S2E4 | Why Are My Landing Pages Not Converting?

Most people encounter your brand through landing pages. But in the excitement of showing off (as you should), you may be tempted to go overboard… and end up forgetting about the people on the other side—your customers! In this Damn Good Marketing Podcast episode, Hasita and Subha discuss what actually makes a landing page effective and how brands should approach making one.

Discussion Topics: Why are my landing pages not converting?

• What exactly is a landing page and what is it supposed to do?
• What do users actually look for in a landing page? And what do they absolutely NOT want to encounter in one?
• How can I toe the line between explaining my services adequately and not overwhelming users with information?
• What should I avoid while creating a landing page? (The don’ts of creating one)
• At what point (and from whom) should I take feedback about my landing page?
• Topic-Al: The advent of AI writing tools and why we find it so appealing.

Transcript: Why are my landing pages not converting?

Subha: You know, once upon a time you went to a website and you said, Hey, this is what I want and then you got what you want actually was there that once upon a time, or am I dreaming it up? I’m frustrated as you can see. I’m trying to find a good new email marketing tool, and I have gone to three, four such sites this morning and they all are like, it’s so overwhelming they’re just telling me so many things that they can do, but I’m just thinking, can you do the basic stuff? Like can you get my emails across to more people easily? That’s all I want to know.

Hasita: Yeah, and it’s interesting, you bring up email marketing, because when I think about the ecosystem in which they operate, so today, they have to promise automation, they have to promise AV testing, they have to promise the moon and the stars and then some, I guess, because everyone else is doing that and that’s the domain in which they’re kind of operating, but it’s interesting that somewhere in doing all that the most basic consumer need, which is to send emails with these seems to have gotten lost. And honestly, Subha, I don’t know if I have a recommendation for you there because I was looking up, MailChimp, ConvertKit, and Omnisend, and all of them are saying different things, but I don’t know if any of them really make a compelling use case, in your case or mine for that matter.

Subha: Yeah, like, say, I landed on some of these with some effort, I did a Google search and I asked a few people and I made a list of three, four tools that others used, I actually even looked at the emails that I got, and newsletters, etc and try to figure out which tool they’ve used. So I’ve put in the effort and then I’m landing on this page, and it leaves me wanting to just fly off from there immediately.

Hasita: You have just opened a can of worms. So let’s discuss that in a little more detail without going too gross. Welcome to the damn good Marketing Podcast. Today, we are discussing the pages where we land, the landing pages, the utopian dream of every marketer is to convert everybody who lands on a landing page. But what does the landing page mean? What does conversion mean? And how do you measure and manage all of this when you also have a business to run? Let’s discuss that.

Subha: Yes, let’s please. Because I mean, now that you’ve called it out, and it’s about landing pages, it’s a struggle for me to for my business, like, what is a landing page, like every page is a landing page, right? You can land on it.

Hasita: Yeah, in that sense, you should definitely be thinking about these pages in that context. Say, for example, your homepage is a landing page, right? Everybody’s not going to land upon it at some point in time. Any products, any solutions that you have on offer, say you have a nice little package for how your coaching sessions are offered, for example, that has to be showcased in a way that makes sense to somebody. I think the nuance that sometimes we miss when it comes to landing pages is that they can be consumed independently. And we always think that somebody’s coming to the page where maybe they’ll read a case study, maybe they will be interested in my video.

But you have to work with the assumption that they will probably not be interested in any of those things. And if that was just the one piece of content they were looking at, with no context, like you said, you could have landed up there from a Google search, right? It could have been a sponsored ad. And if what I was looking for, and the ad and the page don’t match each other, then it doesn’t matter what else I have to say, because I’m already in trouble. Say in your case Subha, I’m assuming you Googled, easy to use email marketing tool, easy-to-use email software, one of those things.

Now, your ads will definitely say the easiest email software in creation, but the moment you land on the page that promise is lost, and that’s where I think the landing page has become a little bit of that beast that is difficult to rein in. Because as small businesses, there is only a limited amount of capacity in terms of development resources and tools. So you can’t build up a page for everything. It’s as simple as that. So how do you still kind of make conversions work in that context really?

Subha: Yeah, because conversion that’s ultimately the goal, right? If I’ve got somebody who’s taken the effort to find me and find my website and land on one of the pages or has been kind enough to click a link that I’ve shared somewhere, then you want them to have the experience. One that’s positive etc. and tell them who you are. But you also, I think somewhere want that to convert into something meaningful and valuable for you and them.

Hasita: Yeah, and that’s where I think thinking about it is so much more important than we give it a priority, in the sense that if I am a service provider, and if I’m a provider of services that are a little more individually driven like you Subha is a coach. If I work with you, it’s probably going to be a long-term engagement. I want to know whether I’ll find resonance with you, whether it’s going to be a synergetic relationship in that sense. So what I am probably going to be looking for is social proof, like what other people who are serving in similar functions like me said about you, what experience you bring, do I see the gravity of what you’re trying to do in the work that I’m consuming from you.

So then I don’t really see the need for a landing page that opens with unleashing your full potential with the help of a coach. It’s understood that that’s what I’m trying to do. Then comes Okay, can I put say social proof front and centre? Can I put some of my past work anonymized, of course, front, and centre. But on the other end of that spectrum, if you think about it, the other tech products, the platforms, they’re all getting us to sign up, in the sense that the landing page, so to speak, is serving as the salesperson, they have to do the job of selling, by the end of it, the idea is that you have taken a demo, or you’ve signed up for a free trial, or whatever it is.

And that, admittedly, is a much harder thing to do. Because from the beginning, you have started at, you know, first there was Shantanu, and then you have to like, the whole epic has to kind of pan out in the span of that one landing page, which is I think, things start going south because that temptation to say everything is very strong. That’s my biggest grouse with a lot of landing pages.

Subha: Yeah, no I’m genuinely overwhelming, and as you said, if there’s that big fat form, which the worst type is when it comes as a pop-up like they don’t let you see anything else till you tell them who you are and where you were born and everything or there is this kind of constant attempt to get you to sign up to something without even letting me experience who you are, what you’ve done, and why I like, it should be good enough for me to search for that signup or say, let me see a demo, or call me and let’s talk or whatever it is.

Hasita: It exists, it’s just not intrusive really, and yeah, you’re right there are some contact forms, which are longer than the page itself. So I mean, that’s definitely a no, no, don’t put a contact form that requires you to fill in as much detail as you would for an Aadhaar application, it’s just not worth it. But also, what you said is very interesting, in terms of a lot of the copy that you put out there, I think it tries to tell you what you can expect, right? analyse, automate, optimise, increase this red news, that it’s always that, but I do think that these are certain things that people should be given a chance to experience for themselves.

Me telling you Subha writing three blogs is rarely going to change your life and is probably not going to, you know, I have to show you I have to tell you that this is what happened in the past, maybe if it’s a product, especially give you a demo because a lot of times people are coming with certain baseline expectations today. Like, would you go to an email marketing tool and see whether they will allow you to upload a database in bulk? Like, I would assume that that’s the whole point.

Subha: No, very true that a lot of things today have become baseline and very much a hygiene factor, and I think that’s important to remember that you also have to then keep, like you said, is there a good test for whether your landing page copy is making an impact? Like, unleash your potential work maybe five years ago. Today everybody is like, just done and dusted with unleashing their potential. So what am I going to talk about, what’s that hook going to be today, and what’s the good test of that hook?

Hasita: So there is a test thankfully, it may or may not apply in all contexts and use cases again, we have to use these things with a little bit of discretion I would say don’t just apply blanket to everything. But 70-80% of the time, it works and that is true. If you look at your headline as soon as you land on a page and you put three words in front of it before as a prefix, and that is now you can then the headline. Now you can what? And it’s quite surprising I don’t know if it’s a very B2B thing most companies fail this test. Because I was looking at examples. I have been on the receiving end of a lot of product demos and I felt the pain that I think some of my clients experience as well, and it’s quite interesting because a lot of promises made are broken on the landing pages.

And the first place where it happens is actually that headline, and I can’t help but think what is the need to complicate it so much, I was actually looking at a tool called Workable in the context of some research that we were doing and the headline says big ideas, amazing talent, the recruitment software that brings them together. It’s a good headline, there’s nothing wrong with it. But it’s not really telling me anything, you know what I mean? Like, okay, I’m curious but so what? And the funny thing is, right underneath, they have a small subheader, which says, find and hire the right person for every job.

Subha: No, that’s great, now you can right now you can do this, like that’s fundamentally why you have landed here and we can help you do that.

Hasita: Exactly, and just think about the many different ways you can play with it, like, obviously, if you say, find and hire the right person for every job, it’s generic, in the sense that it’s very common to say that. So maybe you can even add a little bit of personality to it and that’s where content becomes copy. You say for once find and hire the right person for every job, and people are reading it like that, in their minds. It’s not that we are just consuming mindlessly from top to bottom. So yeah, I think that now you can test is definitely a good one. But it’s also scary.

The reason I say it has to be used with discretion is that it’s not going to work unless you’ve already spent some time thinking about the customers, your audience, what is the flow through which people are going to come and land on this website, and how much context will they have before they get there. Like, I would think that HR Tech is a crowded space. And there is enough and more. And everyone’s trying to solve similar problems to some extent, especially on the recruitment side of things. So when you know that it’s a crowded market, the likelihood is that people will come to you from review aggregators, people may come to you because they attended a forum where other HR Tech presenters were also there. So when there’s that much noise, keep it simple really, like just get down to the basics.

Subha: No, no, I think this keeping it simple there’s this need to show that you are in the business and you know the terminology and you know the acronyms, but ultimately, if let’s say for the Mailchimp sends the mailer like the sense of the world, a lot of small business owners, small to medium business owners are your target market. So when we land on your page, if you throw a lot of jargon, you can double your ABC with our XYZ kind of stuff then I don’t even know what you’re talking about, I don’t even know that I’m supposed to look at some of these metrics. So throwing up metrics as a selling point, then you’ve lost me there itself because you’re an email marketing tool, talk in plain English, and then when the person is getting more engaged, and maybe looking at your pricing plan, or looking for a demo, or something else, or looking at the various functionalities that you offer, then get into some of these important details.

Hasita: Correct. I think we fall back on numbers so much because it’s tempting to be on the certainty bandwagon. In my mind, a 30% improvement in existing processes is not something that you need to talk about on a landing page. If you’re not efficiently optimising, then why are you even doing it? That’s a product challenge you really have to think about. But there are use cases where I would use numbers like if there is a tool that I can use that will make me do something in days instead of months or weeks, that’s a number that I want to put out there. If your numbers are in the high 90s, like 95%, improvement 96% improvements, and there are products that have those kinds of numbers, then, by all means, have a number, but numbers without context are just me filling the page up like you know, 3x faster. Maybe it’s a very individual thing as well, but I’ve gotten over it’s just not registering anymore. I think we are living in a world of too much noise.

Subha: Yeah, too much data to process, and sometimes, the numbers make you feel like what they’re showing you is either much smaller than you are or much bigger than you are and so they’re not the right.

Hasita: Exactly. So that’s where you have to tell the story. Like, it’s not okay anymore to just throw three numbers at somebody and say, Okay, this is our social proof. No. How are those three numbers happening? What are you doing that’s making that happen? And that’s the story that a landing page really, let me say when done well, it is a powerful tool, right, like you’ve cohesively told a story, you’ve done the four. five things that you need to do to get it to a logical conclusion, then it’s a good investment and that’s why people spend so much. And also operationally, landing pages are created specifically usually for every campaign, and every paid ad that you run. So in your example, Subha the easiest email marketing tool should ideally be leading to a different landing page than the email marketing tool for 2000 plus subscribers, because those are two very different needs and contexts, and therefore, you have a separate page built for each of those contexts.

Subha: Right. So each of those becomes in a way, the critical landing page for that use case, you know, the person who lands there. That makes sense. It doesn’t seem like it should be too difficult, but I feel like too many landing pages just fail in so many ways. So what are some of the kind of top few big do-nots that you generally see?

Hasita: Top few big do nots that’s going to be difficult because there are a lot of top many do nots. But I’m just thinking, if you’re very heavy, especially on the paid campaign side, since that’s what we’re talking about, keep adding and retiring landing pages all the time, stay on top, because you don’t want to have created 2,300 of them and they are just floating around the internet being goes, well, after they’ve served their purpose. That would be on the slightly more technical side of things. But more basic, even if you had two or three pages, optimised for the customer, think about where are the two, or three places coming in from. And I think you asked me for don’t and I’m telling you the do’s special like, don’t make promises that are too basic.

Subha: True. It should feel like you’re worth the effort to scroll and subscribe.

Hasita: Yeah, like I’m just thinking and again, this is a mistake that a lot of service businesses seem to make, because our proof is in the operations. We don’t have much to showcase upfront, like, I mean, if I had to make a sales pitch to you, then the best I can do is tell you about past case studies. And therefore without that proof of concept, I think we fall back on things like high-performance teams, and efficient operations. I mean, my thinking is that without them anyway, there’s no business. With a low-performance team, there’s no.

Subha: And the high-performance team and an efficient process you know, those are good for you, but what’s in it for us to be customer?

Hasita: So I think that’s where another simple test that can be applied is as opposed to what so if you have a features list of 10 things, just read it out and say, as opposed to what? And very quickly, five, six will go out, and the remaining three, four are probably actually worth spending time on and kind of espousing. And we’ve done that so many times in so many workshops. And this is where I am going to also air, one of my pet peeves is that if you’ve hired an expert to write your copy, then don’t mess with their process. And they’ve done it multiple times. You’re bringing them in for that objectivity first and foremost. So if they are telling you that this is not important enough to put on a homepage, then they’re probably right. So how do you do it?

Now that’s a don’t. But if you had to, you know, gun to head, give feedback on a landing page, I think just try and put a friend next to yourself, and let them navigate it, let them see, experience it and make notes. So when someone who’s completely away from the context, but it is somehow relevant, like don’t find completely random friends, but someone who may potentially use that service at some point, and if they were reading it, and how do we navigate it? Like, are they able to reach the right sections? Are they completely skipping through some of the sections that you thought were important? Just doing that exercise can sometimes be very illuminating I find.

Subha: No, I think getting a lot of feedback in the early stages is important, like you said, someone who has some connection or some interest or even knowledge of what you’re going to put out there because I think you’re probably beyond the point of just feedback for the sake of feedback. You’re saying, if you were a potential customer, and you have landed here, what would you think, how would you act, what would you do and what is missing for you? And I think, for our websites, and there are various versions that we’ve held in the past, that’s been very useful to say, hey, when you land here, what did you think, what do you think I offer or what do you think are services, or what do you think I don’t do, or who you think is my audience, right? So, I think landing pages what you started out saying that the simplicity is just so important.

Hasita: True, and you will be surprised by some of the feedback that you get. That’s why I find so much value in showing it to the world outside. Because when we launched the website for Motley Crew, we were obviously very proud of it and we built it in-house we’ve done it in four days, which is a record time for a website. And then somebody did get back and say that maybe you are highlighting the wrong thing, in terms of the industry font being a lot bigger than the service font. So if it said brand strategy, manufacturing, the manufacturing was just visually bigger and brand strategy was smaller. And I would never have spotted that like I’m eternally grateful to the person who came up and said that because we are not highlighting the manufacturing we are highlighting the brand strategy side of things. And just by switching up those two things it made such a difference I mean, I could see it immediately after we made the change. So it is important to kind of have that outside-in perspective also, not from too many people, but like some people.

Subha: No, that makes sense. Okay, so then assume I kind of go and really look at my pages to figure out what my landing page should look like, what’s the call to action, etc. then what can be my realistic expectation because kind of going back to our email bit, we know that, you’re lucky if you get a click rate in the low 20s, for most of the industries. So in landing pages, what could be a realistic expectation of the kind of action folks will take?

Hasita: I think you do want them to fill out a form or you want them to get in touch with you somehow, some people do encourage newsletter signups as well, especially if it’s a very early interaction, no one’s going to fill a form and say, okay, Hey, I’m ready for this. So in those cases, maybe you may want to take them to a different content piece, nurture them, and engage them somehow. Realistic expectation, to be honest, it’s different from industry to industry, you can only benchmark it against the standard that your competitors already are at. And I would look at, how I get there. So you’ve built a new shiny landing page, and you’ve probably changed a lot of design elements. Always test one thing at a time. So don’t change the headline and the call to action and the placement of various elements.

So if you do all this, and something works, you don’t know what worked. So might as well just do one thing at a time, or even an A/B test, you know, have one headline in one version and one headline in a different one, see if that makes a difference. Put your calls to action in different places, highlight them in different ways, and see if that works. And you do have to continuously test and also it’s a very dynamic thing, just because it worked today doesn’t mean it will work tomorrow. Because the more fatigued people get and this is true of this industry itself in the sense that if I’ve seen the same thing in 10 places, then the novelty is lost. So I’m going to have to run that race in terms of keeping up with new trends or even being the trendsetter in some ways.

So interestingly, when we built an entire website, and it was full of landing pages for solutions for platforms, for a B2B tech product, the highest amount of conversion we got was from the Typeform chat. And I know exactly why as well. Because yes, the website did its job, it was a very compelling story. So all that layering had happened. The first question that we put on the typeform wasn’t, hey, what’s your name? Like lots of people open with What’s your name? What’s your email address? But we just said, Hey, what are you here for today? And then we gave people three very distinct options to choose from. Now, how do you put those three options because you’ve known you’ve spent enough time in sales calls, you’ve spent enough time getting to know the customer, so you know exactly what kinds of questions they have on their minds. And that’s the reason why conversion was, frankly, wildly better than I had expected and it was fully organic. So that was a huge win.

Subha: No, it makes sense. I think it’s going to be a bit of trial and error. Right? I think we have to be ready for that, too, that you have to keep seeing what’s bringing it in, what’s attractive to your audience, and that itself may change like, today we were talking about the email tool sites, right? Like, there are some basic expectations and then you want maybe certain kinds of automation, and maybe you wanted to write the email for you.

Hasita: Eventually. Yeah, that’s very possible.

Subha: So, to be able to keep up with the times and the landing page is definitely not a permanent page.

Hasita: Definitely not and that’s why you have so much leverage to play around with it. So go crazy. I mean, yeah at lower expenses.

Subha: Sounds good. Let me try out a few of these things for my next event. So things are getting a little exciting in the AI space I hear Hasita, and now I’m getting excited, like, can these email tools or whoever or whatever, actually write out a lot of content for me, especially if these cold call emails that I just don’t want to write?

Hasita: They can and that’s just the TLDR reality of it all like they actually can. I have been surprised by the capabilities of this new tool that’s kind of taking LinkedIn by storm it’s called ChatGPT and you know, it’s one thing to churn out content, it’s completely another to contextualise it and add a bit of nuance to it, which it’s doing so well. I mean, I can’t say I can’t believe it. This was the future. It’s been coming for a while now, it’s not that, suddenly, there’s a ChatGPT out there today. But it’s exciting times, I think, for everyone in the copy and content spaces. One way to look at it, of course, is that it will take away a lot of jobs and probably, I mean, if any AI tool can do what a human being does in five minutes, would you still work with a human being like, I know, for a fact that I wouldn’t, but that’s it.

But that said, I’ve been on the writing side of things and as you know, I still write landing page copy myself for a lot of clients that we work with. And I found that to be an extremely illuminating experience because the other day, we are working with an AI ML client and I was kind of struggling to write some of their headlines, because it was not feeling very natural, to me, it was not feeling very organic. And then I just put into three prompts, I started playing with this tool, and I put in a prompt saying, explain ML ops to me, in as simple a language as possible.

And the response that I got, literally opened with, most ML models never make it to production, which I thought was such an on-point problem statement that it had captured so I took that, and I then immediately changed it to the most revolutionary ML model, maybe sitting on a shelf right now. And I see that that’s such a cohesive way of human-machine interactions. And I’m so excited about what else is possible because it’s already like brainstorming with another person in the room. So it’s all very exciting.

Subha: I think if you look at it that way, if you have that perspective, that it’s not like, many times we think of it as I’ve outsourced my writing to somebody, and not even somebody I have something, it’s not even a person. And so then you have a lot of apprehensions and you even talk to it very differently. But if you think of it as another person in the room, because that thing has been learned from people.

Hasita: And that’s very valuable.

Subha: Yeah, one your outlook really does become a little more positive and hopeful and you could have, I think, a more valuable conversation with that thing.

Hasita: Tool or that platform thing slash person, is pretty much what it is. So this particular processor is called DaVinci, and I quite like that everyone in AI is trying to humanise it as much as possible so then we don’t absolutely freak out at the possibilities that it presents.

Subha: No, I think a lot of these names are meant to make us feel like you can trust it, right, like Dali, and now DaVinci.

Hasita: Yeah, Oh, I’m brainstorming with DaVinci can you imagine like, it’s a nice way of thinking about it? And also see as a business owner, you have to write brief documents, you were talking about blogs earlier. In fact, it could be such a nice way of outsourcing because now you’re using a tool like this, to also prompt some thought in terms of, hey, give me a positive take on XYZ, and then hey, give me a negative perspective on XYZ, and you read all that and then you suddenly have enough content to give someone a good brief.

You can even say, Hey, I kind of came across these various different opinions and this is how I feel about it and therefore, can you please help me write something on those lines, and then please tell the other person also that there’s a tool involved so that they can also use it and come up with some you know, and people are just having so much fun with it, people are rapping like M&M, people are talking like Jane Austen, all sorts of interesting use cases are showing up.

Subha: No, I think truly, truly interesting times, we have to move with it. I think there’s a lot of content generation that even today is happening using maybe more simplistic versions of such tools. We’ve tried a few which give you a topic and it gives you a kind of outline.

Hasita: Yeah. So to be honest, I’ve actually never found a lot of value in them. I mean, they do a lot of the research, the heavy lifting they enclose the conclusions and things, but somehow, and in fact, one of the tools I tried is called Jarvis. And the reason I paid for it is because that’s Iron Man’s Butler. I literally just signed up for that one reason and that one reason only, and it was actually a very disappointing experience. But this is open source. This is just free. I mean, anybody can go we should add a link in the show notes in fact, so that everybody can just play around with it. And you can do it on your laptop, you can do it on your mobile phone. And sometimes it’s just nice to know that you’re not in a black box, like, it’s nice to be able to have something else where you’re bouncing off ideas. And if you know humans and machines can achieve that together, I see that as an absolute win.

Subha: So true. I mean, we can all like it takes a village and let this.

Hasita: Let this be the village. I mean, it’s learned enough for several villages so might as well use it everything that it’s learned,

Subha: Maybe I’m going to throw you a challenge. Maybe you try and see if you can have one paragraph in the show notes written by.

Hasita: Yeah, why not? That will be so interesting. We should try that.

Subha: Yeah. Sounds good. Catch you next time.

Hasita: Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode on all things landing pages, copy, conversion copy, copy minus conversion, and all sorts of weird and wonderful combinations. We do hope this episode has been helpful in terms of getting you thinking about landing pages. The subject itself is extremely vast and diverse. And the truth is that to make one landing page work, you need a team of experts, UX designers, developers, content people, copy people, business perspective, Insight, Analytics, so much of it, but there are ways to simplify. Some easy ways to build landing pages will be linked in the show notes as well. And if you have any questions for us, you do know where to find us. Do give our podcasts a follow and see you next time.