Are your landing pages doing their job properly? And if not, why not?
Your landing pages should be driving conversions and generating leads. They’re a crucial part of your marketing campaigns – taking those warm leads by the hand and leading them away from their frustration directly to your solution.
By not investing enough thought into how you create landing pages, you’re missing the chance to be that bridge in your customers’ path to purchase. Landing pages with one explicit goal, expertly explained, are highly effective – lowering your lead generation and sales costs.
We’ve listed 12 common landing page mistakes that are easy to make, with a straightforward solution. Using ScoreApp’s AI powered technology, you can create a landing page as part of your Scorecard, in literal minutes.
Mistake 1: Too many goals
This isn’t your homepage, you shouldn’t be trying to display all your wares on a landing page. It’s a very common mistake because it’s difficult to resist the temptation to tell your audience everything about your product or service. But the power of landing pages is their singularity.
You want to explain all the features, show how it works and how many other customers love it, get them to sign up for a newsletter, and make a purchase – all at the same time. If on one page you’ve got a sign-up form, two different CTA buttons, a pop-up testimonial and links to the product features page of your website. Is it any wonder that your landing page conversion rate is low? Your visitors have too many options… and it’s completely confusing.
How to fix it
You need to be 100% clear about the purpose of your landing page and refine this to one aim. What’s the main conversion goal? It can be whatever you want – join a waitlist, buy now, download an ebook, take a quiz – but it must only be one thing. You can create another landing page with a different goal to capture a different audience. But each one must aim for one bullseye.
This gives your one source of traffic one clear intention. No confusion. Visitors either take the next step or leave the page.
The hyper-focus of only having one goal has two benefits:
- Eliminating confusion for visitors of your landing page – keeping their eye on the prize.
- Specificity in your landing pages gives you more granular data about your prospects and the success of your campaign.
Mistake 2: No clear value proposition
Online attention spans are notoriously short. You need to get to the point immediately. If visitors can’t understand the value of your offer quickly, they’ll simply go somewhere else.
Prospects have already shown interest by clicking through from another asset, so you need to greet them at the door with the value proposition they expect. And reinforce why they care about it, showing how this resolution benefits them. They shouldn’t be left wondering why they’re there or what they’re supposed to do next.
How to fix it
Once you’ve decided who your offer is for, you only need to answer these 2 questions:
1. What’s the benefit for your prospects?
2. How are you going to reliably deliver the goods?
It’s no more complicated than that.
Highlight your value proposition straightaway at the top of the page. Headlines should directly state the main benefit or value – not the features, and your subheadings support this with concise subtext.
Mistake 3: Too much information: Tl;dr
One wall of text or several chunky paragraphs can overwhelm, bore, or even annoy visitors. A landing page with way too much information will end up with a high bounce rate.
Users don’t need a detailed description of all the features, an in-depth guide to its user applications, or a long list of ‘we’re the best’ style slogans. For a landing page, often less is more.
How to fix it
The fix to this is really simple – edit! Consider each sentence and make sure it’s doing one of these jobs:
- Expressing the benefit or its value to the reader
- Connecting with the emotions of your prospect
- Giving facts about your company, product or service offer
- Building trust with, for example, a testimonial
If any of your sentences aren’t doing one of these jobs, get rid of them. Structuring your landing pages with only bullet point lists or short paragraphs, under powerful headings and subheadings, helps maximise your word choices. ScoreApp’s templates are all built with this in mind, saving you time by scaffolding your creation process.
Mistake 4: Too many call to actions (CTAs)
Having unclear or too many different CTAs confuses visitors and reduces conversion rates.
If you’re trying to get visitors to buy a product or service, sign up for a newsletter, and watch a webinar – even if they’re all about the exact same topic – your audience will be confused by the multiple CTAs. If they don’t know exactly what to do next, the potential to exit the page increases.
How to fix it
Wield the power of one. A landing page exists to direct action towards one thing, and one thing only. So your CTA must be the clear, specific signpost your buyer needs at this precise juncture of their path to purchase.
According to Hubspot’s 2023 research, personalised CTAs convert 202% times more than general ones. To create CTAs that pinpoint your visitors’ position:
- Choose the one thing you want your visitors to do: Buy now, Take quiz, Join waitlist, Book a call
- Include the action word in your CTA
- Make sure those buttons visually stand out on the page.
It’s a good idea to have more than one CTA button, perhaps one above the fold and one at the end of the page. Just make sure they’re the same, apart from their different positions on the landing page.
Mistake 5: Slow loading times
Do you know how long your landing page takes to load? If it takes too long, your prospects won’t even read your landing page offer – they’ll just click somewhere else. By not maximising the speed of landing page loading times, you’re basically handing those conversions and sales to your competitor.
But how slow is too slow? You’ve got two seconds, three at the absolute max, before people just abandon your website. 2024 Forbes research shows that 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a page to load, and 40% will leave after a three second delay. You can check the speed of your landing page using Google’s tool PageSpeed Insights and a Core Web Vitals report will help with possible fixes.
How to fix it
Using ScoreApp is the easiest way for you to achieve speedy load times for all your landing pages. Every feature is responsive to screen size and orientation, so however you customise your landing page, it’s always at peak performance as well as looking its best.
For example, you don’t need to do any of the image resizing to make sure it’s not slowing things down – ScoreApp does it for you automatically. Quick load times are crucial for your sales growth, so it’s built-in to our templates as a given.
Mistake 6: Confusing structure
Visitors to your landing page want to find what they’re expecting as quickly as possible. They don’t want to be bamboozled by an unfamiliar ‘creative’ layout that makes them work harder than necessary.
If visitors are struggling to skim through a logical format and key information seems hidden amongst snazzy graphics or excessive pop-ups, they’ll give up and look elsewhere.
How to fix it
Successful landing pages stick to a clear visual and informational hierarchy that leads visitors logically from headline to CTA. Your visual design and content structure work together to make things as simple as possible for visitors to understand.
ScoreApp has a range of visually different landing page templates, but they all have user experience as their foundational design element.
Mistake 7: Not being mobile-responsive
If your landing page isn’t mobile-friendly, users won’t get the top-notch experience they deserve. And you’ll miss out on the huge proportion of prospects that try to visit you on a mobile device, but click off in disappointment.
Not being mobile responsive is a big conversion killer and, ultimately, loses sales. According to Statista’s February 2024 analysis, mobile internet traffic represents 59.45% of the total global online traffic. Forbes’ research shows that 73% of people have landed on a page that’s too slow to load – that’s longer than three seconds. The flip side is that 74% of users say they return to websites that they know are mobile-friendly, so you’re looking after your retention figures here too.
How to fix it
Designing your landing page with ScoreApp means that it’s always mobile-responsive across different devices. We’ve made it part of every template. Each element will resize and reorient to different screen sizes and orientations – including images and videos.
Mistake 8: Lack of credibility
Landing pages are standalone, separate from your website’s usual navigation. But you still need to imbue them with your company’s credibility. A landing page without any reviews, testimonials or other social proof is immediately less convincing – and less-likely to convert.
People like to buy with a recommendation or endorsement from others who’ve already successfully used the product or service. By not incorporating trust signals, like social proof, you raise doubts about credibility instead of boosting prospects’ certainty in their purchase.
How to fix it
This is an easy fix because you’ve already got everything you need. Consider including a combination of:
- Reviews: like star ratings
- Trust seals from professional organisations
- Trust badges like payment security or SSL
- Logos of well-known clients
- Testimonials or case studies that refer directly to your offer – video or written
- Endorsements from celebrities or industry influencers and thought leaders
- Statistics that demonstrate the success of your offer
This doesn’t mean cluttering up your whitespace, but carefully placing high-impact trust signals can get prospects over the conversion line. ScoreApp’s testimonial drag and drop makes incorporating these elements into your design really quick and easy.
Mistake 9: Not sharing it anywhere
You’ve focused on creating a great customer journey from a PPC ad, through a landing page, to a ScoreApp quiz. Every step leads perfectly to the next. You’ve optimised everything. But no one’s arriving on your landing page! Where is everyone?
Well, no one can visit your landing page if they don’t know it exists. You need to share your landing page wherever your prospects are online. Otherwise, you’ve invested a lot in a brilliant tool that’s just sitting in the shed, waiting for someone to come and visit.
How to fix it
You already know the answer to this one – share, share, share! Get your landing page in front of as many eyes as possible. Share it on your social channels, in your emails, podcasts, webinars, books… literally everywhere.
Here are 10 ScoreApp LinkedIn templates to get you started. Want to take it viral on social media? We’ve got you covered.
Mistake 10: Not handling common objections
At this point in your customers’ journey, you need to answer their ‘But what if?’ questions – and the niggles that stop them from taking the final step.
- I really like that dress, but what if it doesn’t fit properly? Niggle: Is the returns process an expensive nightmare?
- I quite fancy reading that free book, but what if the download kickstarts more emails? Niggle: I only want to know about things I’m interested in, not 1,000s of irrelevant offers clogging up my inbox.
- I’d like a free trial of this SaaS product, but what if I forget to cancel after the free period? Niggle: I don’t want to enter my payment details unless I’m sure I want to buy the subscription package.
You need to know what things make your different audience segments hesitate at this point in their path to purchase. If you preempt the potential problem, you can tackle these last-minute objections head-on. Otherwise you run the risk of prospects being put off, informed by previous negative experiences, and not completing the sale.
How to fix it
The fix to this problem is called a ‘click trigger’. You use perfectly placed microcopy to address the last-minute jitters right beside the CTA. Maybe with a bit of social proof as a backup. To take our examples above, this might look like:
- Free easy returns
- We’ll only send you emails you actually want to read
- No payment details required
You may be in the position where you don’t know what your customer objections are yet. You can use a ScoreApp waitlist to get inside the heads of your prospects with some well-defined customer research. Then use these insights to create perfectly aligned landing pages.
Mistake 11: No supporting content – images and videos
Sometimes people understand ‘clutter-free’ design to mean ‘just text’. But a clean landing page doesn’t mean boring. You need your text and images to work together to tailor your messaging to each customer segment.
Any images should illustrate your one goal, your industry, your business (maybe even you!) or what your audience will get when they click on the CTA – quiz, waitlist, book.
Videos are a great way to get more information onto your landing page without overloading. According to Forbes, videos increase time spent on a page by 88%, taking the average from 5.59 seconds looking at written content, to a whopping six minutes.
Getting your words working hard is crucial, but don’t forget about the supporting cast.
How to fix it
ScoreApp landing pages make integrating your own visual content really easy. You can use ScoreApp’s substantial library of free images, or upload your own custom photos or graphics in a couple of clicks. ScoreApp templates automatically adjust everything to keep it responsive to desktop and mobile users. So you don’t have the fiddly resizing job to do.
Adding video is just as straightforward. Choose from the different styles of landing pages available, customise the text, and copy and paste your embed code into the video box. It couldn’t be easier.
Mistake 12: Not tracking your conversions
You’ve worked hard to create really specific, clear landing pages for each of your three new offers. Time to hit publish. Now you forget about it… This is a really common mistake with landing page creation. You’ve forgotten the final step – monitoring the results of all your hard work.
You need to decide what, why, and how you’re going to monitor the key metrics of your landing pages’ performance before you go live. If you don’t track results you won’t know:
- What’s working
- What isn’t working
- How to optimise the performance of each page
How to fix it
You can use ScoreApp’s built-in data and reporting features to analyse performance. You can zoom in to the scores for every question answer, location and lead. You can also zoom out with aggregate scores that inform deep insights into your customer segments. You can use this analysis to test different versions and really fine-tune your landing pages.
Create amazing landing pages with ScoreApp
Now you know how to body-swerve the most common mistakes, you can get cracking on creating brilliant landing pages with ScoreApp. We’ve eradicated most of these mistakes in our pre-built templates, so all you have to do is add a layer of your amazing content.
Take a few minutes and try one of our ready-to-go templates – all for free.
