Why Aren't My Landing Pages Converting?

It’s one of the oldest and oft-heard complaints in the marketing world: why aren’t my landing pages converting? It’s really the sole purpose for a landing page’s existence. If we want to educate visitors about our products/services or our company, they can visit the rest of our website. But landing pages are meant for special promotions or campaigns, and they exist only in the hopes that a visitor will feel compelled to hit “submit.”

And in case you’re considering dumping landing pages altogether, allow me to remind you of their importance. In the sales world, there are never enough leads or enough quality leads; therefore, leads are a precious resource we need to value like solid gold. And if a landing page is doing its job correctly, it should be able to provide you with a significant number of leads, including some good ones.

So we need landing pages. But we also need yours to perform better. Why aren’t they converting? Here are some possible reasons:

You didn’t KISS

No, we’re not talking about smooching. KISS is an old acronym that you may have heard of, but if not, let’s just say it stands for Keep It Simple, Silly (one of those words has been altered).

Your landing pages shouldn’t look like a Jackson Pollock painting. If you want to impress your visitors with fancy site design, save it for the rest of the website. Landing pages have one job, as we discussed: converting. So make it as easy as possible for your visitors to do that. Make the form the anchor of the entire page, and make sure the submit button is big, bright and clearly labeled.

You don’t have a quality value proposition

In order to convert on a landing page, you need a strong value proposition. Basically, you have to convince the visitor that filling out the form is worth their time. So what are you offering in exchange?

Usually within inbound marketing, we use a content offer to entice the visitor. If that’s your plan, you must choose a valuable and informative piece of content. Nobody is going to fill out a form to get another short blog article – you need to create well-designed eBooks or influential white papers in order to get that contact info in exchange.

Nobody saw the landing page to begin with

Look, it doesn’t matter how successful your company is or how awesome your value proposition might be – your conversion rate isn’t going to fluctuate much. Even if you’re excellent at converting, that rate isn’t going to go much higher than 10 percent. Therefore, it behooves you to get as much traffic as possible, because 10 percent of 10,000 will always be more than 10 percent of 100.

So be sure to promote the heck out of your landing pages. Post links to them on every social media site and email links out to your current clients (or anyone else you have an email address for).