Landing Page Myths: 5 CRO Techniques You Should Avoid

Contrary to what some business owners think, it’s not enough to build a website, go online, and wait for visitors to flock in. The entire point of having a website is to actively attract users and nurture them into becoming your loyal customers.

This is where conversion rate optimization (CRO) comes in.

In a nutshell, CRO is about optimizing different elements both in and out of your website to push users into becoming consumers. In that sense, you could say CRO builds upon your efforts to increase organic traffic through search engine optimization (SEO), social media, email marketing and more.

Your site’s landing pages — the individual web pages that users “land” on — play a critical role in converting visitors into leads, and eventually, into buyers. But if your landing pages aren’t generating the kind of conversions you want, you might be making a number of CRO mistakes negatively affecting your bottom line.

In this guide, we go over a few of the most common CRO techniques that do more harm than good.

#1: Wowing Customers with Great Content, But Failing to Deliver on Performance

Sure, “Content is king,” and it’s absolutely important to use value-laden content to educate your potential customers about whatever it is that you do. Content marketing, much like CRO is all about timing. It’s important to deliver content at the right time and right place.

But even if your landing pages contain the best content in the world, if they take forever to load your users will only feel frustrated and “bounce” out. And if you ask any SEO expert, slow page speeds also lead to lower rankings on search engines like Google.

The bottom line? The faster your pages, the better your visitors’ user experience, which leads to improved customer retention and loyalty, so:

• Invest in better hosting.
• Check your website for HTML/code errors.
• Enable compression, particularly if you’re creating high-quality content.
• Optimize your images.

#2: Depending Too Much on Discounts to Stimulate Sales

When your business has problems moving inventory, your involuntary impulse might be to slash prices to entice buyers. However, while reducing prices may give you a sales boost, it can also create the impression of a company with low sales. This can kill consumer confidence in your brand or product.

And even if your discounts attract buyers, it’s likely they’re going to be bargain hunters instead of loyal customers.

Try these alternatives instead:

• Move your product to a new market segment.
• Combine multiple products together into a separate product bundle.
• Emphasize another shopping benefit, such as free or next-day shipping.
• Make discounts exclusive to members of your loyalty program.

#3: Using Only Email Marketing Software to Grow Your Email List

One of the most critical tasks for successfully improving your website’s conversion rate is to build its email list. But, email marketing software such as ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp or Infusionsoft is not enough to help your website get more subscribers.

When trying to grow your online business faster, you should consider employing a dedicated lead generation service like LeadPages.

What exactly is LeadPages?

Simply put, LeadPages is a landing page builder that allows your website to target users with opt-in forms which will help your site capture more subscribers. This can then be used in conjunction with your email marketing software to transform your plain old landing pages into high-converting landing pages.

With CRO, it’s almost always better to compartmentalize your offers into different landing pages. LeadPages allows you to do the following:

• Send content upgrades automatically.
• Create opt-in forms within blog posts and landing pages.
• Create viral “thank you for subscribing” pages
• Host webinars.

#4: Ignoring Your Homepage in Favor of Product Pages

Many marketers often ignore their homepage, thinking it’s better to focus on landing pages where conversions actually happen.

This sales-focused approach undermines your content marketing efforts and ignores the fact that users need help and nurturing before they make a purchase decision. Remember, your homepage plays a critical role in introducing your company to new visitors and guiding leads to pre-sale content assets.

For example, a visitor may want to learn about your company, history, and corporate values. That person will start by looking for your ‘About Us’ page on—you guessed it—your home page.

Make sure your users can find everything they need right from your homepage. Invest in sound UX design to improve your site’s readability and navigation.

#5: Sales Funnels Don’t Work

When looking at generating more leads, no singular marketing technique will do the trick. While it may be impossible to pinpoint the exact marketing technique to generate more leads, think about how your business employs its sales funnel.

For new online businesses looking to improve their CRO, trying to create a sales funnel that creates “emotional hooks” to drive conversions can be a daunting task. As sales funnels vary by industry, It’s hard to know where to start and even more difficult to employ a useful model that optimizes conversion.

Sales funnels are key to maximizing your profits, which is described in this DotCom Secrets review.

So how can you make a sales funnel that really grows your business, offers more things to your customers, and increase acquisitions?

If you’ve never created a sales funnel before, then you’re in luck. There are many tools available online to assist in helping you build highly convertible landing pages. Tools like ClickFunnels assist online businesses in creating business sales funnels.

So just how do tools like ClickFunnels help create more efficient sales funnels? By allowing you to create different types of funnels that have historically shown to successfully convert.

Other benefits of ClickFunnels include:

• Great visual drag and drop editor to make creating pages easy.
• Huge selection of page elements.
• Step-by-step onboarding process to help you get up to speed faster.

Final Thoughts

Any business owner wants their website to create revenue. The right conversion rate optimization techniques allow you to get more value from your site and identify opportunities to push ordinary visitors into paying customers. Be sure to avoid the common mistakes mentioned above to get one step closer to achieving your conversion targets.