Driving more traffic, more clicks and more people to your website or landing page doesn’t mean a thing if all they do once they get there is take a quick look around, come to the conclusion that what you have is not for them, and then disappear, never to be seen again. Yet sadly, this is exactly what most pages and sites do, scare people away, often forever. Depending on what statistic you look at or what industry you’re in, the average is that when someone visits your site for the first time, somewhere around 95 to 98 % of them will leave and never come back. ]
In other words, for every 100 people that you get to your site or your page, only a few of them are going to stick around and hear what you have to say, and that ain’t good. So in this article, I’m going to show you exactly how to create a high-converting landing page that not only looks good but also works well and one that you can create in as little as a few minutes. In fact, in the end, I’m even going to give you the exact templates that I use inside my business to generate some of the highest conversion rates in the industry.
Here’s my promise to you. If you do exactly what I show you in this article, you’re going to get you will increase your conversion rates and get more leads, more customers, and more sales without needing any additional traffic at all. Let me show you how it’s done. It all starts with the single most important element of all, having an irresistible offer. There’s a rule in direct marketing called the 40 40 20 rule, which essentially just states that the success of your campaign comes down to three things in the following percentages.
40 % of your success is the result of your offer. 40 % is the result of your audience and your ability to find the right target market. And just 20 % is what we marketers call the copy, which are the words and the images that you use to describe your offer. But here’s the thing. People get this backward all the time. They spend the bulk of their time and their money and their energy on making things look nice or sound good and then completely ignore the audience that they’re going after, or more importantly, the offer that they’re making.
In other words, is what they’re offering or what they’re proposing to the market something that they want, or more importantly, something that they need? Most often the answer is no, but it does explain why so many websites and landing pages often perform so poorly. I want better for you, though. That’s why we’ve got to focus on making sure that you’re creating the most irresistible offer possible, something that the people you’re trying to attract would find relevant and useful, and valuable.
I know, sounds obvious, but common sense isn’t always common practice. And if I had a dollar for every time that I’d seen a website or a landing page where I couldn’t even understand the offer, much less decide if this was something that I needed or wanted, well, I don’t know, let’s just say I’d have a desk full of dollars. Man, that’d be messy, and disorganized, and I have to start buying things with cash. I can picture it now, standing in the grocery checkout line, being that guy trying to pay for things in cash, expecting the cashier to have exact change, holding up the line behind me, and everybody gets mad.
So the solution to all of this is to do us both a favor and make sure that your offer is truly solid. Now, there are a lot of ways to craft a truly compelling and irresistible offer, but if you’re just getting started, I’m going to suggest you go with something that I call the clear offer formula. And it looks like this. We do have X for Y so you can Z with our W. The X is what you do, literally, the product or the service that you sell and put in a way that your audience would understand.
There’s no need to be clever or creative here. Just say what you do. The Y is your ideal customer avatar, that perfect fit client or customer, that perfect prospect, the one that you love and that loves you and wants to tell everyone about just how great you are. You know the people I’m talking about. Z is the benefit that they want, that end state, that outcome, that dream result that you’re hopefully able to provide for them. And W is something that they don’t want. This is typically something that’s going to take all of their time or all of their energy or cause all kinds of pain or frustration, and hopefully, you can minimize or remove that completely for them.
This is a great place to start because the point is all of the best words and pretty pictures in the world are going to mean a thing if your visitor doesn’t immediately understand what it is that you’re selling and how or why they should care and how it’s going to benefit them. And this is the perfect segue into the next point, which is all about content congruence. Content congruence is just understanding that where your traffic came from is just as, if not more important than where it arrived, which in this case is your landing page or site.
And messing this up is one of the biggest reasons that most sites and most pages simply don’t convert. Maybe this sounds familiar. You’re scrolling through the web, you’re reading an article, you’re watching a video, whatever it is, and then somebody says something that catches your attention and makes you want to click a link to learn a little bit more about whatever it is they’re talking about. So you click. But where you end up is often strange and confusing and doesn’t align at all with what you thought you were clicking on. So naturally, you click the back button and you bounce.
And this explains what happens for most people most of the time. And the solution takes part in one of three different ways. The first one is media congruence. Now, this one’s important, but it’s also a little more advanced, so we’re going to cover it, but don’t be afraid to put this on the back burner and look at it later. Essentially, it just states that whatever media they’re coming from should be in line and congruent with wherever they’re going. So for example, if they’re watching a video, then ideally the next step in the process would be some video content or integrating some video element.
The same thing goes for text. If they’re clicking on a text post or a text article or anything like that, make sure that the next step in that funnel or in that journey has a large amount or a decent amount of text because it’s going to be an alignment. Audio is a little bit trickier because the primary forms of audio marketing center around podcasts and it’s tricky to get somebody to a landing page and then embed an audio file. Often doesn’t convert well. So there is going to be a little bit of a gray area here.
The next factor is information concurrence. This essentially just means that whatever page or whatever site you’re guiding them to is in alignment with what it is that they’ve just consumed. To use a marketing example, let’s say somebody is watching a video on, I don’t know, SEO. Well, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to then get them to download a lead magnet on email marketing or video marketing.
To use a health example, if somebody is reading a post on, let’s say, the Keto diet, well, it doesn’t make sense to then send them to a post on paleo or vegan diets or anything that’s not related to what they were just consuming. Again, sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how often this gets missed. And the third factor is brand congruence. Essentially just making sure that the style and the tone and maybe even the colors of where they’re going is in alignment with where they just came from. All of these are important because if you mess one of them up or stray too far off the original content you created, well, it can create a jarring effect in your visitor anononononmake them question where they ended up and make them start to think that they’re not where they should be.
So while we’re talking about brand congruence and congruence in general, well, the next factor is all about images. There’s an expression I know you’ve heard before, which is that a picture is worth a thousand words. And when it comes to landing pages, this is the case. Your choice of images and more importantly, the images that they’re going to convey to the visitor can often mean a double-digit increase in conversion rates.
The thing with images, though, is that there isn’t a one size fits all formula where a single image is going to work equally well across all businesses and all markets, and all industries. That said, there is an image that is more of size fits none. An imageAbad that works nowhere, ever. And that is the standard stock photo. Do you know what I’m talking about? Those super fake photos of people in an office shaking hands, smiling at the camera unnaturally, or the worst culprit of all, the stock photo high five. So do your best to find an image that looks like the people that you’re trying to serve and one that conveys the right attitude and emotion that you’re hoping to deliver.
And of course, don’t be afraid to test different images. And on the topic of things you may want to test, well, next I want to share with you one of the least understood aspects of landing page design, possibly one of the least understood aspects in all of marketing. I’m talking about the inline versus the pop-up form. But before we go into the specifics of the inline versus the pop-up form, first we need to get a little bit of terminology out of the way.
Now, full disclosure, I’ve done my absolute best to make this next part as clear and as simple and as easy to understand as possible. But admittedly, it’s still confusing and sketchy. So don’t be afraid to go back and rewatch it if you need another run-through it. Are you ready? All right, let’s go. When it comes to collecting someone’s email address on your landing page or your website, you have two different ways to do it. One of them is an inline form, also known as a one-step opt-in or a traditional opt-in. This example right here, well, this is an inline or step opt-in because all someone needs to do is enter their email address and then they’re pretty much ready to go.
A pop-up or a two-step opt-in, on the other hand, looks like this, and it requires the visitor to click a button first before being presented with the opportunity to enter their email address. Essentially, it adds another step to the process, which on the surface sounds like a bad idea. I mean, why would you want to make things more complicated and involve more steps? So I’ll cover which one works better in just a minute.
But what’s important here, at least in your overall understanding of marketing and especially tech talk and marketing lingo and jargon and some of the weird things we say here, well, there are also other terms called a double opt-in and a single opt-in, which take place after somebody has entered their email address. email address. A double opt-in is what you traditionally see when you sign up for something and then you have to click a confirmation link in your email address to confirm that, yes, this is you that requested it before you’re going to receive anything or be subscribed. A single opt-in, on the other hand, means that as soon as someone enters their email address, well, they’re automatically subscribed without having to do anything else.
