Eleven landing-page mistakes
The humble landing page or mini-site is a powerful tool in on-line marketing. It is also the point where the true conversion happens, where a click becomes a sale, so to say. (Or a lead.) Yet surprisingly they are often regarded as outside of the rules; it often seems as if all common wisdom regarding what to do and what not to do goes out the window when people build one of these cute little puppies. Here you have a small site, nothing big project-wise at all, and it’s all about one single purpose, nothing could be easier. And of course you are a seasoned web… (fill in), you don’t make these silly, obvious, mistakes I’m listing below. Yet someone does, because I see them daily. Sometimes twice. So, read on and if you learn nothing new, pass it on to those who will.
1. Sloppy coding
Often marketing specific pages are a one-off affair, made quickly and meant to exist only a limited amount of time. They are made quickly and, all too often, sloppily. Given that the point of marketing is to introduce new customers to your brand, this means for many visitors the page will be their first impression of you and your company. Like my old boss used to say: if it is worth doing, it is worth doing it right. Adhere to the same standards as you would for your main site. Especially take care of those issues that are likely to cost you conversion. A few common oversights:
- The headers. You know, the invisible information which ‘does stuff’ for search engines, or when a user bookmarks your page. I see way too many empty page titles, for example. If a user shows interest by bookmarking your page, you should celebrate your success, not make it harder.
- No alternative for embedded content.
There is a reason shopkeepers allow customers to use PIN or a credit card for their purchases; if a customer leaves your shop without a sale made, even if it’s just to go get cash from a machine, that’s a sale lost. Don’t expect your hard-earned visitor to go fetch a Flash plugin just to let you sell them something. You are the salesman, you should make the effort.
- No cross-platform testing. I am a veteran of web maintenance, and I know how hectic things are just prior to launch. Still, you should test your product across platforms and browsers and do so prior to going live and after. Never assume that the dev server is really as good as your live environment. (Or vice-versa.)
2. Music and video
You want to introduce your proposition with some pizzazz. I get that. Please do so. I am a pragmatist; the rules get stricter incrementally with factors such as intended lifecycle and overall importance of a site. It’s OK, really, to add some swish-bang. But don’t drive your prospects away. Fireworks are pretty up in the sky, not between your customer and the product so they can’t get at it. Get my point? Do not have video and/or music start playing without user consent.
I usually have my own music playing when working from home, and I forbid my team to have music on at all. (Because in a web-production environment people need the speakers to hear what they are doing, not the latest ‘funny’ song.) Now, imagine you are listening to the latest New Model Army album (Yes, a plug. Sue me.) and suddenly some ‘festive’ midi-jingle-jangle tune starts annoying you. Or you are in my team and you are recharging your batteries by surreptitiously doing some private surfing (of which I have a ‘don’t let me see it and make your deadlines’ policy) and the computer starts broadcasting your not-working status to your co-workers. What do you do? You click the little cross up there, that’s what.
Do I need to go into the problem with people using screen readers? How many sales have you made while holding up a stereo and blasting your favourite tunes through your pitch?
3. Obscurity and identity
Landingpages are about standing out, grabbing the user by the gonads and making that sale. (Or other type of conversion.) You want to think outside of the box, do something new and action some more buzzwords here. You want to summon up a feeling, emotion, image. But what if you succeed at all that but no one ‘gets’ what you are selling or who you are? It’s a mistake as old as advertising and it’s still being made in every aspect of our fine business. This is no reason for you to get lazy and do the same. Make sure that whatever great imagery and ‘experience’ you throw at the prospect, you also communicate clearly what the point of your page is and what it is you are selling. Never forget that it is about your brand, not about what your brand should make people feel like.
Usually things go from bad to worse when there’s a promotion attached such as a contest or event. People get so wrapped up in telling the prospect they can win a trip to France they wind up promoting the Eiffel tower rather than their product. Really, people ‘get’ free stuff. What they don’t yet ‘get’ is your brand or product or you wouldn’t be putting in all this effort. Get the priorities straight. France can advertise itself. (Or hire you, of course.)
4. No price or other relevant information
Advertising is about branding, sure. But what if people get so excited about your product they want to buy straight away? Should you throw away this cash, which is practically in your pocket? Of course not. Make sure you always include pertinent information about your product such as its price, where to get it and so on. Better still; add a ‘try now, buy at a discount.’ link to your web shop, or a partner web shop. (The latter is a fine opportunity to have someone else foot a hefty bit of your advertising bill, too.) If this doesn’t conflict with other conversion points you should never ignore an opportunity to sell actual product. But at the very least, please, tell your prospects what your product is and what it costs.
5. No way to share (nicely)
Many promotional pages open in a new window, with no address bar at all. Worse still: many offer no way of sharing the promotion with friends. Or they expect a prospect to first convert him/her self and then offer one of those “mail a friend” options. This is a highly intrusive, and arrogant, way of expecting your prospects to do your work for you. I sure as a hot place am not going to bother my friends with some robot-generated blurb even if I do think they would like the product or site. Besides, what if I don’t think the promotion is for me but can think of people who would like it? Make sure people can easily share the address to the promotion with others.
6. Getting too clever with code
Recently I came across a page I wanted to share with others. It had a nice ‘share this’ button so I clicked it. Next I was treated to a popup telling me my browser didn’t understand what was going on. Clearly the developers had wanted to do things the ‘clever’ way instead of the simple. There is nothing wrong with the humble “mailto:” or a basic form. Assume that each level of complexity you introduce will introduce more errors. Look at your site ‘outside in’. Decide what the user experience should be and work towards your logic and code from there, not the other way around. If your developers want to play with their toys, let them do so in their own time. Be especially wary when someone says ‘we can now…’. This means you couldn’t before, and therefore anyone with an older browser or computer still can’t.
7. Expecting too much effort from the prospect
I have seen many, too many, promotions where people had to print out a page and bring it to a store or event. Now, this may be fine if you are offering a coupon, it’s not always wrong, but really; if someone is in your database is it too much effort to simply put them on an attendance list and let them into your event based on their name and (perhaps) e-mail address? Don’t expect people to write down long numbers, print a page and not forget to bring it with them and so on. They will (rightly) conclude that they are ‘in your computer’ and you should be able to look them up. Each added ‘speedbump’ on the highway between the prospect and your sale means loss. Cut as many of them out as you can. Be especially wary of situations where the prospect has to switch between online and offline. (Write things down, print something, make a phone call…)
8. All Flash
Flash is a great tool to let you develop quickly. I’m not against Flash at all. But when developers get lazy with it, things go wrong. Next time you are on an all-flash site, draw imaginary boxes around all the bits that actually animate, and the bits that are really just text. Now, how much effort would it be to slice the whole and let the text be plain text, so even people who can’t use Flash (because they are non-sighted, don’t have Flash, or are working on a corporate computer with stringent security restrictions such as is very common in banks and large corporations) at least get the message? And really, what is the effort in adding static images of the animated bits so the page looks good without Flash too? It can be done, and at a fraction of the total development overhead. Do it.
9. Preloaders
Don’t do it. If you need to pre-load your page, you’ve gone overboard. Preloaders are for games and interactive content people are prepared to wait for. People don’t halt their car to wait for a billboard to load, neither do they wait for your page to sell them something.
10. Password masking and inconvenient forms
Whenever I was involved with a promotion where people had to leave information on the page there were bad leads: misspelled addresses, fake E-mail addresses, and so on. It got worse when people had to think up a password. Password masking (dots or asterisks instead of what you are typing), form fields that are more form than function, too many ‘required’ fields, they all make it harder for the prospect to do what you want them to do. I have, in all seriousness, just recently encountered a form where the “remarks” field was required. There is only one thing worse than no leads, and that is bad leads. They cost time and money to weed out, and represent at best a lost sale. Keep things simple, make sure you get what you really need and get the rest in the follow-up.
11. Language
The web is an international affair, and open to all comers. The one most commonly made mistake, and therefore number eleven in this top-ten list is unnecessarily hard to read text. An amazing number of people has trouble reading above a basic level; because they are dyslexic, poorly educated or not native speakers. Keep your texts short and simple, you won’t offend those with a larger vocabulary (because they appreciate easy to read text too) and you will get more business from those who don’t know words like pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. (Yes, that’s a word.)
Also, think really hard about your choice of language. My blog is in English while most of my audience is Dutch. But the Dutch (or at least those who are also my audience) speak English, while most anglo-saxons do not speak Dutch. Translation services aren’t expensive; if at all possible, offer the information in several languages appropriate for your audience. Sure, sure, if they live in your country they should speak the language. But they don’t live in your country; they live in the Internet, and the Internet is international.
More…
Some of these links are old, but the information still holds true.
Jacob Nielsen on password masking: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/passwords.html
Jacob Nielsen on web design mistakes: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html
Common mistakes in web design: http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/common-mistakes-in-web-design/
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