The landing page is your funnel’s first impression and it might be your only chance to turn a visitor into a prospect or customer. There’s absolutely no point in developing a marketing or sales funnel if you can’t get them to take the first step.
This is why you need to optimize landing pages!
A well optimize landing page can help reduce ad spend, increase leads, increase sales, and will make a huge difference in your business.
So how do you know if your page is converting and how the heck are you going to make it better? There are a ton of tools out there to choose from and companies are more willing than ever to invest in optimization technology.
In fact, research by Forbes shows that on average companies are spending as much at $2,000 a month on CRO tools.
SEOGadget also states that 44% of companies use split testing software.
These stats show that usage of CRO tools is increasing every year and people are putting special focus on using these tools for optimizing landing pages.
Which leads me to a HUGE problem:
There are just too many damn tools out there. Well today I want to share the five tools I constantly use to boost conversions on my landing pages.
Before I move on to the list, I’d recommend downloading our Landing Page Blueprint so you can cut out some of the busy work and get a page that converts out of the gate.
Contents
Here are the Five Useful Tools for creating High Converting Landing Pages:
Instapage:
Instapage is a landing page creation tool that makes it incredibly easy to make landing pages that convert. The best part is you don’t have to know a thing about coding or design…all the hard work is done for you. Just input your copy, offer, and images and you’re good to go!
On top of the powerful editor the real power behind Instapage is their template library. Time and time again I’ve seen some awful landing pages and nine times out of ten this is because people try to build out their own pages within their WordPress template or have taken WAY too many liberties with their edits.
Even big brands make these mistakes, take a look at this page:
This is an awful landing page! Notice that the design is weak, there’s no visual heirarchy, there are competing headlines, and it’s incredibly difficult to read. If you were using a tool like Instapage, I doubt this would happen on your landing page. If you want to audit your landing pages, I’d recommend reading this post and downloading the 15-point checklist.
Instapage offers a lot of nice third-party integrations, such as Google Analytics and even email management platforms such as Constant Contact, MailChimp, Infusionsoft, and Active Campaign. which make it easy for you to sync your landing pages with the rest of your marketing tech stack.
If you’re looking for a new landing page software you can try Instapage free for 14-days. After the trial, the price won’t break the bank with the tool cost ranging $29/month to $127/month. The mid tier price point of $55 a month to the top tier price point is a fairly steep price for the added features. So if you’re going to give Instapage a try, I recommend starting at the professional plan.
Crayon: Inspire:
Sometimes it’s really tough to come up with halfway decent landing pages. Even if you’re using a solid template library you might just hit a creative brick wall. If this ever happens to you, you’ve got to check out Crayon.
Crayon’s Inspire tool is a design search engine that grabs every page design you can think of, from every device, from virtually every type of industry you could think of!
This is a great way to see different types of pages so you can see how your pages stack up in your industry.
Remember, you never want to be a carbon copy of your competition. However you do want to make sure you’re page meets the expectations and needs of your audience. If you start seeing design trends or functionality on multiple pages that happens to be missing from your landing page, then you might want to consider testing it out!
Crayon’s inspire tool is totally free, so go check it out. You also might want to subscribe to their ‘Blink’ newsletter so you get daily updates of new page redesigns.
UserTesting:
Normally user testing is a long and expensive process that was reserved to enterprise level companies. Enter UserTesting.com and data that was once reserved for top tier companies was made available for everyone to use. This type of data is a great way to see what is and what isn’t working on your landing page in an active test environment.
You are given a detailed account about how people are using your site and are given an audio recording of the interaction with the page.
When you use UserTesting you can get valuable feedback like:
- “I don’t understand this…”
- “I’m trying to do X, but can’t…”
- “I’d like to see an example of Y, but don’t see one anywhere…”
This type of data doesn’t require excel sheets or thousands of variants to dig through. After a few recordings you can start to see how the average visitor is using your site.
When you’re doing any kind of active user test, or a test where the visitor knows they are in an observed environment, it comes down to targeting the appropriate audience based on your target market and customer avatar. UserTesting.com let’s you pick and choose people so they are the best representation of your market.
VWO:
VWO specializes in A/B testing and is the tool I’ve been using consistently throughout the majority of my career as an optimizer.
I’ll start by saying this:
VWO is not cheap!
…but if you are consistently running split tests to improve conversions it is worthwhile.
Most Landing Page builder also include split testing as part of their technology, but I’ve found that to be unreliable when compared to services that specialize in testing.
VWO also offers heatmaps, but they also leave something to be desired. Just like landing page tools that don’t do testing all that well, the same can be said for testing tools that also bolt on customer behavior analytics tech.
UsabilityHub
I absolutely LOVE UsabilityHub – they are the yin to TruConversion’s yang.
UsabilityHub is a suite of active customer behavior data tools that will give you detailed user feedback including:
- Five Second Test (my #1 pick)
- Question Test
- Click Test
- Navigation Test
- Preference Test
If you were to just use a single tool of these five on your landing page, I’d recommend using the Five Second Test.
This test shows your page for five seconds, takes it off the screen, then asks a series of questions. I’ve been known to say that if someone doesn’t know who you are, what you do, and what they’re supposed to do next within 5 seconds you’ve lost them.
During a previous redesign at DigitalMarketer, they used a Question Test and it helped settle some internal arguments as well as improve the new page usability.
The team showed this page…
…and asked, “What do you think of the image size?”
UsabilityHub will give you a detailed breakdown of each response and a word cloud:
Apparently the image was a little big!
BONUS TOOL!
TruConversion:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug our own software. TruConversion is the most powerful Customer Behavior Analytics tool on the market that will show you why your landing page isn’t converting with heatmaps, session recordings, form analytics, funnel analytics, and surveys.
A heatmap like the one above will show you where people are clicking, scrolling, and whether the actions they’re taking are the action’s they’re meant to make.
After creating the landing page, you’ll need customer behavior analytics to see how your visitors are actually interacting with your site. Couple their actions with the quantitative data, e.g., analytics data and conversion rate, and you’re well on your way to creating a high converting landing page.
TruConversion is an easy to install tool which makes it extremely hassle free for anyone to use it on their website. You just install a code and you’re ready to start monitoring your visitor’s behavior.
Tools like heatmaps, scrollmaps, session recordings, micro surveys and funnels allow the website owner to trace the visitor behavior at each step of the customer journey. If you’re planning to use TruConversion or other customer behavior analytics tools, I highly recommend reading this guide first.
If you want to try TruConversion on your landing pages, you can request an invite here
Conclusion:
Landing page optimization is the first step to increasing leads, sales, and growing your business. With all of the tools out there (especially the tools listed above) there is no excuse to have a sub-par landing page anymore.
If you still don’t know where to start, take a look at these 14 TIPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR LANDING PAGE CONVERSIONS.
If you aren’t using any optimization tools yet, well, we did you a favor listing out these crucial 5 tools.
I don’t recommend getting all the tools at once, there will be a steep learning curve and it will be difficult to implement anything. I’d recommend getting a landing page builder first then investing in TruConversion. After that get VWO or another split testing tool and finally dig into the active user testing technologies.
