5 Easy Ways to Increase Your Landing Page Click Through Rate

When it comes to landing pages, businesses understand the tenets of creating and designing a landing page that will sell. The problem however is the click-through rate the landing page gets. While this post talks about how to increase the landing page click-through rate, it is also important that you understand what this really is.

To create the best reading experience for you I’ve created the Table of Contents below. Use it to jump to a specific chapter or keep track of where you are:

• What is Landing Page Click-Through Rate and Why Does It Matter?
• Balance Your Images/ Video And Copy
• Don’t Let Your Brand Control TheColor Scheme
  • 5 Advantages of Innovatively Using Color
• Use Images That Trigger An Emotional Response
• Avoid Visual Clutter
• Don’t Ignore Your Mobile Audience
  • Design For The Device
  • Don’t Be Too Iconic
  • Use Site Filter And Search Tabs

What is Landing Page Click-Through Rate and Why Does It Matter?

When people see your adverts and land on your landing page, otherwise known as a pre-sell page, a percentage of them will click-through to the target/offer page from your landing page. Generally speaking, this percentage is what we call the landing page click-through rate.

To calculate the accurate “Click through Rate”, this is what you do:

Take the number of clicks your source of traffic is showing. For example, if the figure is 500, take the number of clicks your affiliate network shows for the offer. From this source, let’s assume you had 200 clicks. This means that you have a ratio of 200/500.

Mathematically, 40% of the people click though on your page.

While this is a great source of analytics, you need to also ask yourself how many people convert.

Here is the deal. Imagine having a click through rate  of 70% and only 10% conversion compared to having a CTR of 10% and 90% conversion?

Here is an example:

Landing page A has a higher click through rate compared to landing page B.However, it is a mistake for you to conclude that landing page A is the winner. Observe the conversion rates and see the difference.

Do you notice it?

Some people would now conclude that increasing conversion is the bigger catch. While this is true to some extent, taking time to work on your landing page CTR is also important.

In my opinion, as much as conversion matters, you need to strive to increase your  click through rate because this means that you also increase the number of people who can convert. Therefore, you need to understand how to increase your CTR on your landing page.

Let’s explore 5 Ways to Increase Click-Through Rate of Your Landing Page.

1. Balance Your Images/ Video And Copy

Almost every blog will advise you to ensure that you create a great copy for your landing page. While this is good, some people dwell too much on creating the copy and forget on working on the images and videos as well.

Quick question:

Which landing page would convince you better to click to the offer page, a page full of lengthy words and descriptions or a mixture of descriptions, a video and images?

I know what you are thinking!

One with the mix is better than the rest.

To find a balance, a great copy should show the quality of the product, have an image that illustrates the customer pain points and also show how the product or service will relieve the customer pain. The latter can be done using a video, to better speak to the customer.

Why are we insisting on visual representation such as images and videos?

Let me show you something else:

It has been proven that most people, in fact over 90% of people prefer videos compared to white papers and case studies. These facts simply show you how videos are a necessity in landing pages.

In her short copy copywriting report titled “Sales Page Relief Manifesto“, Karri Flatla talks about how the web has matured and so has the customers’ eye for quality products. She explains that businesses should refrain from writing the long, copy-heavy sales they have long been used to.

Customers now want rich copies with more professionally presented options.

To drive the point home, we will look at sales copies without images and sales copies with images.

Do you notice how wordy these copies are? I bet given 10 seconds you cannot tell what product or service the businesses are offering.

Here is what a great landing page that will increase click-through rates looks like:

Here is another example:

Simcity wanted to improve its landing page CTR and conversion rate and decided to a/b test its landing page and see what elements to eliminate.

Here is the original landing page:

Do you see the product promotional banner highlighted in the image? Well, seems this was the problem as proven below.

The promotional banner was removed.

The result: 43% increase in conversion.

Do you notice the video and the conspicuous call to action? Let’s look at an even better example:

Do you notice the image and videos as highlighted in the image above? This is what we are talking about.

Here is why you need to include videos to improve click through rate:

A video will help you tell your story in a simple and succinct way, better than how text will ever do.

Take for example, having to explain how a particular hair product makes the hair smooth and curly. You will better attract more customers by showing a video of the exact results that the said product gives. To prove this point, a study showed that product videos can increase product purchase by 144%.

Now that you know what you need to do, how do you do it?

You can never have the same template for the kind of images or videos you create for your customers.

Do you know why?

Each product is different and the target market is different, meaning that you need to design a better and custom way of dealing with each audience.

Here is what you should do:

First understand your audience or target market profile. Then seek to understand what their pain points are.

Does your service or product have a solution for this? Create a list of more than one but many compelling reasons showing key features and benefits.

After doing this, it is important to critically think business. What is your conversion goal? Do you have the potential headlines that will attract your target audience? Do you also have supporting sub-headlines that will drive the point further?

What is your call to action? If you do not know how to create a great and highly converting call to action, get reading and learn how. Lastly, after you have all this figured out, talk to your graphics department and design perfect imagery and videos to help you deliver the message better.

Remember, when you are making a video, certain emotions make people to click on things.

To better understand the concept, here are 5 landing page videos you can learn from. You can also read here on how a retailer discovered that product videos are 174% more likely to convert.

2. Don’t Let Your Brand Control The Color Scheme

I know this seems confusing to you. You are probably wondering why you should associate coca-cola with yellow yet its brand color is red.

Don’t worry, you are not alone! I used to think the same.

If my brand color was red then all my marketing campaigns had to be red.

Well, I must have forgotten one thing, the role of color in conversion and marketing. Well, you can still wittily mix colors and in the end, still maintain your brand colors and recognition.

First things first! Let’s learn the exact role color plays in marketing what a few colors mean in business, while we delve into how you do a merger. Please note that we are not implying that you totally forget your brand scheme, you can use color related to your theme to maintain focus.

While companies spend millions of dollars every year in marketing and developing new strategies to increase click-through rates and conversions, one simple tweak could help solve the problem- using color in a brilliant and innovative way, even out of the brand cliché scheme.

5 Advantages of Innovatively Using Color:

There are many advantages of color to marketing but let’s look at the 5 important ones

1. Colors Increases Brand Recognition

It is extremely crucial to ensure that a prospect is not only made aware that a certain company exists but is also able to easily recognize it based off of a component as basic as color in order to remember it. It has been reported by University of Loyola in Maryland that color increases brand recognition by 80%.

This means that if you fail to add color to your marketing, a prospect is less likely to recall your brand, and is more likely to forget about the brand very fast.

Obviously, this is an incidence that no company would love to encounter!

People tend to associate different brands based on color and logos. Therefore, it is exceedingly important that you incorporate color to your brand marketing and logo.

Just remember not to lose track and fail to incorporate colors that complement your theme color.

2. Increases Marketing Success Rates using Colors

When marketing, you need to understand the psychology of humans and know that they are visual beings. Other than videos and images, color has been proven to be a major attraction for prospects.

This research clearly showed that integrating your marketing with color immensely increases the success rate. It has therefore been verified that color guarantees a higher click-through and conversion rate.

3. Better Readership And Understanding

Advertisements on electronic media like televisions take at most one minute.  This is probably the same amount of time a prospect takes to read your landing page. At this point, your main priority as a marketer is to ensure that both usual clients and prospects get to read and understand the vital information within the allocated time.

Using specific colors to highlight the main aspects improves consumer memory.

For example, bright colors must be used to highlight the main points. This way,a consumer is able to retain the information for a long time.

Truth is landing pages are trickier because we need to say all we want to say in text in the shortest time possible. Factually, you have 0-8 seconds to compel a prospect.

Good news, there is a way out!

Incorporating color in your content and e-newsletters makes it easier for someone to scan and skim through your content very fast while at the same time capturing the main points. Specific items like call-to-action, price, headlines that show benefits and customers pain points should be highlighted and printed in conspicuous color.

Bitballon was able to increase its conversion rate by changing the CTA button from green to red.

A different company offering Free YouTube MP3 converter changed the font color of the headline from orange to black and increase the CTR and conversion rate by 6.64%, as illustrated below.

4. Colors Improve Visibility and Ease of Use of your Website

In an earlier article, we talked about the importance of a great user experience in increasing conversions. We briefly talked about how an easy navigation is important for your website. This is exactly what color can do for you.

Maybe you are an engineering firm also dealing in roadworks machinery and use brown as your brand color. Your landing page has top-notch content and alluring descriptions yet your navigation is bad due to the dull brown color that you have solely used in your content.

As a matter of fact, brown is hated by both men and women.

What this means for you is that you should refrain from using it too much in your landing page.

Basically, the point here is that you should refrain from monotonous text in your landing page. Let’s look at this illustration.

What is the sales message? Does the monotonous text allure you to read the landing page? I bet not.

I really feel overwhelmed by the text and already feel too tired to read the text.

You don’t want that happening to your page.

Let me ask you this:

What is the use of having absolutely impressive content in your site yet the site navigation is annoying? You can easily lose many potential customers through poor site navigation.  Who would keep visiting a site where findingimportant tabs such as ‘contact us’, ‘FAQ’ or ‘blog’ is a struggle?

Now that you understand how and why color is an important tweak in your landing page, it is crucial that you use the right color scheme.

A wrong color scheme has led to business failure in some areas. For example, MECLABs received a client whose landing page was performing poorly. The business needed to improve its landing pages color scheme and in-turn, increase conversions.

The control page, which is version A in the image below, had a black background with white text.

A simple tweak of reversing the colors worked wonders. The background was changed to white and text changed to black.

The result: 10.66% increase in account sign ups!

This is why every marketer should know what each color means and the consumer perception in order to accurately use them in a logo and advertisement.

5. Complete Guide to Using Colors to Increase Click through Rate

Red:  Most people associate this color with blood and danger. This is the best when you need to warn people about something. It is also popularly associated with love. Thus, it is a perfect color choice for a hospital or relationship-oriented business logo.

In addition to that, red causes people to make prompt decisions. This can be used in your favor and add it on ‘click here’ and ‘buy here’ tabs.Generally, in your call-to-action buttons.

Black: It is a neutral color, allowing you to play with it to your advantage. Black is mostly used for formal writing such as landing pages and press releases due to the authority, elegance and integrity aura it exudes.

It is best used for content that need to be as plain as possible yet easily read. The best way to market using black is by using bullets and numbering as well as underlining the main points or putting them in bold or italics.

Yellow: Its bright yet soft nature stirs a lively mood. It is one of the best attention-grabbers to use. Conversely, overuse might highly cause the consumers to avoid the landing page because too much of it is irritating to the eyes.
You need to be careful when using this color. Minimal always works with it.

Blue: As a child, you mostly associated blue with the skies and heaven. This gave you a feeling of confidence, safety, trust, honesty and intelligence.You can use blue in your color scheme, non-verbally assuring your clients of trust, honesty and reliability.

We sure need not discuss the need and importance of you building trust with your prospects. In addition to including videos for evidence, use color blue to non-verbally warm their hearts.

Pink: Popularly associated with love, pink is best used to advertize dating sites. This is therefore a great color to use when you are selling erotic items for example. Additionally, it is a girl color that you can use to attract prospects seeking items and services for baby girls.
Purple: It is a sign of royalty and a rare thing. It is commonly used to advertize rare products. A consumer is able to attach great value to a product due to this amazing color. Take for example, a jewelry store.

Green:It is commonly associated with the environment and perceived to be one of the friendliest colors. It is also a good color to creatively work with. It is universal, hence has no limitations to it.

White: It is the color of peace and tranquility. It radiates a serene sensation. You can best use it as a background color due to its ability to make other colors more visible.

Brown: Brown is universally used to signify the earth. It is a sign of simplicity, strength and resilience. Unfortunately for this color, many consumers associate it with dirt. It is therefore a bad choice for a restaurant or hospital.

It tends to hide dirt making it most appropriate for construction companies and industries. You can also alternatively use it inlieu of black when you have a complementing background like dull yellow or cream.

Orange: This is a tricky color to use. You must fully understand your target market before using it in your logo or landing page. It is a warm color that gives a flamboyant mood and shows affordability. Regrettably, some people might mistake the affordability trait for a cheap and insincere company.

For that reason, you must pay serious attention to consumer perception. When perfectly used, it can positively stimulate your clients’ senses due to the warm and sociable impression it displays. Diners, travel agencies and sports teams can comfortably use the color in their landing pages.

Gold: Gold is one of the most valuable minerals in the world today. Great economies are associated with gold. This is why using color gold in your business logo is a sure way of communicating to consumers that your products are of extremely high quality and expensive.

It also non-verbally tells your clients that the products are rare and worth the price. However, it can easily scare away the middle and low class prospects. It is a color well known to induce deep fear as well as bliss.
Additionally, it is a poor choice for a website because it is perceived as dirty yellow by site visitors. Businesses aiming for the high class market can easily use it without intimidating its clients. Jewelry shops are best placed to use it in their logo.

Gray: Just like white and black, it is a neutral color. As a result, it can be combined with any color to create an awesome logo. For content, it is best used as a background color due to its ability to increase the visibility of other colors.

Its conservative nature shows a reserved and indifferent personality. Please note that it should not be overly used because it shows lifelessness, boredom and lack of energy. Its maturity, reliability and security nature makes it perfect for use by law firms and financial websites.

Silver:  It is close to gray but has an uplifting nature. It is a sign of wealth, calmness, prosperity and modernity. Businesses dealing with exquisite and valuable items can comfortably use it for content marketing or logos. Nonetheless, it decreases readability when used in excess.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to know which color scheme will work best. Take time to experiment with different color schemes and scrutinize the market acceptance. Additionally, always make sure that you know your target market.

3. Use Images That Trigger An Emotional Response

This is simple psychology. Scientists have found out that displayed emotions have an effect on whoever is exposed to it.

If the emotion exuded is a happy one, then your prospect is likely to take a positive action and vice versa.

As a matter of fact, the way you use emotion on your website could potentially determine the success of your call-to-action and eventually, the click-through rate.

Look at this case study for example:

According to Red Cross, in America, it is estimated that 38% of the population is eligible to donate blood but only 10% does. This due to the fear of needles and people just never think about blood donations until it affects them.

In order to ask more people to donate blood, Red Cross was able to hire the consulting firm IDEO to help them redesign the experience of donating blood. The company used images and videos that were empathy driven.

In a book, Creative Confidence, IDEO founders, David and Tom Kelley explain how empathy begets understanding. This is the same concept that they used and now Red Cross has more people donating blood.

Here is what one of the blood recipients, Noelle Gardner, said about the new Red Cross approach.

In an article, Paras Chopra talks about how human photos can double your conversion rate, explaining the influence imagery has on an audience. He explains the need to include human photos in your landing page if you need to increase your click-through rate and ultimately your conversion rate.

To further emphasize on this point, he cites a scientific fact that talks on the ability of human faces to attract even toddlers and monkeys.

Clearly, human photos are better than other types of photos like scenery when speaking to prospects.

Let’s compare these two examples:

This first example of the NetDNA’s landing page shows us that the designers of this page clearly know the rules on how to use color and imagery to increase click-through rates. But take a second look at this landing page and see.

Does the image of the world map marked in red trigger any emotion in you?

Can you tell the kind of services the company is offering and does the landing page represent the kind of results you should expect?

Well, in my opinion, NO!

The world map does not really say to me that the business deals in content delivery.

Let’s look at our second example of, Roxio’s landing page below:

Do you see the difference with the previous example?

The designers of this particular page understood the importance of including images that trigger an emotional response.

I can see great photos of happy people having fun, subconsciously showing me that I’ll indeed have fun with the program.

I can’t help but also notice the great use of color and short but precise headlines in the landing page. Just 10 seconds of looking at the page and you have a glimpse of what the business does, how it is done, how much it costs and what to expect.

Let’s look at one last example, Debt-free 123’s landing page:

Once again, look at how color has been used by debt-free 123 to make this landing page easy to skim through and understand what’s going on. Now, look at how the designer pegs on letting the reader know that the business understands the pain points and has the answers.

As I’ve highlighted on the photo, we can see that the business acknowledges that the readers could have possibly lost control over their finances and is possibly facing bankruptcy. To someone who is going through the same problem and can resonate with the business, it would be of interest to know what the solution is.

Now,

After the business has identified the pain points, it has gone ahead to state what solutions it has, in well-formatted bullet points, showing the features and benefits.

The punchline: “The happy family, which is the end result that any client going through a debt crisis is looking forward to.”

In summary: While you design your landing page, look at the images you have selected and ask yourself whether they will trigger the kind of emotion you want your target audience to feel.

In case your analysis shows unexpected results, then takes more time and find appropriate images.

4. Avoid Visual Clutter

Well, this is another tricky issue to handle in your landing page. Before we begin, read this famous quote from Antoine De Saint-Exupery:

What Antoine meant in this quote is that when designing, you need to ensure that you have said all that you needed to say in the simplest and easiest way possible, without repeating yourself.

Research has showed that visual clutter is one of the reasons people abandon landing pages. Why would anyone bother to see your offer page when all you have done is turn your landing page into an eye sore?

Here is how you avoid visual clutter:

Review your document and sift any redundant information and remove it. Also ensure that whatever has been posted or written supports the main message.

If it drifts in any way, or does not support the call to action, it should be labeled as clutter and removed with immediate effect.

There are also other types of visual clutter that Jill Leviticus talks about in her article, where she talks about visual overloads. Have you visited websites or landing pages that have flashing words popping up on the screen while pop-up messages keep appearing?

Well,

We understand that maybe this is an effort to emphasize on the call to action. But in all honesty, if you used all the easy tips and tricks on how to write a call to action, then you need not depend on visual overloads like flash words to do the trick for you.

Some people even go to an extra mile of including songs or musical selection on their landing pages, which are even autoplayed.

While this seems sweet, be sure that the noise alone sometimes drives traffic away before your message is read.

Here is why:

Now, imagine that you are targeting the corporate market and your target audience is probably reading your landing page in the office. What would this person do the moment music begins to play with no warning whatsoever? You are right; they would immediately leave the site.

Well, I am also thinking what you are now thinking.

What about the video, won’t it make noise?

Is it really perfect for the working class which might be viewing during office hours?

My answer is, absolutely!

As opposed to a song which can start with no warning whatsoever, maybe because these music tabs can be inconspicuous, you will see a medium or large screen for a video and prepare yourself accordingly. Maybe, plug in some headphones.

You see the point? Videos don’t have the element of surprise that audios have.

5. Don’t Ignore Your Mobile Audience

You cannot afford to ignore your mobile audience.

Here are the facts:

62% of companies that have designed a website specifically for mobile had

If this traffic or rather, the mobile audience found landing pages optimized for them, and then you are sure that your click-through rates would increase.

Let’s look at some stats by Pew Research Center. According to them almost two-thirds of American adults own a smartphone and out of these people, 87% of them access the internet using their smartphones, 68% doing so on a typical day.

Have you seen how much you miss for ignoring your mobile audience? Let me show you 5 ways of optimizing for mobile.

One: Design For The Device

User experience on mobile phones and tablets is different from computers. For example, for one to see small site details on mobile, they need to zoom in.

Additionally, you need to create an app for your business that mobile users will find better and more convenient to use that using your site directly.

Two: Don’t Be Too Iconic

Mobile screens are already small enough. For this reason, refrain from reducing sire features into icons.
Three: Use Site Filter And Search Tabs
To help your site visitors find whatever information or feature they seek, it is important to include search and filter tabs.

Four: Wittily Position Your CTA

Your call to action should placed in a position that will be most conspicuous to your site visitors. Take for example, the front and center.

Five: Give Clear Interaction Cues

When using a computer, it is easy to know clickable elements in a webpage when hovering the mouse around. This aspect should also be included when creating landing pages for the mobile devices.

You should check out How to Maximize Conversions from Mobile Traffic by Hammad Akbar for a complete guide on Optimizing mobile for commerce and conversions.

Final Thoughts

A landing page is the gateway to your website or offer page. This is a very important page for your business because it has the potential to significantly determine the amount of revenue you can earn by increasing your click-through and conversion rates.

As you have seen in the introduction, there is need to understand the relationship between click-through rates and conversion rates. Either way, each of these business aspects is important and you should ensure that you strive to increase your CTR.

Visual representations, color and simplicity among other aspects as discussed, are parts or elements of your landing page you can’t joke around with. When these vital elements are perfectly designed, a/b tested and selected, you will begin to enjoy better performance of your sales page.

To help you better track your performance, ensure that you try the all-in-one Truconversion analytics tool to help you strategize better after analyzing your heat maps, conversion funnels and visitor-session recordings.

Are there other ways you think you can use to increase your landing page click-through rate?

Have you tried any of the suggested methods above? How did it work for you? We would love to hear from you. Please share with us in the comments section below.