Your homepage or your landing page’s first goal is to immediately engage and guide your prospects. Most homepages and landing pages are anti-marketing sites, with numerous distracting links and unclear navigation.
Remember—If your homepage or landing page isn’t drawing your prospects in … it’s most likely driving them to your competition.
A direct marketing homepage/landing page has 2 goals:
- Make a sale
- Generate a lead
That’s it. Your homepage or landing page should always be steering your prospect through your sales copy to your order form or to your sign-up area. Everything should lead to the conversion.
Extra clicks are the enemy of high conversion rates. Each additional click lowers your conversion rate. The worst thing you can do is encourage random clicking all over your site. You want to guide them through the pages.
This means …
- Get rid of your sprawling navigation bar. You don’t need it. You can probably incorporate that copy on your shopping cart if you believe your prospect needs more information. The fact is, when you send them to another page, you’re sending them away from your order form.
- Don’t even THINK about a link to another website. Why would you want to send them anywhere else?
- Your homepage should only lead to one other page: your shopping cart or sign-up page. Studies show every click decreases the chance of conversion.
- Take a look at your homepage. Can you see the likely path your prospects will take? Or does it have a random, haphazard “who knows” path? Always plan your layout to guide your prospect through your copy and graphics to the shopping cart or landing page.
Are your conversion rates significantly lower than your unique visitor rates? Give me a call at (310) 212-5727 or email me at [email protected].
