It doesn’t matter what marketing activities your business invests in, if you rely on a website to help people through the purchase journey, it is imperative that your landing pages offer a great user experience (UX) to engage users and drive business performance.
UX is just one part of conversion rate optimisation (CRO) activity that you should be utilising to drive better conversion rates. Below are a few quick, landing page focused UX tips that should be considered when creating or changing a landing page to improve its conversions.
✔ A great user journey across all devices
A great user journey on desktop is essential but with mobile usage increasingly becoming the main device used to receive web traffic, it is vital that mobile also provides the best possible journey for your users. Whilst a larger percentage of conversions still occur on desktop computers, mobile is a critical part of the journey and a well-designed mobile UX and interface can still increase mobile conversions.
✔ Site speed
Research by the likes of Google has found that every 1 second delay in load time could reduce conversions by 7%… and user patience is only getting narrower. Ensuring a landing page (and website in general) is as fast to load as is technically possible will help keep users on the page, decrease bounce rates and help increase engagement and ultimately conversions. Also, the introduction of the accelerated mobile pages (AMP) framework by Google in 2016 enabled mobile pages to be built with limited JavaScript and HTML for faster loading pages on mobile devices – by removing dynamic features that can slow a page down – which helps with the varying strength of network connections.
✔ Content
As well having the right messaging (including calls to action) and use of language, the layout of the content is crucial. As mentioned above, AMP allows mobile users to access your content fast; but having a clear, easy to navigate and well-designed format will allow users to find the information they are looking for, as well as reach CTAs that drive conversion.
✔ Only ask for relevant information
Too many steps or fields in a form can be a barrier to conversion by causing users to drop off a form or not fill it in at all. What information do you really need from your customers? Reducing steps will reduce drop off and directly help your bottom line.
Note: These are general tips and each website/landing page has different requirements needed to improve conversions.
All Response Media Viewpoint
Before any changes are made, quantitative and qualitative (data-driven) research should be carried out to identify where the issues or opportunities are. To ensure the changes made to landing pages will improve conversions, it is critical that they are tested before being made permanent – A/B testing is one of most common methods used to compare the changes versus the original page. Landing page testing is something that should be continual and in most cases, not a one-off. Some tests will be successful and others will not which is why data-driven testing is something that should be carried out on an on-going basis.
