When it comes to converting prospects to customers, a marketer’s most valuable asset is a targeted landing page. Research has shown that businesses with 40 or more landing pages generate 12 times more leads than those with 1 to 5.
But just building more landing pages doesn’t guarantee more conversions. They have to be built right. The trouble is, most marketers still spend most of their time perfecting the pre-click experience than they do the post-click experience.
Demographic reports, surveys, ebooks and tip sheets—there’s nothing a marketer won’t sift through to create a great ad. But too many marketers forget that the ad is only the first impression—known as the “pre-click experience.”
What happens next is what makes a prospect into a lead, a lead into a customer, a customer into a repeat customer. What happens next is called the “post-click experience.”
- The pre-click experience: Everything that happens before a prospect clicks your ad. Logos, colors, headlines, images; relevance; when and where it’s seen. These are just a few examples of what can impact a prospect’s willingness to click your ad.
- The post-click experience: Everything that happens after a prospect clicks your ad. Page load time, skimmable text, usability, informational images, message match. These are just a few examples of what can impact your prospect’s decision to convert.
Most marketers already know what impacts the pre-click experience. But, to many, terms like “message match” and “contrasting CTA buttons,” don’t mean much. Today we’re going to make sense of them, so that first impression turns into more than just a click.
Landing Page Elements That Optimize the Post-Click Experience
From the top to the bottom, here are a few of the most important things to feature on your landing page to optimize the post-click experience and boost the odds of converting your visitors.
1. A 1:1 Conversion Ratio
Attention spans are shorter than ever, and your landing page is competing with countless distractions. Offline there are coworkers, lunch breaks, meetings, and more. Online there are amusing videos, educational content, and social media to name a few.
So the last thing you want to do is add more distractions to your prospect’s situation. When your landing page has navigation links in the header, the footer, or anywhere in between, you give them yet another reason to leave your landing page. That includes links to other offers available from your business.
That’s why you should ensure that the only place to click on your page is the call-to-action button. The only way off the page should be by clicking the “X” in the corner of their browser window, or by converting. This is known as a 1:1 conversion ratio: 1 conversion goal, 1 place to click.
Here’s a great example from Who’s Who:
2. Message Match
A shocking 97% of ad clicks do not end in a conversion. And the major reason is trust. If an ad is your business’s first impression, your prospect will expect your landing page to match the expectation set by the ad.
If your ad offers a webinar with a headline that reads “How To Increase ROI With Native Advertising,” then your landing page headline should read “How To Increase ROI With Native Advertising.” The images, branding—including logos and colors—should all be consistent with the ad. Signals like these indicate to the visitor that they’re in the right place.
Here’s a good example from Outbrain:
3. Personalization Through Retargeting
Over 75% of consumers will ONLY evaluate offers if they’re personalized. This is where the pre-click experience really sets up the post-click experience. If an offer isn’t tailored specifically to a prospect’s interests and behaviors, they won’t click through.
That’s why it’s important to use retargeting technology—code implanted on the back-end of your web pages—to track the content that your prospects visit, the links they click, the offers they’re interested in. That way, you can draw the 97% that don’t convert back with relevant offers tailored to their behavior.
4. White Space
The thing about white space is, when it’s used well, it’s not noticeable at all. And that makes it hard to know what a good usage of white space looks like.
Inexperienced designers think that every inch of space needs to be covered with some kind of badge or image or text, but the best know that simplicity is best. When it comes to landing page design, less certainly is more.
Here’s an example of good white space usage from BrightRoll:
5. Contrasting CTA Button
On your landing page, the physical act of getting someone to convert comes down to the CTA button. They have to click it. But before they can do that, they have to see it. Size, shape, copy, color—these all impact whether a visitor notices your button—and the best way to make yours noticeable is to make it contrasting.
It should pop off your page, and color is your biggest ally here. And the right color is one that’s different from most of the other colors on your landing page. The hue, shade, tint you choose should be bright, bold, and one that’s used on no more than 10% of your landing page.
Here’s an example from Conversocial:
Don’t Neglect the Post-Click Experience
The post-click experience isn’t the first thing on marketers’ minds when they create an ad campaign, but it’s the last obstacle to the conversion. What good is an ad if the person who clicked it doesn’t claim the offer it advertises?
When the pre-click and post-click experience are aligned, the result is a better chance of turning prospects to leads and leads to customers. If the average ad campaign only converts 3% of its customers, then the only place to go is up. Optimizing the post-click experience is where to start.
Are there any best practices I’ve listed above that you plan on implementing? Tell me your plans in the comments, I’d love to hear about it.