Are your landing pages designed with your customers in mind or are they self-centered?
It’s easy to get wrapped up in your own sales goals and create a website that seems great to you but leaves potential customers feeling cold.
High converting landing pages are designed with your target audience in mind. You need to meet their needs and expectations to offer a more compelling experience.
What is Customer Centricity and Why is it so Important?
As the name implies, customer centricity is all about focusing your marketing efforts on your clients’ needs and interests. However, this concept relies on true engagement and lasting loyalty. You don’t just want customers – you want brand advocates and fans.
Not only does this make consumers want to interact with you, but it’s beneficial for your brand as well. Customer centricity improves client acquisition and retention, and it differentiates your company from competitors.
You don’t just want customers – you want brand advocates and fans
However, many brands have started to take this approach, which will make customer centricity mandatory instead of an added benefit in 2015. Some companies just talk about customer centricity, but shoppers are coming to expect this from every brand they interact with. Businesses that don’t implement a customer-centric marketing strategy could lose to brands that do.
Additionally, customer centricity doesn’t just involve offering a great in-store experience. It needs to extend to every touch point, including your website. The goal is to create a lasting emotional attachment to your brand, and many customers may experience your company for the first time through its website. This is where landing pages come into play.
Designing Landing Pages With Clients in Mind
Most landing page designers know that every element needs to be designed with the ideal customer in mind to lead to a higher number of conversions. If you cater to multiple target audiences, it may be a good idea to design separate pages based on keywords for each group.
Otherwise, landing pages can seem like they are trying to reach too many people at once without truly appealing to any single group. The first step to implementing a more customer-centric approach is to consider your target audience’s needs.
What kind of information would they need the first time they visit your website? Knowing this can help you create a more relevant experience, leading to a better first impression.
Check out some of the key ways to create more customer centric landing pages with each design element:
Headlines
This is often the first thing visitors notice, so it’s important to get it right. Although puns can make pages more fun, you need to be careful to avoid confusing customers or creating unnecessary ambiguity. The headline needs to be clear and begin the process of encouraging visitors to convert.
Without this, much of the traffic you’ve worked so hard to attract will hit your website or landing page and leave almost immediately. Without this, the amount of online marketing success you enjoy will always be quite a bit less than it could be.
A solid headline can seriously boost the success level of an online marketing message. It grabs and focuses your reader’s attention. It makes him want to read your message. It “sets the stage” and the emotional tone that will make conversion more likely.
When you are reviewing your landing page headlines, put yourself in your reader’s shoes and try to think like he does (this is a good practice for every part of your online marketing messages).
Images
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when implementing a customer-centric approach is using generic stock images or clip art. Visuals increasingly carry more weight, with content forms like videos and infographics taking off.
Stock photos do not typically resonate with viewers. You can build credibility by depicting someone using your product. Putting the product in context gives potential customers a clearer idea of the item.
Well-chosen pictures on your landing pages can help you enjoy more conversion success. Images that are relevant to your marketing message and draw out an emotional buying response from your landing page visitor can lead to a higher conversion rate.
Top landing page faux pas: using stock images and clip arts
On the other hand, poorly chosen images that don’t relate to your message and are chosen strictly to take up space can cause your conversion rate to plummet. So don’t neglect this often overlooked part of landing page optimization. It’s important to your online marketing success.
Call to Actions
Calls to action need to be designed to command attention and eliminate any ambiguity about what potential customers should do next.
From a design standpoint, the button needs to contrast with the background color of the landing page, it should be large and the placement shouldn’t interfere with the user experience. It’s also important to consider the wording of the CTA.
Defining the action through the word choice often drives conversions. Good examples include “Start my free trial now” or “Download my copy now.” Vague wording – such as “submit” – may not have the intended effect on conversions.
For the sake of reducing ambiguity, it may be beneficial to only use one CTA per landing page.
Highlight the Benefits for Viewers
Marketing and business as a whole are becoming increasingly more customer-centric. People are only interested in engaging with companies that offer tangible value.
Because of this emerging trend, you can see better conversions if you place text that highlights the benefits of your product or solution right above the CTA or on the button.
A quick rundown of the value can pique leads’ interest and make them more likely to take the action, subsequently boosting your conversion rate. This also has the effect of strengthening visitors’ connections to your brand.
Your proposal needs to be differentiated from competitors to compel visitors to follow your call to action. A common error in landing page copy is to only focus on the features and benefits.
Most companies with a similar product take the same approach, so it’s more difficult to stand out. For example, tell visitors what they will get in exchange for filling out the form.
Use a Shorter, Simpler Lead-Capture Form
Landing page forms are essential element of CRO. However, some websites ask visitors to fill in too many fields for the sake of gathering more information to guide future marketing efforts.
While this can give marketers more data to work with, it’s a leading cause of form abandonment, quickly sinking your conversion rates.
As a form best practice, you should only ask visitors for the information you absolutely need to get in touch with them again at a later date. Asking complicated questions can scare leads away as well.
Dear landing page designers: dropdown menus are more frustrating than you think
While you may think dropdown menus make forms easier, they can actually be more frustrating for visitors. A maximum of three fields can increase landing page conversions.
Have you implemented customer centric features on your website?
