If your institution has recently rolled out a new campaign or product offer, you’ve probably developed a landing page to promote it. While landing pages are a popular way to drive online engagement, their effectiveness varies greatly depending on the level of effort put forth in researching and executing on best practices related to them. Luckily for the financial industry, landing pages are a fantastic way to communicate new ideas and products to members and drive conversions, two things FIs always want to do.
So how do you go about making the best landing page possible? We picked out the five most essential components of landing pages that power conversions, as well as some tips on gathering and interpreting data related to conversions, so you can start leveraging landing pages to the best of your abilities.
Landing Page Best Practices
Landing pages are an essential part of any company’s marketing plan. They allow you to communicate quickly and accurately about the subject at hand, without requiring lots of navigation. Financial institutions should quickly be able to realize just how essential this is to their marketing efforts, as many of the products and services they offer require them to educate and guide potential members towards a conversion.
When building a landing page, some of the best ways to increase conversions are to:
Focus on One Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, is an action phrase that prompts your target audience to perform a certain action. Think “Call Now” or “Find Out More.” An issue that those creating landing pages often run into is overcrowding their page with CTAs, as studies show a steady decline in conversion rates as the number of links per page increases. Prompts for inputting contact information, downloading content, and navigating to related pages should be minimized in favor of highlighting a single CTA that directs the target audience to move further along the path to converting.
Simplify Design
Following the same trend as CTAs, less is more here. Design elements should be kept simple and clean in order to draw the eye towards content. While you should always abide by your brand standards, using complicated illustrations and bright colors tends to distract from the information at hand, which can actually hurt you when it comes time to drive conversion. FIs generally have an easier time with this tip, as their brands tend to be more serious and straightforward design-wise, but it’s still helpful to keep in mind.
Optimize the Page for All Users
One of the key difference makers for all web pages is the extent to which it is optimized for both standard and mobile users. Delays in loading time, especially, can catastrophically impact your conversion rate. Image size, keyword density, and mobile user experience are all important factors to consider when creating your landing page.
As FIs continue to expand their reliance on mobile assets, ensuring the optimization of all mobile content should be a top priority. If the user’s app experience is great but falls off sharply when asked to link out to your site’s landing page, you are much less likely to earn a conversion.
Narrowly Define Target Audience
Your landing page will usually drive conversion for a very specific offer, product, or service. While casting the widest net possible may seem appealing at first, you must avoid this temptation if you want measurable, achievable results. Campaigns with broader appeal must, necessarily, lack some of the specificity needed to effectively convert a high percentage of your audience. This, in turn, creates the illusion of a less effective campaign by having a lower conversion percentage, and makes collecting data on the back end harder as well.
A narrower audience will allow FIs to target those who have a genuine need or interest in what’s being offered. Higher conversion rates will follow, feedback will be easier to gather, and your organization will save much needed capital.
Prisma’s expertise in creating personalized campaigns can help you target your audience more effectively. Find out what makes Prisma stand out.
Add Social Proof
One of the most powerful tools at your disposal when it comes to converting is testimonials. Nobody wants to commit to a product or service that has no social proof behind it. For this reason, it is essential to include testimonials or demonstrations of how the product or service will benefit your members.
For FIs especially, hesitancy is one of the main killers of conversion rates. People are understandably slow to commit to financial products, but if you embed a video with a short illustration about how the process works, along with reassurance from others who have utilized a similar offer in the past, you are much more likely to convert the current audience member.
How To Interpret Conversion Data
Conversion rates will differ between businesses based on a number of factors, including market fluctuations, the nature of the products and services on offer, and other variables. While FIs may have a slightly lower average conversion rate than other industries based on the complexity of their offers, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shoot for the stars.
A great conversion rate is around the 10% mark, but 6% is the benchmark for effective landing pages. This depends on audience size and demographics, though, so you must assess your own campaign for its effectiveness in this regard. For example, a 5% conversion rate is not a good sign for an FI that only targeted 20 of its members, but represents a significant amount of conversions for an audience of 2,000.
As long as you are constantly surveying your page for chances to improve, and following up on feedback from both conversions and those who did not complete the process, you should be well on your way to creating much more effective content.
Prisma Can Help
Prisma is uniquely suited to help financial institutions like yours leverage technology and create marketing solutions that fit your audience and your budget. Schedule a demo with us today, and see how transformative our campaigns can be.
Image credit: Adobe Stock