Creating an effective landing page (or website for that matter) can be both art and science. Landing pages are used to test interaction and interest in a product or service. They are used to iterate towards higher conversions (whatever the call-to-action (CTA)).
The art of the landing page is the combination of several characteristics including images (or, literally, “art”), copy, call-to-actions, and user forms. It can be difficult to determine the right detail. Thank goodness for variant-testing from services like Landing Lion and Unbounce.
For today, I’d like to hit home on key aspects of the user form as it is oftentimes the critical step of conversion.
- Know the audience. As in any marketing, product, or sales initiative, knowing and understanding the market is critical. It’s step one. Knowing the audience enables a landing page builder to employ the right semantics & style and ask for the right data points.
- Ask for what’s needed. Per Eloqua’s benchmark data from 3Q 2011 (see image below, provided by Hubspot), 61.4% user forms have 5-10 fields and convert ~40% of unique visitors. Too few fields (assuming the “right” ones) hampers sales from engaging the visitors with personalization while disabling marketing from iterating their efforts for high conversion. Too many will scare off visitors from taking the time to enter info.
- Check the CTA. Impact Boundsuggests making the CTA be both action-oriented and benefit-oriented. Help the visitor know what s/he is getting by completing the form.
The user form is just one part of a landing page/ website, but it’s the critical piece to converting a web visitor outside of direct contact (i.e. email, call). As mentioned before, test the user form with a landing page builder service.