Landing Page Mistakes Costing You Millions

Jul 13

Putting your landing page together sounds simple enough. Until you’re three weeks in and it didn’t convert once. Or you can’t stop editing long enough to actually launch it. Landing pages serve a very specific purpose and it’s easy to make simple mistakes that end up costing millions in revenue over time. Design flaws, missed opportunities, and not understanding the reader are prime suspects when your page doesn’t convert.

A successful landing page takes time to master. But if you can avoid these basic mistakes, you’ll stay ahead of a good amount of the competition.

1. Treating Landing Pages As a Catch All

Your website is the all-purpose spot for browsers. And if it’s optimized, it should bring in plenty of business on its own. So why do so many landing pages feel like a rehash of their homepage?

A landing page should be a goal-oriented and highly targeted spot meant to capture your audience at a specific point in their journey and carry them through your sales pipeline.

Getting traffic to your landing page is half the battle. If your ads are performing or your content is bringing in views, bouncing those clicks with a page that doesn’t convert is actively throwing people out of your pipeline at full speed.

Landing pages make money when they’re written for one type of person in a very particular situation and state of mind. Let your website pick up everything else.

2. Making Assumptions

Knowing your page’s target audience goes way beyond customer demographics. Targeting middle aged males who like sports just isn’t going to cut it for a page designed to end in a sale. It’s not enough to know who they are. You need to know exactly where their head is at and where they are on the journey of this problem,

It’s one of the most time-consuming and skill-based areas of marketing, so most people skip it altogether and do the most costly thing possible instead…guess.

I once heard one of my favorite marketers, Alisha Conlin-Hurd describe this phenomenon in a presentation from a forum in Hong Kong. In her blunt aussie style, she explained that when your toilet breaks and you’re knee deep in literal shit, you’re not looking for 10 tips to keep your plumbing in good condition or which plumber near you did the nicest bathroom reno recently. You’re not only aware you have a problem, you’re ready to buy a solution right now.

Too many landing pages spend time selling customers on a service they’re already ready to buy if only you’d stop waffling. And others throw a buy now button in people’s faces before they know they have a problem.

3. Lack of Testing

If you don’t love direct response, pouring over a landing page can take weeks of time and use up a good chunk of your life force. So the idea of of doing it over and over again? Exhausting. But that’s exactly what you need for real targeting and seamless sales.

Even when you narrow your audience and know exactly what they need to hear, a difference in phrasing or the selection of eyebrow font on your landing page could be making or losing you thousands of dollars in sales.

Finding out what doesn’t convert is the treasure you need to dig for and creating your own data is the only way to do it.

4. Not Using An Eyebrow

An eyebrow is a line of text sitting directly above the headline onyour landing page. And it’s not used nearly enough.

Every part of a landing page that’s visible before you make readers start scrolling is prime real estate. It’s where the decision is made to stay on the page or not.

The rest of your copy could be pure gold, but if nobody sticks around to scroll, it’s completely wasted and not making money. The eyebrow gives you one extra chance alongside the headline to tell people why they should stay.

I don’t care if you like the design better with a clean, minimalist background. If you’re not using an eyebrow I can almost guarantee you’re losing money.

5. Rambling

I’m a fan of a long landing page. Some marketers think differently, but i’ve seen it work more often than not. But there’s a clear distinction between a long landing page experience and mistaking it for a piece of content or simply rambling to fill space.

Every word of a landing page serves a purpose. And if it doesn’t, it’s hurting the bottom line. Over explaining only leads to confusion and can even make the reader talk themselves out of taking the next step.

If you tend to over explain in person, chances are you’ll do it in copy too. Reign it in and see sales go up.

Change Your Landing Pages for Better Sales or Outsource to The Experts

Avoid these mistakes and you can stay ahead of the competition. You wouldn’t believe how common they are and how much money gets left on the table. But if you’re officially done figuring it out or the thought of repeating the process a dozen times gives you a migraine, outsourcing is a faster way to get results.

At Trabin Communications, we’ve started hundreds of landing pages from scratch and reworked many more to boost sales using our proprietary Revenue Resonance system. If you need support to lead your audience to the sale, let’s see if we’re a good match to help get you over the line. If we’re not, we’ll tell you. And probably have a good referral for you.

Lisa Trabin