How to Maximize Landing Page Conversions Using Behavioral Science


By: Alex Macksoud

What do review sites, Rotten Tomatoes and the New York Times bestseller list have in common? They’re all examples of behavioral science, the study of human behavior.

After attending Digital Summit Detroit 2017, I learned that behavioral science can be used by marketers for a variety of functions – most notably to optimize landing page conversions.

Just about every digital marketing campaign relies on the landing page to gauge success. Therefore, you would think considerable time and energy would be spent to ensure it’s as good as possible. As it turns out, that’s not always the case.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a standalone web page that visitors can “land” on by clicking a hyperlink. It is often distinct from your main website, and designed to meet a single, distinct campaign objective.

A landing page has two purposes:

  • Keeping the promise made in the ad campaign
  • Getting the visitor to make a choice

If your landing page fails to address either of these purposes, your marketing campaign will fail.

Customer Research

Who is your landing page targeted to, and how do you get them to click through? Those are two important questions to ask when developing the campaign to get people to the landing page.

One of the most common methods of driving people to a landing page is email marketing. While your email headlines may keep the promise of the campaign, they will convert people at varying levels.

The common reproach to solving this problem is A/B testing, which compares two versions of something to see which performs better. While that is always a solid option – it’s often referred to as the Supreme Court of behavioral data – there are other tools available, such as preference tests, that allow marketers to ask an online panel what they think of various headlines.

A/B testing and preference testing is great not only for email headlines, but also landing page designs, in seeing what people respond to best.

Stay Away from Stock Images

We’ve all seen website landing pages with awful, generic stock imagery – a close-up of a handshake, a man pushing buttons on a translucent screen, a bar graph with the arrow pointing up. This is the absolute wrong way to design a good landing page.

Rather than design a landing page first and having the copywriter create the content later, the opposite should be occurring.

Always get the copy and function down first, and then bring in the designer to get eyes on the most important parts of the page. Your copywriter can even suggest a customized image that more accurately supports the content.

If you’re not spending as much time on your images and you are on copy, your landing page will reek of unattractiveness and limit conversions.

Ask for Feedback

Once your landing page goes live, the work isn’t done. You should constantly be refining and tweaking the design and copy based on available visitor data.

If you want to gain valuable insights on why your landing page conversions are lacking, try putting a pop-up on the page asking visitors that fail to convert what kept them from seeking more information, or doing X.

It may seem small, but the feedback you get might surprise you, and allow you to find flaws in your landing page that were previously overlooked.

Follow these tips, and you won’t have to launch your landing page and wonder whether it will work. You can launch it and KNOW it’s going to work!