8 Landing Page Elements You Should Be Testing

Best practice makes every aspect of marketing easier, especially conversion rate optimization (CRO).

But here’s the truth:

It’s only a starting point. Nothing more.

Want to really fire-up your conversions? You need to test your landing pages.

Simply building landing pages is not enough.

But, what exactly should you test?

In this quick post, I’ll share a bunch of key landing page elements you should be testing for maximum conversions:

1. Your headline

Your headline is the first thing people will see when they land on your page. Getting this right is key. And when you do, you’ll see far better conversions.

Headlines are easier to write when you have a clear value proposition, and have audience personas already mapped out.

2. Your tagline

Testing taglines (or subheadings) is a missed opportunity for many. It can add a lot of extra weight when combined with a hard-hitting headline.

When done right, your headline and tagline make a potent combination.

Use your tagline to continue where your headline leaves off, or inject some much-needed social proof.

3. Your call to action (CTA)

Your headline and tagline may be important, but it’s your call to action that encourages your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

And, there are plenty of ways to make your CTA more compelling – it’s can be so much more than just a buy now button.

Here are a few ideas:

• Remove sign up barriers by conveying free trial offers.
• Inject social proof by mentioning how many customers you have.
• Change the structure of your call to action entirely.
• Make your button text more specific, e.g. “Start My Free Trial Now.”
• Expand your CTA to include it’s own sub-heading that focuses on the problem your audience is facing, e.g. “Your sales funnel is broken. Let’s fix it.”

4. Page copy

I’m a firm believer that a successful landing page is the sum of its parts. And as such, everything on a landing page matters.

Ok, sure, some parts matter more than others (e.g. headlines and CTA’s), but don’t neglect the rest of the copy on your page.

Make it exciting, make it compelling, and make it accurate. And, of course, free of glaring errors.

But, don’t forget how that page copy appears, i.e, your typography.

Readability is super important. Consider your choice of font, font size, line spacing, paragraph spacing, heading sizes, and use of white space.

5. Social proof

According to Wikipedia;

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation.

In a nutshell, this means that when we need to include glowing customer testimonials, and credibility logos on our landing pages.

Let’s explore these types of social proof, and a few others below:

Testimonials

Testimonials can carry a lot of weight, but you need to back them up with credibility. Especially seeing as though they can just be, well, made up!

A great way to do this is to embed tweets. They’re publicly available and visitors can see they’re from real people.

If you can get a testimonial off an industry influencer, that’s great. Especially if your target audience will recognise them.

Note: If you’re struggling to source testimonials and use WordPress, you can automate the process by setting a page to collect testimonials using Thrive Ovation, and including a brief CTA linking to that page within emails in your automation sequence.

Credibility logos

These will typically come in several forms. You can leverage the logos of websites you’ve been featured on, client logos, or logos of companies you’ve worked with.

That said, consider your audience personas here. Focus on credibility logos that are both impressive, and relevant to your audience.

Impressive data

If you’ve got a decent number of subscribers, traffic, or customers – leverage it any way you can.

You can incorporate these numbers into subheadings, CTA’s, and more.

Beware negative social proof

Yes, it’s a thing. Just like positive recognition can have a positive impact on the impressions people form of your brand, the opposite can happen.

This is why I mentioned “impressive” data a moment ago.

If the data isn’t that impressive, the first impression people will form about your brand will be that it isn’t important.

For example, if you only have 100 email subscribers – don’t mention it on your landing page.

6. Page structure

How your landing page is laid out is important. It’s got to flow, and so has the copy within it.

So, when planning out which tests to run, consider completely changing your page layout.

For example, if you have a long-form landing page, you may get some interesting results from testing against a short-form page.

As is par for the course with optimizing for conversions, leave any assumptions of what will convert best at the door. The data shall reveal all.

7. Images vs video

Video may be great at keeping people on the page, but production value plays a role here.

If the production value isn’t good enough, it could create a negative first impression of your brand. On the other hand, high production value will have the opposite (and more desirable) affect.

Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to get a well-crafted explainer video created thanks to platforms like Fiverr.

You may find that in some cases, video just isn’t needed to get the conversion rates you crave. In which case, images may be your best option. Image creation platforms like Visme make it easy to create all sorts of visual content.

Either way – testing will reveal what converts best.

8. Form fields

Best practice says more form fields are bad. And we should keep them to a minimum.

Now, the reality is that this isn’t always the case. Sometimes reducing the number of form fields can cause a drop in conversions.

This is why it’s so important to test and not make assumptions without data.

But, don’t forget – there are more ways to test form fields than just changing the number of fields.

You could also test breaking the questions onto multiple pages as part of a stepped process.

And consider the threat level of each question. There will be some information that people will be less likely to give up – you may find conversions increase when these questions are moved towards the end.

Wrapping it up

Are there more landing page elements you can test? Definitely – this isn’t an exhaustive list.

These elements should be more than enough to get you started and once you get them right, you’ll seriously level up your lead generation efforts.

Now, it’s time to build your landing page. Then, come up with a hypothesis as to what could improve conversions and run some A/B tests. Once you start running split tests, you’ll have a better understanding of how your audience behaves.