Nope. Having a healthy number of website traffic won’t cut it. That is, if you want your online business to flourish.
What you ought to be targeting is to generate leads or sales. After all, even if you have millions of website visitors, if none of them are buying from your WordPress website, then all of your efforts to bring them to your web pages would have been for naught.
And so the question becomes: How are you supposed to convert your website visitors into paying customers?
While there are several ways to go about doing this, one of the most powerful ways to convert your website visitors into actual paying customers is to make use of landing pages.
With a carefully crafted landing page, you’ll find that convincing your website visitors to buy your products would be a lot easier to pull off.
Instead of giving you some points on how to create a high-converting landing page, however, allow me to share with you the exact opposite instead.
We’re going to talk about some of the worst landing page creation mistakes that you can ever make, that can easily shred your hopes of selling your products to pieces.
1. Using a cheap (and crappy) landing page creation tool
Some business owners opt to use the cheapest landing page creation tools that they can find thinking that by doing so, they can cut their expenses and be able to use their budget on something else.
#BigMistake
Friends, don’t even try going that route.
For most people who choose the low-quality tools in exchange for saving a couple of dollars, they almost always end up scratching their heads due to them spending more on add-ons down the line since their cheap tools aren’t giving them enough features to get the job done.
Instead of going for the unknown – let alone risky – landing page creation tools, why not use a robust one like GetResponse instead?
While there are a lot of good things to be said about GetResponse, one of the most amazing things about them are their responsive landing page templates. Not only do their landing pages look stunning, but the platform is dead easy to navigate. Once you’re logged in and you want to start creating your landing pages, you just need to pick the type of landing page that you want to create.
Here’s how their platform looks from the inside.
To give you an idea of how amazing their landing pages looks, check out their most popular templates.
Their templates look remarkable, don’t they?
2. Ramble about how “amazing” your product is
I’d hate to be the ones to break it to you, but if you want your landing pages to have a decent conversion rate, you need to remember that your audience isn’t THAT interested in who you are or how amazing your products are.
For the most part, what they’re keen on finding out is whether or not you can solve their problems. They want to know how they can benefit from collaborating with you.
Some companies make the mistake of rambling, over and over, about how well-known they are in the industry. They keep on telling their readers how awesome their products are or how long they have been in business.
Friends, I promise you that you won’t get far in your online business if you’re doing this.
To solidify my point, why don’t you imagine going to one of your friends to ask them for food, and tell them that you’ve been starving for hours.
How would you feel, if your friend would ramble on and on about how he has been in the culinary industry for years, and that he has become the head chef of several restaurants. Not only that, but he would also tell you all the recipes that he created that has been featured in food magazines — all while not giving you a single thing to eat.
Can you see how annoying that can be? You could care less about your friend’s background if, in the end, he won’t give you anything to eat.
3. Add truckloads of distraction to your landing pages
Digital marketers who are worth their salt would know better than to add several call-to-actions on their landing pages. 99% of the time, it is better to add only one type of call-to-action. Of course, the entire landing page is centered towards letting the readers take action on that specific call-to-action.
For example, if you want your readers to attend your webinars, then your landing page’s call-to-action should only be about that — asking your readers to sign up for your webinar.
If you add other elements like social sharing buttons, banner ads, or call-to-actions asking your readers to comment on the page, the chances are good that they might miss signing up for your webinar since they got distracted by the other elements that you added.
4. Not leaving a clear call-to-action
If you don’t add a clear call-to-action on your landing pages – or to any of your content for that matter – the chances are good that your audience will only click away after reading your landing page’s copy.
On one of Zig Ziglar’s books, “Secrets of Closing the Sale” he mentioned how a lot of salespeople miss closing the sale because they don’t even ask their prospect customer to buy their products. The salespeople will do everything that they need to do from explaining how their prospective customers can benefit from their product, establish trust, do their research about their customers (among other things); however, they do not ask for the sale.
When their customers ask, “Are you trying to sell me something?” the sales people would shy away by saying “No.”
As a result, they only end up wasting their time and their prospective customers’.
Not adding a clear call-to-action on your landing pages is akin to a sales person not asking for the sale. If you don’t ask your audience to take action on the offers on your landing page, then the chances are they’ll just click away.
5. Add pop-ups.
OK, I know that pop-ups should be included on the third point since they are still a distraction; however, I’d like to single this one out since they are THAT destructive to a land page’s conversion rate.
Pop-ups are such remarkable marketing tools since it will undoubtedly catch your audiences’ attention. Not only that, since some pop-ups will cover your entire web page’s content (some pop-ups will only cover a portion of your page), then your readers will end up seeing whatever content you added on your pop-ups.
Of course, if your pop-up’s offer is enticing enough to your audience, then they’ll end up taking action to your pop-up’s call-to-action, instead of your landing page’s CTA.
Having said that, you want to make sure that you do not ruin your landing page’s power to influence your audience into taking action to your CTA by disrupting their experience (and focus) by adding pop-ups.
To illustrate how pop-ups can hurt your conversion rate, try to imagine running a webinar three weeks from now. You’ll then create a landing page for your webinar so you can funnel your audience through your landing page.
As your audience read the content on your landing page and are about to be convinced of how important your webinar is, your pop-up suddenly appears telling them that you are giving away discount coupons to one of your ebooks. Since your audience also wants to buy your ebook, they will follow the CTA on your pop-up, distracting them from your landing page which is meant to have them sign up for your webinar.
In the scenario that I shared, I’m sure you can imagine how the number of webinar attendees will drop because some of them got distracted by getting the discount coupons that you offered on your pop-ups.
What’s next?
What kind of conversion rate have you been getting out of your landing pages? Are you satisfied with the figures? Or do you feel like throwing up every time you see your conversion rate?
Please share your ideas in the comments section below.