You’ve spent a significant amount of time and money driving traffic to your online store. After all that hard work, wouldn’t it be frustrating to see none of this traffic results in a sale?

When you don’t optimize your home pages and landing pages, you are hurting your chances of turning targeted traffic into valuable customers. In this post, we’re going to share a few key reasons why you need to optimize your home pages and landing pages and some effective strategies to help get you off to the right start.

Home Page Optimization

Your site’s homepage is one of the most important pages on your site and is often one of the most visited as well. As such, it needs to make a great first impression and meet the high expectations of your site’s visitors.

The bad news is that you have less than 15 seconds to meet these expectations. That may paint a bleak picture, but there are plenty of ways to optimize your homepage so that visitors will hang around and convert.

Make Site Navigation Easier

One of the biggest conversion killers on a homepage is often poor site navigation. With the rise of mobile search continuing to outpace desktop, it’s now essential that you have a responsive web design.

Offspring, an online shoe company, saw a 15.19% increase in their mobile/tablet conversion rate just by switching to a responsive web design. Make your homepage easy to navigate across devices, and you will see a boost in your own conversion rates.

Have a Unique Value Proposition

A visitor who lands on your homepage needs to know immediately what your business is selling and what makes your business stand apart from the rest. Without a unique selling proposition, visitors won’t understand why they should choose you over your competitors and will bounce from your site.

Take a look at Thrive Market’s homepage for a good example. Thrive Market makes their value propositions prominent on their homepage with excellent visuals to emphasize their point. Visitors know exactly what Thrive Market sells and how it can benefit them.

Display Social Proof

When debating whether to purchase from your online store, consumers like to know that others have confidence in your products. Displaying social proof on your homepage can be highly persuasive and turn your site’s visitors into customers.

Social proof can come in many different forms. Testimonials, customer reviews, and even your social media sharing buttons are forms of social proof.

If you have a celebrity endorsement or you have been featured in The New York Times, let others know about it by putting it on your homepage. Going back to the Thrive Market example, you can see where their products have been featured at the bottom of their homepage:

Consumers can often feel anxious about buying online, but by featuring social proof on your homepage, you can ease some of their concerns.

Landing Page Optimization

While homepages are designed to welcome prospects and other generalities, landing pages have a single objective: to convince visitors to take the desired action. If you aren’t optimizing these pages for conversions, you are essentially throwing money away.

Even if you write compelling PPC ads, this doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t convert. Every single element of your landing page needs to be optimized so that your efforts don’t go to waste.

Here are some landing page optimization tips to help you achieve a better ROI:

Make Headlines Captivating

Everything begins with an amazing headline that captures your visitor’s attention. If a visitor isn’t interested in your headline, they probably won’t read anything else on your landing page.

An effective landing page headline should be informative, clear in its message, and short. For example, The Purple Carrot gets straight to the point and uses ”award-winning” to entice consumers into trying their vegan food. Their generous discount makes the offer even more persuasive.

To make your own headlines as persuasive as possible, CopyBlogger has an excellent eBook that will give you tips to improve headlines so that you can ramp up your conversions.

Improve Functionality

Landing pages are meant to streamline the customer journey. When there are too many forms to fill out or too many options to select, visitors can easily become overwhelmed. Make the path clear for users and keep things simple, yet specific.

A great example of this in action is Shopify’s landing pages.

All Shopify asks for is an email address to get started. Plus, they make sure to highlight the fact that users don’t need to enter credit card information, a huge selling point to anxious users.  Shopify’s headline is short and conveys its selling point clearly.

Segment Users to Improve Conversions

Optimizing for a wider audience may seem like a good idea, but you will drive more conversions by segmenting your customers and sending them to landing pages built specifically for them.

For example, you can segment your customers based on their past purchases and then send them an email newsletter that takes them to a landing page that matches your message. Putting your audience in front of an offer that is relevant to them will boost your conversions more than casting a wide net and hoping that something sticks.

Final Thoughts

Both your homepage and your landing pages are essential to the success of your online marketing campaigns. When you take the time to optimize these pages, you are guaranteed to increase your conversions.

There are many other ways to optimize your homepage and landing pages, but the methods above are a good starting point. To maximize your conversions further, don’t forget to test the effectiveness of any changes that you make!

 

About the Author: Erika is the Chief Marketing Officer at Springbot where she leads all brand, product, marketing campaigns and communications.