process work from start to finish, and where are people losing interest and failing to convert? If you aren’t sure how your customer journey should develop, use these internal questions to get headed in the right direction:

What problems are your customers facing, and how does what you offer solve those problems?

How long does it typically take for a customer in this niche to make a purchase?

Are the offers made by your competitors more compelling for one reason or another? 

What is your Unique Selling Proposition and is it being presented clearly to the potential customer?

These are questions that require you to step back from any individual landing page to think about your overall marketing campaigns from a general perspective. Once you take this step back, you might find it easy to determine where you are going wrong and how you can get back on track. 

Tip #3.) Write and Test Tons of Copy

It seems that many marketers have something of an aversion to writing. Plenty of people working in this space would rather do just about anything other than write a bunch of ad copy. However, that’s exactly what you should spend some of your time on, because good ad copy can make up for a lot of other errors. 

Even if you are already happy with the copy that lives on your site, don’t just sit back and assume it is good enough. Even good copy can always be improved, as you can test new configurations to see if any of your changes lead to even higher conversion rates. You might be surprised to find just how much of a difference changing even one or two words can make to the performance of your pages. 

Also, through the process of testing ad copy, you might find that some of your copy works better for certain types of users than others. That’s great news, as you can then segment out your copy and make multiple versions of your landing pages, each of which is tailored to a different segment of the market. By serving those unique pages to various user segments, you should be able to drive up conversions across the board. 

Improving your conversion rates by even a few percentage points can have a major impact on your business. With that in mind, be consistent about pursuing small gains in this area, and over time, those gains can add up to something impressive. Get started today by reviewing the ideas we’ve presented in this article and decide which one or two you want to try first.