Bounce rate.
It’s one of the metrics you must keep tabs on as you run your digital marketing campaigns.
And if you’re running a lead generation campaign, your landing page bounce rate is one of the most important metrics to track. That’s because if your bounce rate is high, you won’t capture as many email addresses as you should.
That’s why you must know how to decrease your landing page bounce rate.
What is Landing Page Bounce Rate (And Why is it Important)?
Just to be on the same page, a bounce can be defined as a visitor who arrives on one of your web pages and leaves without taking any action or clicking through to subsequent pages.
Therefore, a landing page bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of people who arrive on your landing page and leave without converting.
For the purpose of our topic today, a conversion is opting in for the offer on your landing page.
For example, if 20 people arrive on your landing page and only 5 submit their contact details, your landing page bounce rate would be 75%.
By implementing landing page best practices, you can decrease your bounce rate and capture more email addresses.
8 Strategies for Decreasing Your Landing Page Bounce Rate
Decreasing your landing page bounce rates is one of the first steps to landing page optimization. That’s because as your bounce rates drop, your conversions enjoy a lift.
So, let’s quickly look at eight strategies to help you decrease your landing page bounce rates so you can capture more email addresses.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
Decreasing your landing page bounce rates starts way before you design your landing page. It begins with you conducting audience research.
Understanding your audience will help you:
Communicate Your Value Proposition Clearly
Having an excellent value proposition won’t convert visitors. Expressing it clearly in a way that your audience understands will.
Understand User Behavior
Understanding user behavior is critical to optimizing your landing page and reducing bounce rates. There is always a reason behind every action your visitors take or don’t take. And knowing your audience well gives you insight into those reasons.
Craft Impactful Messaging
Audience research will also help you tailor your messaging in a way that resonates with your target audience. This implies using words that trigger specific emotions and language your audience resonates with.
So, before you overhaul your poorly converting landing page, conduct audience research first. With the right data collection tools, this is pretty easy.
2. Design for Conversions, Not Looks
Another critical element that can lead to high bounce rates on your landing page is its design. Every element has a bearing on how your landing page will perform.
Some landing page design best practices that can help you decrease your bounce rates include:
Make it Skimmable
Don’t crowd your landing page with text and images. Leave some white space to make it easy for readers to skim through it.
Use Images Wisely
Images shouldn’t just be a matter of aesthetics. They must be strategic. For example, use images as cues to direct users on how they should flow down your page. You can also use them to lead them to your CTA.
Put Your Lead Capture Form Above the Fold
Don’t make your visitors dig through lots of copy and images to find your form. Doing so will only increase the chances of visitors leaving your landing page without giving you their contact details. To avoid this, you must place your form above the fold.
Use the Right Tools
Not all landing page builders are the same. Make sure to use a landing page builder that’s been proven to create beautiful landing pages that convert.
A well-designed landing page not only makes it easy to communicate your offer but also ensures you give your visitors a positive user experience (UX). Both are factors that are crucial in decreasing your bounce rate. Consequently, it also results in you capturing more email addresses.
3. Match Landing Page to Referring Page
One of the main reasons people bounce off post-click landing pages is because they feel cheated. The reason for that is simple — the referring page and the landing page don’t match.
In most cases, this isn’t done deliberately. But you must be deliberate in ensuring that the referring page and your landing page match. In other words, your landing page must meet the expectation your user has. To do that, some essential elements that must match are the:
- Headline
- Logo and images
- Brand colors
- Featured image
- Calls-to-action
However, the most critical element to match is the messaging. Your landing page must be a continuation of the referring page but must reinforce the most important points. It must reiterate the points that sell your offer to sign up.
4. Improve Page Load Speed
Another common factor that leads to high bounce rates is slow loading landing pages. That’s why you must ensure yours loads fast. According to Google, the average time it takes to load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds. However, when a landing page takes longer than three seconds to load, 53% of the visits end in a bounce.
To improve your landing page’s load speed, here are a few things you can do:
- Run speed audits to know how fast your landing pages load
- Optimize images and videos (host videos on a good video hosting platform)
- Implement a CDN
- Reduce dependence on JAVA and CSS
A landing page that loads fast offers users a great UX. More importantly, it keeps them engaged and maintains their momentum of signing up to your email list.
5. Use Trust Builders
Remember, people today are more selective about who they give their email addresses to. They need to know they can trust you to keep their sensitive information safe. They also want to know if you can deliver on your claims.
That’s why you must incorporate trust-building elements in your landing pages. Also called social proof, these are elements that help you show your visitors that they can trust you. Examples of trust builders include:
- Customer testimonials
- User reviews
- Case studies (preferably in short video format)
- Informational webinars
- Counters (leveraging herd mentality)
- Customer logos
- Awards
Use anything that boosts your authority and bolsters your authenticity. Social proof is an excellent way of convincing people to follow through with the transaction on your landing page.
Video is also a huge trust builder as people love watching interactive content where they can see someone on screen. To generate leads that actually convert to sales, make use of webinars courses if needed.
For example, if you’re sending traffic to a B2B landing page for an offer, you might be sending people to a webinar or course before they make a direct purchase. First, choose a platform to generate new webinar registrations and promote your final offer. This works for high-end offers like enterprise software, consulting, and selling online courses (list of tools here).
It’s a great way of reducing your bounces and increasing your email sign-ups.
6. Don’t Ask for Too Much Information
When the comes time to ask for your visitors’ contact details, only ask for the information you need.
Don’t ask for too much information.
In most cases, the only information you’ll need is the name and email address. Asking for too much information will result in higher bounce rates. The reason for that being your visitors will feel they have to put in a lot of effort to complete your form.
Research backs this up as studies show that more than three form fields on a landing page result in decreased conversions.
To take this a step further, consider further personalization while asking for minimal user information with lead generation quizzes.
Take the quiz below for example, where all that is required is the first name to get started before asking a series of questions. Once complete, users can get their personalized recommendations emailed to them.
By applying an element of personalization, users will be much more likely to provide their email address as they anticipate the quiz results.
Bottom line — to decrease landing page bounce rates, make your form easy to fill. Don’t ask for too much information. By simplifying the signup process, you’ll be able to capture more email addresses.
7. Ensure Your CTA is Optimized
While it may be a small element on your landing page, your CTA plays a massive role in helping capture more email addresses.
That’s why you must ensure to optimize yours for conversions.
When your CTA is poorly designed, your visitors can actually miss it. And if they do see it, it won’t have an impactful effect. Of course, the result is that they’ll bounce off your landing page. Here are some best practices to follow as you design your CTA:
- Contrast the color of your CTA to the rest of your page.
- Center align your CTA and make it the most prominent element on the page.
- Avoid over-styling your CTA button.
- Use a scrolling CTA
Your CTA must be easy to identify. More importantly, it must make it clear what steps your visitors should take.
If your CTA can’t do that, you’ll lose your visitors and miss out on capturing their email addresses.
However, if your CTA is optimized, your bounce rate will decrease, and you’ll enjoy higher conversion rates.
If your team is at capacity, consider hiring a freelance marketer to help with this process.
8. Ensure Your Driving the Right Traffic
After putting in practice the above strategies, Is the percentage of people visiting your landing page and leaving without you capturing their email addresses still high?
Then you could be driving the wrong kind of traffic.
To ensure you drive high-quality traffic to your landing page, you need to understand where your traffic comes from. Know your different advertising channels, the demographics who use them, and their psychographic traits.
Doing so will help you create accurate buyer personas you can use to target the most relevant traffic for your landing page.
As you do this, your traffic will improve (quantitatively and qualitatively), and your bounce rates will decrease. Consequently, you’ll be able to capture more email addresses.
Reduced Bounce Rates and Increased Email Signups Equals Great Business
61% of marketers say lead generation is one of the hardest aspects of their duties. Knowing how to reduce the bounces on your landing page is one way of making the process easier.
After all, if you can keep people longer on your landing page, you increase the chances of them giving you their email addresses.
So, go ahead and use these eight strategies to decrease your landing page bounce rates and capture more email addresses. As that happens, your business will enjoy significant growth.
