Landing Page Optimization Strategies for Course Creators

Today, I’m going to look specifically at your landing or opt-in page optimization, but the same basic principles apply to sales or offer pages. 

I’m going to look at three core elements of landing page optimization. 

1. Page layout and the key elements to be included. 
2. The five core elements of landing page optimization. 
3. How to approach conversion rate optimization.

It isn’t always evident just how important landing page optimization is until you analyze the figures. Let’s say you have a Facebook® Ad campaign driving traffic to an opt-in page and that page is converting 20% of people who visit.

At a 20% conversion rate, each lead is costing you $10.

If you optimize your landing page and take the conversion rate from 20% to 40%, with everything else remaining constant, your cost per lead will drop from $10 to $5. 

A 40% conversion rate is ok but it is possible to do so much better. In most campaigns, this should be your starting target rate. So what if we were to go a bit further, and optimize the  conversion rate from 20% to 80%, 

At an 80% conversion rate, with everything else remaining constant, your CPL will drop from $10 to $2.50. 

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a powerful tool in reducing your cost per lead. The reason why I place so much emphasis on CRO is that it’s next to impossible to get the sort of improvement possible through CRO  from tweaking your Facebook® Ad audience, or creatives. 

CRO It may not be the most glamorous part of Facebook® advertising, but it’s the part that will provide the greatest return on investment, especially in the early phases of your campaigns.

Key Components of a Landing Page

Often, we want to get as much stuff as possible onto our landing page to convince somebody that they should sign up. But what I have found in practice is the simpler and more straightforward your page is to start with, the more effective and higher converting your landing page will be. 

Over time, when you start applying these optimization concepts, you will be able to add more content because you will know what to test, how to test, and how to track people’s reactions.

When designing your opt-in page, especially for a free lead magnet, a key concept is; less is more. When starting out make sure you keep your opt-in page to the depth of a single screen. Focus on getting all relevant information onto this one page while leaving lots of “white space”. 

Here are the elements you want to include on your opt-in page. 

Headline

First, you have a headline, which is probably the most important element of your landing page. Your headline is a couple of words, six to 10 words max, which describes exactly the premise of your lead magnet, in order words, what your Perfect-Fit Client can hope to achieve or avoid when they implement your lead magnet.

Subhead

Then comes your subhead which gives them some further qualification on your headline. Your subhead will be 1-2 lines of text max. The purpose of your Headline and Subhead is to outline the key benefits of your offer and how their life will be better once they have put what you have to offer into action.

Body Copy

Then you’ve got your body copy, which is normally 3-7 bullet points underneath your subhead. When you are drafting your body copy don’t just tell people what is in your lead magnet. Tease them with the opportunity of what is possible for them once they have the knowledge you are about to share in their life.

Image

Every landing page should contain an image. The image should connect with your Perfect-Fit Prospect. Either it should represent their struggle, their opportunity, or what they are going to get when they give you their email address. 

Another approach is to build the bond between you and your prospect by using a photo of you which in some way supports the transformation that you have to offer through your lead magnet. 

Registration Button

The registration button speaks for itself. This is the button that someone will click to enter their details and register for the lead magnet. But don’t discount the impact that the button has on CRO. I have seen simple tweaks to button color and text bring about 10%-15% conversion rate improvements on landing pages that were already converting highly. As we see below in the Call To Action section the impact on your CRO also have a registration button and an image. 

Keep your landing page as simple as possible, to begin with. The best way to think about is. If you don’t know that a specific word is moving your prospect towards opt-in, there is a chance it will repel them. Individual or lose words can have a detrimental impact on conversion rates so the best approach is to start light and over time as you learn the language, phrases, and words that drive conversion you can start expanding your copy. 

What’s The Goal of Your Landing Page?

The goal of your landing or opt-in page is to connect on an emotional level with your Perfect-Fit Client. You want to be very specific about what they will experience when they get your lead magnet into their hands and in particular how their life will look, sound, feel and in very quantifiable ways be better than it was before they signed up. 

In addition to the emotion, you also have to give them some hard logic to back up their decision. 

As humans, we make decisions based on our emotions, but we need to have the logic to justify our decision.. We want to believe that we are logical beings, so you need to give some logic for our Perfect-Fit Client to cling to. Enough logic that they say, “Yes, this makes sense”

But be under no illusion what drives our decision-making process is our emotions and this is where the majority of underperforming landing pages fall down.

If you can imagine a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client that even they themselves have not seen and paint a vivid picture for how they can achieve that through your offer that is when you have dialed in a knock-out, no-brainer offer.

You can 

There are two different approaches when it comes to painting a better future for your Perfect-Fit Client. You can go positive and  move them towards attaining some pleasure or you can help them move away from something negative or some pain point., 

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that we will do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. Many people try to resist this but 9 times out of 10, when you test it, avoidance of pain or highlighting the negative will tend to get you slightly better results. 

But still, I am an eternal optimist so I always run positive v negative split-tests to find out which one performs better in a campaign.

When it comes to the order of optimization I always work in the order listed above:

1. Headline
2. Subhead
3. Body Copy
4. Image
5. Registration Button

4 Core Elements of Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization

Design

There are certain tried and tested, proven design features that increase opt-ins and those that decrease opt-ins.

One of the big ones that I shared above was getting the majority of your key information above the fold. People need to have all the information they need to make a decision and the ability to enact that decision without scrolling. 

The only reason you should have information below the fold is for people who are sitting on the fence and need a little push over the edge before signing up.

Far too often, I go to opt-in pages and the button to register is below the fold. Most people land on a page and then they just bounce off it. If they don’t see that there’s some action that they’re being guided to take, so guess what they take the easy action and just leave the page.

Now putting the key information above the fold isn’t an excuse for shoving hundreds of words into a small space. It is a distillation process. What are the fewest words which can have the maximum impact?

From here it is a matter of how the key information is highlighted? You want to have your headline in a larger font. Your headline should be the most prominent thing that people see on the page. 

Then their eyes should be drawn to the subhead. Your subhead will be in smaller font but bigger than your body copy. The headline and the subhead should be the most prominent elements on the page. The acid test is; if the page was to be flashed in front of someone for only 3 seconds would they be able to recount the general gist of the headline and subhead?

And remember simple designs are going to win the conversion battle. People need to be able to see the key information on the page and not be distracted by overly distracting elements or difficult to make out elements. 

Make good use of contrast, don’t place light fonts on light backgrounds. No matter how good something looks, if someone has to grapple for even a second to read it you have lost them. Make sure your message jumps off the page and hits them between the eyes.

And when I say landing page design, effective landing pages don’t have to be beautifully designed.. Very often plain, ugly landing pages convert at a higher level. 

The most important thing is not how beautiful the page looks but that a visitor knows exactly what they are going to get, it answers the question of what’s in it for me?, how their life is going to be improved and tells them clearly the action that they need to take.

Copy

The second key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your page copy. The most important element of your opt-in or landing page copy is your headline quickly followed by your subhead. You have to be specific, you have to verbalize your promise in concrete terms. Your copy has to future pace your Perfect-Fit Client into a world where they can experience in real terms the transformation that you are offering. 

Broad promises like “follow my method to improve your guitar playing” or “become a better guitar player” just won’t cut it. You have to promise people a specific outcome like “learn to play 10 songs, back-to-back, in front of an audience, within 3 months, while practicing for just 10 minutes a day”.

What difference do you think the above would make to your conversion rate?

CTA – Call To Action

The third key Conversion Rate Optimization factor is your call to action. If want to get somebody to click a button and to open up the opt-in and submit their contact details. The placement of the button and the copy on the button are hugely important. 

First off the button has to be above the fold or visible on the first screen of someone who lands on the opt-in or landing page. And remember, the majority of traffic coming from Facebook® ads, will visit your opt-in page on mobile. 

This means that it is even more important that the opt-in button appears above the fold on mobile. In fact, I would go so far as to say that you should be designing from a mobile-first perspective with the desktop design a secondary consideration,

But it isn’t just about button placement. You also have to make sure that the CTA on the button or button text is benefit-driven. CTA’s like “register now” or “sign up now” are not very effective. Instead, link it to the benefit or transformation that you can provide.

Continuing my guitar example above, one possibility for the button text could be “Discover The Easy Way To Learn 10 Songs In 3 Months”

Bonus points if you can add scarcity to the CTA.

Registration Form

The fourth element is your registration form. Every opt-in page will have some type of form which enables people to submit their details. There are two distinct approaches to opt-in form design which I test on every campaign I run. 

The first is where all the fields that someone needs to fill out are visible on the opt-in page and the second is where the fields of the opt-in form are not visible until a visitor clicks the button to register. Both of these are valid options and I have yet to find conclusive evidence across multiple industries and avatars as to whether one converts at a higher rate than the other which is why I always test each format.

For every extra piece of data that you ask for on your form, you are going to reduce your conversion rate. 

For example, if you ask for the first name, last name, email address, company name, address, phone number, then you are going to have a lower conversion rate than if you only ask for an email address. 

In my own email marketing, I like using somebody’s first name. So I will always at least ask for the first name and email, however, some hugely successful marketers don’t. They just ask for the person’s email address, because it increases their conversion rates.. 

You will need to find the balance in your business and figure out the information that you specifically need from your opt-in form. In the majority of cases, email addresses and first names will suffice. 

However, if you wanted to add in additional data fields, let’s say you’re doing a webinar and you want to improve your show-up rate, you could ask for a person’s cell number. In this instance, a multi-stage form could be a good idea. 

If you do want to ask for multiple data points, you can show the email address and first name fields on the first screen. When they click submit on that, then they get presented with a second screen where they are asked for further information, in this case, their cell phone number. 

This approach works because you are evoking an escalation of commitment. Somebody puts in their email address and their name then they click submit. They think that’s job done. And now they get asked for additional information. At this stage, they’ve already committed to the process and they feel compelled by their need for consistency to finish out the process. That’s why the multi-stage form works so well.

How To Practically Implement Landing Page Conversion Rate Optimization?

It’s very important to be methodical with your Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). That means documenting as you go, because on longer-term projects, you’re going to make a round of optimizations, and sometime later, you might end up trying the same or similar optimization again. 

If you don’t have a documented approach to your Conversion Rate Optimization, you’re going to end up redoing things and losing the outcome or learning from the optimization. Start an optimization diary and document every change you make.

The cycle that I like to follow when it comes to CRO is as follows:

1. Analysis
2. Hypothesis
3. Prioritization
4. Test
5. Feedback & Implement

The first thing is an analysis which will normally start with your stats. If you’re running a Facebook ad campaign, have either a Google Sheets or an Excel doc set up where you can track the daily performance of the ads and the daily performance of your opt-in page. It is hugely important not to rely on the stats from Facebook alone. You need to track the actual registration through your opt-in page or your email platform. 

Due to the iOS 14 update, Facebook® isn’t going to be able to report on everybody, who registers through your opt-in page so you’ll be presented with a  cost per lead in Facebook® of a  certain rate. Often, however, you will find that you end up with more email addresses than Facebook® reports, which will have an impact on your real CPL. 

Based on the analysis of your stats you can then start to build your hypothesis. 

For example, I had a Facebook® Ad campaign that was underperforming. Our cost per lead sucked, to put it mildly. This was a campaign that we had spent months on with a significant upfront investment, and it looked like it was tanking. 

But a change to just 33 words not just brought the campaign back from the brink, but turned it into a wildly profitable and successful campaign. We were launching a webinar series on which an offer was to be made for a digital product. We ran this campaign by the book even hiring a top copywriter with serious chops to draft the promotional content for the webinar, including the webinar registration page. 

When it came to launch, we were so excited to see this take off, but it stuttered badly. We struggled to get leads from our Facebook ads and the ones, we got were far too high a price to make the campaign work in any way and be any way profitable.

We looked at the Facebook ads and the stats. The click-through rate was okay. We’re getting traffic to the page, but that’s where the campaign was breaking down, it was clear that the biggest issue was not the ads themselves, but the conversion rate of the opt-in page. 

Having analyzed the stats we formed our hypothesis. There were many changes and optimizations that we could have made but we had a feeling that the headline and subhead were causing the majority of the problems.

So with that information in hand, we Prioritized the optimization of the headline and the subhead and moved into the testing phase. We ran a split test between the original page and the revised one, and instantly we saw a result.

Within 3 iterations we had boosted the opt-in rate from just under 20% to 78%, bringing the CPL from $28 to just $7. But the benefits did end there because we took our learning from the opt-in page optimization, fed it back into the optimization process, and applied it to the ads which drove our CPC and ultimately our CPL even lower.

And remember, landing page optimization is a process. It’s not a matter of getting it perfect, it’s just a matter of getting it started. Because 90% of marketing is your ability to plan, act, reflect and refine. Plan for what you want, take action, reflect on your results and then refine your approach. 

And remember, if you ever have a campaign that is not performing how you would like, or the conversion rate of your opt-in page is struggling, we are here to support you, simply book your FREE Focus Strategy Session today.