How To Increase Conversion Rates Without Touching A Landing Page

August 10, 2015

Are your landing page optimization efforts actually killing your conversion rates?

If you’re stuck in low single digits and celebrating every .5% increase as a big win, I’m inclined to say yes. But what I told you that you could increase your conversion rates … without doing landing page optimization?

Check out these 5 conversion hacks that can boost your conversion rates by 3x, 5x or 10x without touching a landing page.

1. Use Call-Only Campaigns Instead of Landing Pages

Call-only campaigns are a game-changer. The normal desktop conversion funnel requires four steps minimum: see the ad, click on the ad, visit the landing page, and convert to become a lead.

With click-to-call extensions in a call-only campaign, you can get rid of the leaky landing page altogether. Users see the ad, call the business, and you capture the lead. In fact, calls to businesses are worth at least 3x more than clicks to websites.

Call-only can help you dramatically increase your call-in and conversion rates. Don’t even display the URL in your ad; just point people straight to your business with click-to-call:

You can use click-to-call on Facebook, too, which makes a lot of sense since 86% of monthly Facebook users are accessing the site from a mobile device.

This way, you’re only paying for calls to your business – no more budgeting for a ton of ad clicks that don’t end up converting on your landing page.

Of course, click-to-call doesn’t make sense for everyone, all the time. It’s a great thing for businesses where a prospect is likely to want to speak with someone. But you might also want to…

2. Use New Ad Formats and Ditch the Landing Page

AdWords, Facebook and Twitter all offer lead capture ad formats, and when you put these to work, you can skip the landing page altogether.

Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards, for example, display your offer and CTA to users, with their contact information already pre-populated on the form.

One click sends their name, email address and Twitter handle to you for export to a CSV spreadsheet. Alternately, you can integrate with your CRM system if you use one of their approved providers.

Again, this enables you to get rid of one whole stage of the conversion funnel. Why send people from an ad to a landing page when you can convert on the ad itself?

3. Compel More People to Convert with Ninja Ad Tricks

OK, “ninja” might be an exaggeration, but these ad types are crazy super effective. Here are three awesome features you can use to compel more people to convert:

1. Use Shopping Ads or the new industry-specific ad formats for hotels, automotive, mortgages, local service providers like plumbers and so on. if applicable. Depending on the ad format, there are some crazy awesome features, like pricing info, image carousels, one-click directions or booking, local inventory integration, and more.
   
2. Use Ad Customizers to create urgency and FOMO. Ad customizers let you do things like countdowns: “Only X Days Left at 40% Off!” You can even use them to run perpetual sales, over and over, always tapping into that psychological need not to miss out on a deal. Urgency has a huge impact on conversion rates, and in client accounts, we’ve seen increases in conversion rate up to 3x as the sale comes to a close.
   
3. Use Similar Audiences to find visitors more likely to convert. Focus on getting the right people to your site in the first place. Facebook and Twitter both allow you to upload a list of emails and phone numbers (for example, your customer list) to find more people with traits like them. It’s using the power of Twitter and Facebook to find the needle in the haystack for you! Getting in front of people similar to your existing customers and subscribers with relevant messaging increases the likelihood they’ll be interested in what you have to offer. (I wrote about four more powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies here.)

4. Convert Abandoners with Remarketing

Getting people to your site – even getting them to place items in the shopping cart – is no guarantee you’ll win a customer. In fact, 70% of carts with items in them are abandoned, 1 in 5 calls to a business are abandoned, and 96% of website visitors will leave without taking the marketer’s desired action. So what can you do about it?

I am a huge fan of remarketing – HUGE. If you aren’t investing in remarketing, you’re handicapping the effectiveness of all of your other marketing efforts. Think about how much you budget for PPC, content creation, social media … and then you get in front of a person once and give up?

No! Once a person has expressed that initial interest in your business, they’re more receptive to relevant messaging. Remarketing allows you to get in front of them again on social channels, with display ads all over the web, in their email, wherever they are at the time.

And here’s the thing: People don’t actually hate remarketing.

I know that’s what you’ve probably heard over the last few years, but it’s just not true. Check out this chart:

They’re not turned off. People are actually more apt to convert, the more they see an ad. Truth! This is probably subconscious; it’s unlikely that they even notice the ad the first few times they see it.

So be bold. Set your membership duration for 3x the average length of your sales cycle, run multiple ads per campaign and make your impression caps unlimited. Most importantly, run awesome ads! Get creative and be relevant; good remarketing makes people think, “Oh yeah!” instead of, “Ugh, not again.”

5. Change Your Sign-Up Flow

OK, you might need to touch a landing page for this one – but forget about mucking around with button size and font color. Those might get you some tiny movements, but they’re never going to move the needle in a big way.

Instead, try a totally new sign-up flow. Think about your ask: is it too much, too soon?

Consider the typical software trial sign-up form, for example. Almost without fail, companies say hey, please register here for your free trial. You’re just a step away! Give me your info and something awesome will happen, I promise.

The problem is that your visitor isn’t yet invested in the offer. They haven’t yet received anything of value from you – just the promise of value. For a lot of people, that’s not enough to compel them to put the effort into signing up.

So change the flow:

In this example, a company decided to let users get into a free trial immediately. After they had already played around in it for a little while, they were asked to register. This flow shows the user some value before asking them to do the work of registering. It performed exponentially better!

Another way to seriously switch up the flow is to give users a choice. This is even more compelling if the choice has an emotional element to it, like this:

You can also increase the number of steps instead of requiring one lengthy one. Try breaking up the form onto three pages. When people can see they’re making progress, they are often more likely to complete a few smaller, consecutive asks than one big one.

Key Takeaways

Here are my three key takeaways to remember for increasing conversions with minimal landing page optimization:

1. You have the power to change the funnel. You can completely bypass entire stages of it by using smarter ad formats and extensions.
   
2. Big changes produce big results. Changing buttons, fonts, spacing, etc. might make you feel like you’re busy optimizing, but that’s about all they’ll do. Re-examine your offer and flow for meaningful improvements.
   
3. Average isn’t good enough. Puttering along doing the same thing as everyone else will never result in your rising above. Forget about .5% increases. Aim for exponential improvements and focus on the tactics with the potential to improve your conversion rates 3x, 5x or even 10x. Be a unicorn in a sea of donkeys!

 

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