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Does Your Landing Page Catch Your Audience’s Attention?

Author: Eleanor Hecks

Landing pages are one of the most important elements of any marketing campaign. The campaign only converts customers if the landing page can grab their attention and convince them to move forward in their buying journey.

Designing a landing page to catch the attention of your audience will help make sure your marketing campaigns end well — and that the effort you put into your PPC ads, content and other forms of marketing will pay off.

Here’s how to know if your landing page is catching your audience’s attention — and simple strategies for designing landing pages that are impossible to ignore.

Metrics for Tracking Attention

If your current campaign isn’t going as well as you think it should be, you can use landing page metrics to tell if your landing pages are catching your audience’s attention.

These are some of the most useful metrics for measuring how attention-grabbing your landing pages are:

  • Views: How many people total visited your landing page.
  • Goal Completions/Conversions and Conversion Rate: How many visitors went on to convert. The fraction of visitors who converted is your conversion rate. A good conversion rate can vary significantly, but higher is always better.
  • Average Time on Page: How much time the average visitors spend on your landing page. Longer is typically better, but not if few visitors convert. Extremely short page times can be a sign that something is wrong with your landing page.
  • Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who visit just one page then leave your site. If your bounce rate is high and your average time on a page is low, it’s a good sign that your landing page isn’t convincing visitors. It could also be a sign of design problems — like long loading times or broken mobile design — that may be steering potential customers away.

If your bounce rate is particularly high, or your average time on page and conversion rate are particularly low, you may need to change up your landing page to make it more attention-grabbing.

These three case studies show how different brands have designed landing pages to secure visitor attention.

1. Focus Your Design

The best landing pages have a singular goal in mind. Keeping the landing page as focused on that goal as possible will help you to both prioritize design elements that are attention-grabbing and guide visitors towards a sale.

For a great example of a simple but effective page with a clear design goal, check out this page from Illuminating Design, a Georgia-based lighting consultant and design company.

The page header “See What We Can Do For You” combined with a gallery of images from previous projects demonstrates what visitors can expect from the business. It’s simple, easy to understand and helps encourage visitors towards a sale.

2. Review Your Attention Ratio

The attention ratio is one strategy for optimizing landing page design. It represents that ratio of links on the landing page to the number of campaign conversion goals. Typically, the ideal attention ratio is 1:1 — for each conversion goal you have, your landing page should have exactly one link.

Unlike your main page or a blog page, where lots of links are necessary to move visitors around the website and provide the information they need, landing pages can get very simple.

You can dedicate landing pages to just one function, helping ensure that visitors know exactly where you want them to go. This makes it easy to move forward if they’re interested in what your campaign is offering.

This usually means removing all the links and distracting elements from your landing pages that don’t line up with your conversion goals.

For an example of a streamlined landing page with an optimized attention ratio, check out this landing page from Shopify:

Above the fold, there’s just one link — a one-field form with a clear CTA. It’s one of the largest elements on the page and is pretty easy to spot.

If your landing pages are busy or trying to do a lot of different things at once, trying simpler landing pages may help.

3. Consider Form Design

Once you’ve optimized your attention ratio, you can also tweak the design of your links. More effective anchor text and form design can help you upgrade your landing page if visitors seem to be getting stuck or confused.

For example, long forms can be intimidating — if a customer sees they have to fill out five or six or even more individual fields, they may choose to leave the site instead. Paring down long forms is a good way to streamline a landing page. If you can’t shorten your form, you can also try organizing your form so that not every field is visible at once.

See this landing page from Lyft. The company needs more information from a new driver than just their mobile phone number and whether or not they need a car. They’ll also need an address, car information, insurance info and more. Asking for all of this at once can be intimidating, however, so the business staggers the form over a few pages, instead.

If you need a lot of information from a customer, organizing your form like this may help you make your landing pages more effective and attention-grabbing.

Upgrading Your Landing Page to Grab Audience Attention

Good landing pages are necessary for good marketing campaigns. These design tips will help you build landing pages that can secure the attention of visitors who you steer to your site.

Focused design, an optimized attention ratio and strong form design will all help you avoid some of the common landing page pitfalls that businesses struggle with.

Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine. Eleanor was the creative director and occasional blog writer at a prominent digital marketing agency before becoming her own boss in 2018. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and dog, Bear.

A Quick Guide to Email Marketing’s Top 5 Metrics

Author: Arthur Rowley

Email marketing’s advantages include high levels of personalization, direct communication with prospects, and driving traffic to your website via messages. And the cool thing is that whether you have a website selling camping gear or an online casino with games like top online casinos, email campaigns are relatively cheap to run. They’re also perfect for results-driven marketing because the outcomes are easy to measure. You can use tools like Mailchimp or Google Analytics to get numbers on a wide variety of metrics. But before you attempt to track all of them, make your life easier, and start with the five most important ones. There are all of them you need for success in the online world. 

1. Open the Rate of Your Email Marketing Campaign and Ways to Increase It

To find out what your open rate is, first divide the number of opened emails by the number of all recipients. Then multiply the result by a hundred to get the percentage. If your open rate is somewhere between 17-23%, you’re on the same level as most businesses. However, if the number is under 15, it means your campaign is ineffective in addressing your audience, and your email marketing strategy needs improvements. Here’s how to boost the open rate: 

  • Make your content more exciting by adding videos and images to it. Plus, if possible, use storytelling to make your point. Entertaining and engaging emails ensure that your readers will open the messages in the future as well.
  • Make the subject lines catchier. They need to captivate the attention, press on scarcity (for example, a 24-hour discount offer), and above all: remain clear.
  • Think about your timing. Perform A/B testing to find out the exact times your customers are most likely to read your messages. 

2. Click-Through Rate

The Click-through rate shows how many of your email recipients click on links in your messages. It’s an indicator of whether people skim your content or are genuinely interested in your offers. And the better your click-through is, the more conversions you can hope to get. 

But what’s the first thing to do if your email marketing analytics show an alarmingly low click-through rate? The quick answer is to make your content more relevant to readers. Survey your customers to find out what interests them and cater to their preferences. It makes them much more likely to follow your links to sales pages and your website.

3. Conversion Rate Measures Your Success

Conversion rate is a central key performance indicator (KPI) all marketers should follow. It shows how many of the prospects turn into paying customers and how much money the business makes. All the other email marketing KPIs should ultimately work towards improving the number of conversions. And although making more sales is a topic that deserves a separate lengthy article, let’s cover some basics that can increase the conversion rate: 

  • Keep the emails short and to the point. Your readers have plenty of other things to do than consume your content. Be quick and concise with your offer.
  • Segment your audience to make sure the messages get directly to people who are interested in them. 

4. Bounce Rate – Some Emails Never Reach the Inboxes

Bounce rate stands for the percentage of emails that don’t get to the recipients’ inboxes. The typical reasons are that the email addresses in your list are either fake or not active anymore. Sometimes a server overload can also cause an unusually high bounce rate. But if the number is consistently over 2%, you should start cleaning up your email list and delete all non-active addresses. 

Also, consider offering users the double opt-in option. It means that anyone who enters their email in the opt-in box to receive your newsletter has to confirm the request before becoming a subscriber. It’s a great way to make sure your email list gets filled with people who are genuinely interested in hearing from you.

5. Spam rate

Spam rate is another number you want to keep as low as possible. It shows the number of recipients who marked your email as spam. Again, the double opt-in is one way to make sure only interested people receive your emails. 

You should also pay close attention to how your subject line looks. If it comes off as pushy or loud (using all caps and lots of symbols), it has a high chance of getting the spam mark. Instead, keep the subject line simple, as if you’re writing to a friend.

Conclusion

So this was our list of the most important metrics for your messaging campaigns. You can use pretty much any available email marketing tool (MailChimp is perhaps the most celebrated one) to track these numbers. They inform you whether your efforts to reach your audience via emails are successful or not, and enable you to make accurate adjustments to your campaigns. 

Next, subscribe to the mailing lists of some of your favorite brands to see some email marketing examples for inspiration. And start devising your own messages. Emailing is still a surprisingly efficient revenue machine, and it’s time for you to tap into its power.

What are the most important metrics to track in email marketing in 2021, in your opinion? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Author’s bio:

Arthur is a copywriter and an online marketer who specializes in email marketing campaigns. He believes emails are still the most efficient way to reach new customers and keep the existing ones. Arthur also likes to keep himself up to date with the latest trends and write articles on the best marketing practices.