Inbound marketing offers endless possibilities for businesses to reach potential customers and generate more leads. Therefore, if you’ve been running your inbound campaign for a while now and are still not seeing the conversions that you had expected, you might be sabotaging your lead generation without even knowing it. Below we have outlined five common landing page mistakes that may be working against your inbound strategies and costing you some serious conversions.

1. Poorly Designed

Simply put, your website is the center of your online marketing campaign; all of your SEO tactics, blog posts, and content are geared to bring people to your website where they will fall in love with your company, give you their contact information, and provide you with plenty of sales. Sadly, many businesses don’t have a good concept of just how important their website is and, because of their poorly designed landing pages, actually end up running customers away! If you want to have high conversions and generate lots of revenue, you must have effective landing pages on your website. Internet users have tons of options available to them on the web and they will leave your site if it doesn’t provide them with value. Key points to consider on your landing page are:

• Since no one wants to sit and wait around for a website to load, it is vital that your landing page loads quickly, so make sure all graphics are optimized properly.
• Consider what search engine results will bring people to your page and then make sure that the content is relevant; if people don’t receive what you’ve promised them, then they won’t convert.
• Make sure that your landing pages are easy to navigate; when you provide viewers with an overdose of information or options, they may become overwhelmed and simply leave your page.

2. Lack of Testing

No one really enjoys tests but, if you want to have the best online marketing results, it’s important to constantly be trying new things and working to discover what the public really wants. No matter how much time and thought you put into a landing page, there is always room for improvement. The best way to analyze your website is to conduct A/B testing. In A/B testing you present the public with two noticeably different pages that run at the same time. When you check the statistics on each site, you can see which page generates the most conversions and is the most effective for your campaign. Once you discover which page is the most successful, you can delete the one that performed the worst. Continue to test with alternative pages until you achieve the success you want from your landing page. In addition to A/B testing, it is always important to keep an eye on website analytics so you will have an idea of how viewers are finding your site, how much time they spend on it, if they are interacting with your page and which pages are viewed most often.

3. Not Reaching the Mobile Community

More people than ever are using mobile devices to search the internet and do online shopping, and the number continues to rise. If you want to provide a positive marketing experience, you must be mobile friendly. If you have a website, then it is a guarantee that people will search for you from their mobile devices; make sure that you’re ready to handle them because, if not, you’ll lose sales. If people have a hard time navigating your pages on a mobile device, they will leave and, in some cases, may even avoid your website in the future. You can choose to carefully optimize your website specifically for these devices using responsive web design.

4. Forms that Aren’t Optimized

When hitting website viewers with forms, you walk a tight-rope. On one hand, forms are an important part of the marketing campaign as they gather needed information so you can continue to follow potential customers and support them in the buyer’s journey; on the other hand, if your forms are too complex or ask too many questions, they may turn viewers away from your site. While some people enjoy filling out forms, the vast majority do not; if they wanted to answer a thousand questions, they would go to a survey website. It’s important that you customize your forms to ask just the information that you need to contact them in the future. Even if you’re offering your viewers a free piece of content, don’t feel like you have a right to bombard them with questions; even if your content is fantastic, after battling an extensive form, viewers may be too exhausted to enjoy what you’re offering or, worse yet, give up entirely.

5. Thoughtless Calls to Action

Calls to action are a great way to influence viewers to perform the actions that you want such as signing up for newsletters, filling out forms, reading other pages, and making purchases. But all calls to action are not the same; instead, you need to carefully optimize your calls to action so viewers will understand what they are expected to do and what will happen when they do what you are asking. Out of context or confusing calls to action can actually lower conversions and push potential customers away.

When running an inbound campaign, having an effective landing page is a must. By avoiding these five common mistakes, you can attract more potential customers to your website, gather their contact information, and generate more sales than ever. Don’t let your website sabotage your marketing campaign; instead, make the changes you need and start seeing results!