7 Landing Page Mistakes (+How to Avoid Them)

This post was contributed by Nicholas Scalice, Founder of Earnworthy. Earnworthy is an ActiveCampaign partner.

First impressions matter. This will not only create positive momentum but will also generate value in the long term. And when it comes to digital marketing, landing pages could very well be your only chance to make a great first impression.

Surprisingly, it is not uncommon for some marketers to overlook the importance of landing pages not only by allocating limited resources to them but sometimes by ignoring them altogether. While this could be a valid decision for content meant to be readily available to the public, it is a terrible strategy otherwise.

It’s Time to Fix Your Landing Pages

Yet understanding the importance of landing pages is not enough—you need to build them with best practices in mind, while avoiding common mistakes. And in this article, we’ll look at 7 of those common mistakes in detail.

Being able to identify these mistakes and fix them is an essential skill for any marketer worth their salt. Let’s look at some of the most common ones along with some steps you can take to fix them.

7 Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid At All Costs

• Not Focusing on Clarity
• Not Enough Relevance
• It’s a UI/UX Nightmare
• Poor Mobile Experience
• Not Building Trust
• Where’s the Unique Advantage?
• No Next Steps

Mistake 1: Not Focusing on Clarity

Your landing pages will be your chance to make a positive first impression in an increasingly competitive and saturated medium. For this reason, clarity is considered to be one of the most important aspects of any landing page.

Making sure your visitor is able to quickly determine what you are offering and if it is the right thing for them is essential. No one wants to feel like solving a puzzle when evaluating a product or service, right?

Unfortunately, lack of clarity is one of the most common mistakes to make when creating a landing page. The good news is that once detected, it should be pretty easy to fix! Let’s take a look at some steps you can take to improve clarity in your landing pages.

Put Yourself In Your Visitor’s Shoes

To ensure the clarity of your landing page, it is essential that you are able to ignore the context you have and your visitor doesn’t. The landing page should be informational enough for any potential visitor to understand, not only for you and your colleagues.

Putting Function Before Form

Most marketers focus too much on making the design of their landing pages as attractive as possible, which can lead to overly complicated layouts that fail to resonate with the visitor. While the design is important, the ultimate goal of your landing page should be communicating with your visitor.

Start by working on the content of your landing page. What are you offering? Why is it relevant to your visitor? How will they benefit? Once you have ensured that your landing page provides the information relevant to your visitor, use the design to highlight it.

Show Your Product

No matter if your product is tangible or not, you should make sure to show it to your potential customer. This doesn’t mean taking a picture of the book, software, painting, or anything else you are offering and just add it to the landing page. Showing your product should be also about the context and the impact it will have once acquired.

Getting the optin on your landing page is just the first step…

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Mistake 2: Not Enough Relevance

People acquire products and services to satisfy a need or a problem, not just for the sake of it. Are they looking for entertainment, self-actualization, increasing their conversion rates, or reducing costs? Providing your visitors with indications of how your product or service can help will help retain their attention and keep them reading.

While this mistake could be considered similar to lack of clarity, they differ in some subtle ways. Being able to determine if the product is the right fit or not is the first step toward capitalizing on the interest your customer already has in your product.

Fixing this issue is pretty easy if you have a good understanding of your product/service’s use cases. Let’s take a look at how to fix it!

Emphasize Value

Focus on selling the need for your product instead of your product yourself. In a world where there are alternatives to most products and services, you want to stand out. Why is your product the right solution for the issue your customer is experiencing? Why should they want them to try it out?

When you add a feature to what you are offering, you are increasing value, which is what makes someone take an interest in it. By emphasizing the value that your product or service will give to your visitor, you will be assuring them that their needs will be met.

Personalize Your Content

Personalizing your landing pages is a great way to ensure the relevance of your product for the visitor can be communicated effectively. In today’s digital world, it is easier than ever to personalize web experiences using tools such as ActiveCampaign’s web personalization feature.

Everyone is different, so why should every landing page treat people as if they were all the same? Personalization is also one of the best ways to stand out among your competitors. If you have multiple types of customers, consider building separate landing pages for each of your buyer personas.

Mistake 3: It’s a UI/UX Nightmare

If the design, layout, or usability of the page is off-brand, unappealing, or difficult to interact with, your visitor is more than likely to just leave and keep looking. Think about it, how many times have you visited a landing page that is immediately off-putting due to its poor design?

A well-designed landing page should not only look good but will also be easy to navigate. If you have already fixed the clarity of your landing page, good design should flow naturally from it. If it doesn’t, then you need to fix it as soon as possible.

Don’t Overdo It

When it comes to landing pages, simplicity is usually better. Trying to provide your visitor with too much information, graphics, and interactivity will not only result in less clarity but also a worse experience in several ways. Keeping your landing page simple in terms of UI means focusing on the fundamentals.

Make sure your page has a clean and sleek design focused on highlighting the relevant information. If you are using forms, your form fields should ask for the information you really need to provide the visitor with more information or the product/service (such as their email address).

Use Simple Language

Using overly complicated language will result in a bad user experience for most of your visitors. While it is possible many of them are experts in the field, you should consider that some might not be. Having your visitor have to Google multiple concepts to understand what you are offering is not great.

Sure, visual content is incredibly important when it comes to good design but so is the written content. Use simple language while avoiding jargon and technicalities by putting yourself in your user’s shoes. The best landing page is the one that anyone can understand, no matter if they are new to the field!

Mistake 4: Poor Mobile Experience

According to Statcounter, over 56% of global web traffic is mobile. Unfortunately, many marketers seem to be unaware of this fact and fail to account for it when creating their landing pages.

Making sure that visitors who are using a mobile device have a good experience is essential to making a great landing page. Failing to do so could result in you losing the opportunity to convert more than half of all your visitors into leads!

Automate The Optimization Process

Creating a mobile landing page is not only about changing the content. Mobile browsers have different technical capabilities that will require you to modify the code for your landing page. While many might be able to do this manually, most of us will opt to use a platform that automates the process by compressing images, modifying menus, changing the resolution, and much more.

Using a landing page builder that supports mobile landing pages is a great way to save costs and ensure the optimization is as easy as possible. This will result in improved loading times, avoiding coding errors, and ensuring compatibility with different devices.

Pay Special Attention to Forms

While typing on mobile devices has become easier than some years ago and a normal part of our lives, no one enjoys filling long forms when using their smartphones. For this reason, optimizing your landing page for mobile users is essential to ensure conversion.

You can optimize a form for mobile users by following simple steps like avoiding using images on them, using drop-down menus and auto-selected answers, limiting yourself to essential information, using vertical alignment, avoiding specific restrictions on text input, etc.

Mistake 5: Not Building Trust

If you are looking for ways to improve your landing pages, we can assume you are not entirely new to digital marketing. As such, you should have an idea of just how competitive the industry is and how important it is to gain your visitor’s trust.

While your product might already be well known by many satisfied customers, how can you assure a potential customer that your product is the right choice? Just telling them about all the benefits they will receive might not be enough, even if your product or service is the best in the market.

The sad truth is that there’s a lack of trust, credibility, and social proof in today’s digital landscape and as a marketer, it is your job to work around it to reach your customers. These are some easy steps you can follow to achieve this.

Use Social Proof

The digital version of word-of-mouth, social proof is a great way to gain your visitor’s trust by showing them other people’s experiences. This can be in the form of customer reviews, articles covered by media outlets, social media shares, etc. 

If a visitor sees that other people had a positive experience when working with you, they will naturally gravitate toward trusting your product or service.

You can achieve this by using testimonials from satisfied customers and embedding social media. This is one of the most popular methods to use social proof as not only it will allow you to gain the trust of your visitors but also facilitate word-to-mouth in the digital landscape.

Share Case Studies

Case studies are a great way for you to follow up on your existing customers to further improve your product. However, sharing them can also help to increase the trust a visitor will have in your product or service, incentivizing them to take action and acquire it.

Using a case study will provide your visitor with real-life examples supported by data. This will not only demonstrate the value of your product but also ensure a better user experience by demonstrating that you follow up with your clients.

Mistake 6: Where’s the Unique Advantage?

People don’t want to acquire just any product or service, they want to acquire the best. For this reason, your landing page should always let your visitor know what sets you apart from the competition. Do you offer the best value for money? Is your product simple to use? Do you offer the most personalized experience?

Setting yourself apart from the competition is a great way to ensure you capitalize on the needs of your audience. After all, it is pretty much impossible to be the best in all areas!

Support Your Claim

Telling your visitor that you are the best in certain aspects is not enough to ensure they will choose you over the competition.

Providing your user with information that supports this claim is essential! Let your customer know what it is that makes your product or service the best in that aspect. Is it a specific feature? Is it your unique experience in the industry? Is it a whole new approach?

Be Honest

Are you familiar with the “9 out of 10 dentists recommend” claim? Have you wondered how is it possible for so many brands to make such claims? Well, this sort of claim has become pretty old and ineffective in today’s marketing space. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon for landing pages to make a similar mistake by including incredible claims in an attempt to convert visitors.

Being honest about what your product or service offers that other platforms do not is a great way to build trust with your visitor. Think about what truly sets you apart from the competition and cater to those who might benefit from it the most.

Mistake 7: No Next Steps

Calls to action are an essential aspect of any good landing page. However, they often are either confusing, missing, or ineffectual. Implementing a call to action is telling your prospective customer what steps they must follow to start taking advantage of the benefits you offer. Without a call to action, you are unlikely to meet your conversion goals.

Grab Your Visitors Attention

While the content and design of your landing page should already have grabbed the attention of your visitor, your call to action should also shine. This means making a call to action button that can be easily noticed due to its font, design, and placement and motivates your visitor to click it.

Keep It Simple

A call to action should be simple to convince your visitor to follow it. This can be done by using a very specific request that is aligned with your conversion goal. This will depend entirely on the campaign you are running, which will determine the action words you will use.

Make sure the action you are asking your audience to follow is relevant and clear without being distracting while also creating a feeling of urgency to take advantage of the positive momentum.

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Afraid of still making common landing page mistakes?

Now that you are aware of these 7 common mistakes, you should be able to identify if you made any of them on your landing page and start taking action. As we said before, fixing your landing pages has the potential to make a huge difference in your conversion rates.

However, it is important to keep in mind that you should always reevaluate your landing pages as you gather more data. While it is possible none of these mistakes exist on them at this time, the needs of your audience will always be changing. As such, you always want to be on top of your game. Here’s 4 additional landing page mistakes that may be hurting your conversion rate:

1. Slow loading time
2. Too many form fields
3. Confusing CTA buttons
4. Irrelevant images

Fixing these mistakes will set you on the right path toward building effective landing pages that are certain to fulfill their mission. What are you waiting for? Go and fix your landing pages and get ready for your conversions to roll in!