Optimizing Your B2B Landing Page Flow

You already know landing pages matter. The key to a successful landing page is giving page visitors what they want while also having them take desired actions that move them through your funnel. And while the design of your landing pages, their forms, and visuals are critical, how you set up these landing pages in the context of the rest of your marketing is just as important.

What happens before and after a user visits your landing page? How do these fit with the other elements in your funnel and your brand? These are important questions regarding improving B2B landing page effectiveness, but they’re often not as closely considered as traditional issues like fonts, colors, and form fields.

Below are some of our best tips and considerations for optimizing your funnel’s landing page flow.

Ensure the Landing Page is Applicable to All Lead Sources

One of the things we know for sure is that people use the internet on different kinds of devices. Not only are they using different kinds of hardware, page visitors all come from unique sources. It doesn’t matter whether someone comes from a social media ad, an email newsletter, or any other potential source: their experience with your landing page should be consistent. 

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be creating unique landing pages for each campaign you and your team come up with, or that you don’t need to worry about the different sources for leads to the same landing page. It just means that all the different versions you create need to offer consistency no matter how someone accesses the site. This is especially true when it comes to funnels related to consuming information or learning – by some measures, over 70% of web traffic comes from mobile devices. It’s important for those users to have the same thorough access to your landing page as someone on a desktop.

Don’t Neglect Your Post-conversion Thank You Page

It can seem like a relatively subtle detail, but the page that site visitors see after converting can make a big difference in both how they perceive your brand and what they do after taking the desired landing page action.

There are several different strategies to consider when it comes to a thank you page. We see plenty of marketers making the mistake of sticking with the default text. Failing to address these valuable areas where many visitors look for additional information about your business and its other components is a wasted opportunity.

The page that site visitors see after converting can make a big difference in both how they perceive your brand and what they do after taking the desired landing page action. Share on X

A few common strategies used for thank you pages:

  • Play a short video thanking the user and talking about other areas of the company – ideally ones related to the landing page’s funnel.
  • Link to another relevant area on your site. This link could be something like a mission or vision statement, a case study section, or anything else that might entice your visitors.
  • Add a link to a blog post or other popular new content that you’ve recently published. You could also share news in this section, but keep it relevant, so you don’t appear to brag. 

Remember to iterate on and test each design option you consider for your thank you page to see which one works best. Finally, don’t overload your page with so much content that people get bogged down or overwhelmed. 

If your landing page’s funnel is information-heavy and you feel it’s important to include a lot more details on your thank you page, save it for the part of your landing page flow we bring up in the next section. 

Create (or Improve) Your Follow-up Sequence

When we talk about a follow-up sequence, it doesn’t mean a confirmation email you send to a user who converts. It’s a longer set of multiple emails that is meant to do more than just reiterate that they’ll get what they were told they’d receive on the original landing page.

A follow-up sequence should provide extra context that helps nurture a prospect closer to becoming a client by giving them the kind of information that also assists them in achieving their goals.

For example: let’s say you’re a healthcare software company with a landing page funnel to book demonstration appointments. After someone books an appointment on your landing page, you could send them a technical description of the specific tool (or element of the tool) that they’ll be seeing at the upcoming demonstration.

This is also a good place to incorporate social proof in your funnel. Include quotes, reviews, or case studies with data and numbers that show evidence of business improvement and tangible results achieved by your past clients. 

Finally, after enough time has passed – and the user has completed any demonstration, appointment or other time-based objective – you can include an email in the sequence that asks for feedback. Speaking of which…

Solicit Feedback (and Use It!)

You don’t have to ask every user who converts their thoughts on the entire process, but it is important to actively ask for feedback from visitors to your landing page funnel. It could mean including a button that links to a quick web survey, or you might simply decide to follow up with a personal email or call. But one of the best ways to improve the flow around any landing page is to see what real people think about it. If you start hearing something repeated often in your feedback, it may be a sign to implement it into working versions of the landing page or funnel.

Again, it’s essential to keep your requests concise – your prospects likely have a lot of other things going on. Focus on one or two key areas of the page that you might be uncertain about or have been underperforming relative to other parts of the funnel. Remember to be gracious and thankful for any feedback a prospect is voluntarily willing to provide.

Final Thoughts on Optimizing Landing Page Flow

Landing pages are a common and vital part of any funnel. But if the parts of your funnel around your landing page aren’t working well, it will likely hold back your performance and constrain the number of leads you bring in from the funnel.

While you should always strive to improve your landing pages and the things included, it’s equally important to ensure page visitors have a good experience before, during, and after they are on the landing page. That means spending some time considering elements outside of the page itself – the emails you send to users who convert, the information you present on the confirmation page, and the way you incorporate their feedback in both individual sales relationships and improvements made to the broader business.

Looking to get expert insights into your landing pages and the elements around them? The team at FunnelEnvy can help you, whether you’re looking to plug a leaking funnel, pick up the performance of a landing page, or simply ensure that your marketing continues to perform at a sufficient level. Click here to take a short quiz that will help us learn more about how we can get you closer to your business goals.

By |2022-10-06T05:04:35-07:00October 17th, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments

Top B2B Marketing Landing Page Trends

A landing page is the critical element of a funnel upon which its broader results hinge. You could have slick visuals and top-notch marketing automation software – if an error or obstacle on your landing page prevents visitors from converting, it will constrain your results and limit the effectiveness of your digital marketing.

Even if your landing page has been working well and capturing a healthy number of people, it can always be optimized so that you can convert even more visitors. The bigger question is, how do you take steps to optimize your landing page?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Everyone’s offering and their funnel will be slightly different. However, even in the dynamic world of B2B, where there is a strong focus on customization, our team has seen certain trends emerge across several industries.

Just remember, trends in landing page design operate the same way as trends in any other industry – fashion, art, music, etc. That means you don’t need to take this blog post as a comprehensive guide to all the elements you must include on a landing page. Think of it the way you might think about trends in clothing: you wouldn’t rush out and replace your entire wardrobe with only the items trending at this year’s top fashion shows.

Instead, you would look at what kind of clothes are trending, think about your signature style, and decide how you might incorporate a few popular pieces into what you already wear. The same goes for your landing page – instead of completely overhauling a page to keep up with the latest trends, decide which of them make sense and edit your pages accordingly.

Live Messaging and Chatbots

If you’ve been on any recently-updated landing page in the last year or two, you probably noticed a recurring pattern: a chat window pops up, often on the bottom-right side of your screen, prompting you to ask a question about a product or service, or perhaps giving you details of the company’s latest sale or launch.

The rise of support via messenger and chatbot platforms on company websites has been meteoric. According to Fortune, the global chatbot industry expects to grow at a rapid clip of 22.5% between 2020 and 2027. That significant growth rate didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of customers in many industries preferring to get their questions answered immediately via chat instead of sitting on hold or waiting around for an email inquiry to get answered. Over 40% of customers prefer getting answers from chat immediately, compared to 32% who prefer the phone and 23% who prefer email.

You don’t need to build a sophisticated AI-based chat platform from scratch. Plenty of simple chat platforms allow you to use either a real person or a basic bot to message people who have questions about your offering. Check out tools like HubSpot, Drift, Intercom, and Twilio as a starting point in your search for live messenger and chatbot solutions.

Inclusive Design

According to Adobe, inclusive design is a style that “considers the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age, and other forms of human difference.” In other words, it’s a design that allows the broadest range of people to view and use your landing page content, even if they use adaptive technology or have some type of disability.

A great place to start regarding inclusive design is the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG), created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Government bodies, universities, and other organizations leading the way in accessible digital content use these guidelines.

A few simple elements that you can incorporate right away to improve accessibility:

  • Add captions to all video content, whether live or pre-recorded
  • Allow users to pause and play audio and video content
  • Allow users to resize text by at least 200% without assistive technology 
  • Don’t include any images or visual elements that flash more than three times

Progress Indicators and Icons

Another common element on today’s landing pages is some type of indicator to let users know how they are progressing on a form. Percentage bars or icons representing the number of form pages completed and remaining are a great addition to almost any landing page. By some metrics, you can increase your website’s conversion rate by 30% just by adding a progress bar to your landing page. 

Ideally, you want to keep your landing page to no more than four separate pages or sub-forms. If you need to collect more information than this, think about adjusting your funnel or trying to gather extra data after the conversion event has taken place. For example, if your landing page is to book appointments, there may be some kinds of information that you can collect on your first sales call instead of on the page form. Keeping your form as short as possible and letting people know how many more sub-forms they have to complete is a great way to improve landing page conversion.

Minimalist Design

Check out this landing page from Squarespace:

Landing page trends

Notice the simplicity: it has the company’s logo, the main form, and an option that allows visitors who aren’t ready to buy to return to the home page. This type of minimalist design is everywhere on modern landing pages, from those related to the most complex B2B software to those offering the most basic B2C commodity.

If you’re going for the minimalist approach, strike a good balance between design and functionality. Don’t sacrifice important information that prospects need to know simply to include as much space as possible. However, it can be helpful to re-evaluate your landing pages with a close eye to determine if there are elements that you may be able to remove.

A final tip for the minimalist or “blank space” approach: use colors that make the main elements of your page stand out. A white background typically means using brighter colors on elements like links, buttons, and headers. Be sure to pick a color scheme that works well together and doesn’t clash or cause any readability issues for visitors.

Final Thoughts On Landing Page Trends

Remember: you don’t need to adopt any of these trends on your existing landing pages, particularly if your funnel already works well at converting visitors. However, when looking to improve your landing page’s conversion rate, it can be helpful to look at current trends in landing page design as a starting point to determine what positive changes you could make.

Our expert team at FunnelEnvy can help by evaluating your landing page and identifying a few key areas you can improve. With only minor tweaks to your page, it’s possible to increase your conversion rate by a significant percentage that expands your marketing funnel and provides real gains to your organization’s bottom line.
Click here to complete a short quiz and find out more about how FunnelEnvy may be able to assist with optimizing your funnel’s landing page to incorporate some of the latest trends and designs for better results.

By |2022-09-21T04:41:22-07:00October 3rd, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments

The 3 Most Common Landing Page Design Mistakes

We all come across landing pages in day-to-day web browsing. From consumer purchases to complex business decisions that affect large organizations, landing pages are often the foundation for commerce on the internet. A landing page might have many different parts or components from a technical perspective, but a good page has a singular goal: getting a page visitor to take an action, whether that’s to sign up for a newsletter, set an appointment, or purchase a product.

When it comes to complex components like landing pages, successful execution can seem overwhelming. With so many different options and factors to think about, how can you give yourself and your team a process that results in the consistent creation of productive landing pages?

At FunnelEnvy, we sometimes find it easier to advise clients and prospects on what not to do when building out their landing pages. When you know what you should be staying away from, it’s easier to direct the project into success. 

Below are three landing page design mistakes we see most frequently, why they matter, and how you can correct them, so they don’t cause leaks in your funnel that cut into your company’s growth.

Overloading the Page with Copy

When working on creating a landing page, it can be tempting to include every single benefit of your company’s offering, information about past users, quantitative statistics about how your product or service has helped, and so on. Resist the initial urge to be exhaustive on a landing page. In today’s era of browsing on mobile devices and shorter attention spans, it’s almost always better to convey information with the fewest words.

Some marketers – particularly those in complex B2B fields that involve a lot of technical jargon – may push back on this idea, believing that they have to include as much detail as possible to speak to an educated buyer. Depending on which stage of your funnel the landing page is placed, this approach could still work – so long as the content you include is well-formatted and scannable. Make sure to use headers no matter how long or short your page is, and if you include a significant amount of text, it might be wise to include a basic navigation menu that allows visitors to jump from section to section.

Finally, remember that text shouldn’t be the exclusive medium you use to communicate on your landing page. Putting aside the difficulty of reading long-form text on the small screen of a phone or tablet, many people just prefer getting information from videos no matter what device they use. In a survey by HubSpot, over 50% of consumers of all ages reported wanting more video content from businesses they support. 

Giving Users Too Many Choices

Along the same lines as including too much content, giving users too many choices is another fatal landing page error. Again, the tendency here for inexperienced marketers is to try to squeeze as many conversion events as possible out of each prospect or page visitor. And while there’s nothing wrong with striving for efficiency, giving people multiple paths to take often means they decide to walk none of them.

Yet too often, marketers can’t resist adding that small email signup box on the sidebar, or linking page visitors to a similar offer they might like since they were interested in the original one. It may seem harmless to you since you’re focused intently on crafting the best possible landing page. But to your prospect, your landing page is just one (probably small) element in a day likely full of complicated tasks and responsibilities. Several visitors will leave if it’s too difficult to figure out the right path on your landing page. By some statistics, landing pages with multiple offers get 266% fewer leads than pages with a single offer.

while there’s nothing wrong with striving for efficiency, giving people multiple paths to take often means they decide to walk none of them. Share on X

Keep things simple for your page visitors by limiting your landing page to one offer. If you feel strongly about including a plug for your newsletter or another offer relevant to your current funnel, save it for the confirmation or “thank you” page after the visitor has already converted on your main offer.

Poor Load Time (or Other Technical Issues)

One of the major advantages of keeping your landing page minimal regarding content and conversion offers is that it also keeps the page light from a technical perspective. You could have the best offer in your industry with compelling landing page copy and slick, captivating visuals that make visitors want to know more about your product or service. It won’t matter if the technical side of your landing page falls.

According to Google, an increase in page load time from one second to three seconds can increase the page’s bounce rate by almost one-third. In their rush to build a creative, aesthetically-pleasing landing page that will also convert, many marketers forget to consider the technical side of building a successful landing page.

A few common reasons your landing page might be slow loading include: 

  • Too many plugins. Many great marketing automation tools can enhance your web experience for visitors and provide you with a better understanding of their behavior through data. Unfortunately, having too many plugins can also cause your landing page to drag when people try to load it.
  • Images not optimized. Even if you size your images properly, they could be in the wrong format or not compressed the right way. There’s no need to work on manual image optimization. Plenty of helpful plugins and online tools can automatically take your images and compress them to load quickly on the web.
  • Caching problems. Page caching allows small files to be stored on a user’s computer the first time they access a site to increase load speed, but it also helps a page load more quickly on subsequent visits. This fast loading is important if you expect it might take a few visits for an average conversion, which is often the case with complex B2B offerings.

Broken or wasteful code and outdated plugins can also cause issues with how a site loads.

The Last Word on Landing Page Design

As marketers, we are all about efficiency. The goal of any campaign or initiative is to generate the most significant number of leads and sales with the smallest possible investment of time and money. But there are some aspects of marketing where streamlined simplicity should be the name of the game.

That’s the case when it comes to landing pages. By avoiding the common issues mentioned in this post – too much text, too many different offers, and slow page load time – you can bring your audience some simplicity. Doing so will guide them down a path to purchasing something that will ultimately help make their life easier, making them more productive or allowing their organization to remove critical roadblocks affecting progress towards important initiatives.

Looking for some expert help with your landing pages? Click here to fill out a short quiz to determine whether or not our team is a good fit for your needs.

By |2022-07-14T05:05:38-07:00July 25th, 2022|Landing Pages|0 Comments
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