I remember when I found out the tooth fairy wasn’t real. My whole world was destroyed. Granted, I was around eight, but I was mad to find out my parents I’d put a quarter under my pillow every time I lost a tooth, not a cute fairy named Daphne who lived in a castle made of my pearly whites.
Fortunately, belief in the tooth fairy is pretty harmless. Other myths, especially those about your business, aren’t.
In previous posts, we’ve debunked myths about marketing automation, social media, blogging, SEO, and A / B testing … but we’ve never touched landing pages.
Read on so you don’t miss out on information that will help you convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. We’ll debunk the most common landing page myths and provide you with the information to take your landing pages to the next level.
Myth # 1: You only need a few of these.
A lot of people think that you don’t need a lot of landing pages. Maybe you have a contact page and a demo page, and that’s it, right? Not correct. When you have few landing pages, you are missing out on traffic, leads, and customers big time.
Each new landing page you create is another way for you to appear on search engines and share your link on social media. Better search engine rankings and social media posts mean you have more opportunities to increase traffic and conversions for your website.
In addition to landing pages on your website, you also need landing pages to convert leads. These pages are likely not available on search engines, but they will help you keep track of how many leads have clicked on an offer and how many have downloaded your content offers.
Do you need more persuasiveness about the importance of more landing pages? Check out this post.
Myth # 2:Short forms are better than long forms.
No form length is the “best” – it all depends on what you want the form to achieve. Are you trying to get a ton of new leads? Keep the form short. Are you really trying to get qualified leads? Make the form longer. One is no better than the other – they just address different goals.
Your form length will most likely end somewhere in the middle. Run A / B tests and adjust the form length based on the results to determine the sweet spot for form length.
Myth # 3:If I copy someone else’s landing page, my conversion rates go up.
Landing page examples and templates are great starting points for your own landing pages. However, you shouldn’t expect to get your content on someone else’s landing page and get the conversions in the end. A landing page is successful because there are many nuanced elements interacting – the content of the page, the design of the page, and the audience viewing the page.
If you want to copy a landing page layout, use best practices to optimize it Your Audiences convert to Your bid, then test and test to do better.
Ultimately, a landing page will only be successful if the content offered matches the customer’s intention.
Myth # 4:You need to have all of the conversion elements above the fold.
A lot of people believe that all of the important content on your landing page should appear above the fold – supposedly people won’t scroll to fill out the form or get more important information about what’s behind the form.
However, the crease doesn’t really affect the conversion. KISSmetrics found that people who are motivated to convert on a page do so regardless of where the form submit button is. According to this article, the biggest factor in increasing motivation is having a compelling copy, regardless of length. So forget about optimization just For the fold-through A / B tests, determine how much information users need to convert.
Myth # 5: Trust seals always increase conversions.
Think about the situations in which you often see seals of trust. You usually give out your credit card number or other sensitive contact information, right? It makes sense to have a little visual reminder that your information is safe because you are sharing really sensitive information.
But what if you see a seal of trust on a page you are on? were not pass on sensitive information? It would be out of place and you’d be wondering what the hell the company was really collecting from you, right? Trust elements can help tremendously on pages that need them – but they can also put people off if they’re on pages that don’t.
Myth # 6: Changing your form button from green to red will increase conversions.
Full Disclosure: We ran this test and found that a red CTA (call-to-action) outperforms a green CTA … but that doesn’t mean there are red buttons always better than green. This test worked for this page with the design of this page for the audience of this page. If you run the same test on your site, you might find the opposite is true.
This myth really applies to every color test –there is no one correct Color that will transform tons and tons more people. Test the colors yourself to see what works best.
Myth # 7: Landing page copy should always Be short and sweet.
As with color, there is no correct length for the copy of the landing page. We addressed this in Myth # 4, but the copy length myth is immortalized enough to deserve a section of its own.
The length of the landing page copy is what your teachers say when you ask them how long an essay should be – how long it needs to be to cover the topic. For landing pages, it should take this long to convert people on your landing page form. With complex offers where people have to spend a lot of money or their sensitive information, more information could be better. For simple deals like an e-book, you probably won’t need a ton of landing page copies.
Like almost all of these myths, this one is nuanced. Run tests on your landing pages to find out what copy length your visitors need.
Myth # 8: Conversion rate is the only metric to watch.
Landing pages are a stepping stone in your marketing funnel. You’re not just trying to get people to fill out a form. They would hope they will become a customer of yours at some point.
So when trying to get the most out of your landing pages, you shouldn’t just look at the percentage of people who converted on that form – you want to see what happens after that.
What percentage of them become customers? If you look at your closed loop analysis, you might find that a landing page with a low initial conversion rate is actually attracting customers like crazy, or vice versa … which your boss would like to know and fix.
Myth # 9: You should include as many things as possible on your landing page so people can convert something.
Your landing page is not a last-ditch effort to gather someone’s information. It’s there to get people converting to your form and moving your marketing funnel down. You don’t want to give users too many options as they will be distracted and your conversion rate will drop. This means that you should try to get rid of your navigation and any redundant forms. More is not better when it comes to landing page elements.
Myth # 10: You build it and you leave it.
You could probably guess this final myth from one piece of advice I’ve repeated over and over again throughout this post: test your landing pages. There are almost always ways to tweak and improve them. If you create them and leave them alone, you will lose valuable conversions. Landing pages support the backbone of your marketing funnel. So make sure you get the most out of them by A / B testing frequently.
Creating a landing page can feel like a daunting task with the conflicting advice given. For this reason, you should use a landing page generator that will assist you.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2014 and has been updated for completeness.
