Getting traffic to your landing pages certainly doesn’t come cheap or easy. And, it’s only half the battle. Once visitors get to your landing page, you must get them to complete the desired action, whether it’s joining your email list or taking advantage of a free trial. Unfortunately, when people don’t do what you want, you feel defeated.
While you’ll never know all the answers to why people don’t convert, most cases have to do with some type of friction. Landing page friction is a barrier that prevents visitors from completing an action. The friction could be coming from copy that is too long or a CTA button that is not compelling. It could be that you don’t have enough social proof for visitors to trust you. Whatever the sources of friction are, identifying and solving them are inexpensive and effective ways to increase conversions.
In this article, we’re going to help you get a better grip on what landing page friction is and how it can be resolved.
Common Forms of Landing Page Friction
Landing pages should always be tested for performance, even when they’re doing well. This is how you learn about which practices work best for your audience and how you can create even better performing pages.
As you test your landing pages, pay attention to the areas that are most prone to friction.
Landing Page Length
The amount of content and information you share with visitors makes a difference in whether they sign up or not. It might seem best to include a lot of content so that people can make an informed decision, but friction happens when you share too much. It can also happen when you share too little.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution, so you will have to A/B test to find the sweet spot for your audience. However, balance is crucial. Your form should include enough information that people can make a decision they feel good about without feeling overloaded.
If you’re not sure where to start, perform qualitative research to help you discover the types of things that people care about when wanting to do business with your company. Examples of research include customer surveys, interviewing prospects and speaking with customers.
In many cases, shorter landing pages are ideal. As long as you’re not asking for blood, there is little commitment and risk to the person by signing up for your offer. They only need to know the basics.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is what takes place when the messages you’re sharing on your marketing channels don’t make sense. Your landing page might convey one thing, while your social channels and ads tell another.
It’s not difficult to make this mistake. It’s challenging to communicate the same message to the same audience across all channels. Among images, copy, product descriptions and content, there is always the possibility of a discrepancy between what you want to say and how your audience perceives it.
What you want to achieve is cognitive fluency – the opposite of cognitive dissonance. To help you get here, start by making your offer as easy as possible to understand. People are more likely to convert if the offer and pricing are straightforward. Give the impression that your offer comes packed with value, too. If everything goes smooth, the customer will be more likely to buy from you again because they had a positive experience.
Subconscious
We often don’t realize that we’re drawn to make decisions based on our emotions. Even when we think that we’re making a decision based on our conscious thoughts, it’s still being influenced by our emotional brains. With this in mind, it’s important that you connect with people on an emotional level.
To bring a level of connectivity to your landing pages, start with these tips.
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Understand your audience’s pain points
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Define your brand and what you and your customers share
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Think of interactions that will connect customers to your brand
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Track your efforts to see what works
Security Seals
Data privacy is a huge issue and will continue to be as long as hackers keep hacking. Even with the best security, data security breaches happen all the time, and this makes consumers hesitant to share their private information. If you’re asking someone to sign up for a free trial, it might not be worth the risk to them.
Trust and safety seals are the best way to convey that your company takes security very seriously. Place these seals on your website where visitors can see them, especially next to a checkout or CTA buttons where the person is giving you their information. You can run A/B tests to see where the seals perform best.
Social Proof
One last point of friction that we want to cover is social proof, which leads to trust. Consumers need to trust your brand and feel good about giving you their time. With so many spammy businesses online these days, people have their guards up more than ever. So why should they trust you?
Trust starts with a professional looking landing page. Your copy should be well-written and free of spelling or grammatical errors. Images should be high in quality, preferably originals from your business rather than stock images. Form fields should be large and easy to fill out and only ask for the bare minimum of information.
More importantly, show visitors that others trust your company. This is done through social signals like customer reviews and testimonials. Customers love these because they add credibility to your company and reinforce the idea that you are legit.
Just be sure that your testimonials are thoughtful and provide visitors with valuable insight. It helps to add a picture and a name of the customer rather than throwing out a quote with the name “anonymous” next to it. Anyone can make up a testimonial, so take the time to add the human element by highlighting your valuable customers.
Landing page friction is something that will always exist, but you can constantly test your assumptions to see what you can be doing better. Talking to your customers can also provide you with insight as to how you can minimize friction points and create a more direct path to conversions.
