Any inbound marketer worth his or her salt knows how indispensable landing pages are to a site’s lead
generation efforts. Most, if not all websites are after conversions and there’s no better way to get
people to convert than putting up a landing page.
Exceptional landing pages have a reputation of being conversion magnets. But many websites with a
landing page continue to fall short of their lead generation goals. When few to no people sign up for a
newsletter, an e-book, a webinar, or even a blog subscription that you’re offering, there must be
something wrong with the landing page itself.
Let’s take a look at some of the possible reasons your landing page is not generating enough leads.
Asking for too much info
A landing page is designed for one thing: capturing a visitor's information through a conversion form. So
when the lead capture form on your landing page asks for details beyond name, company, email
address, and phone number, then visitors would think you’re simply asking for too much information
and exit your website.
Keep the fields in your form short and sweet. Just ask for information that you really need and that’s it.
You offer isn’t really clear
A good and effective landing page always has a headline practically screaming the offer, an image of the
offer, and a call-to- action right above the lead capture form. If your landing page doesn’t have these
elements, then you just found the reason your lead generation efforts aren’t bearing any fruit.
Poor website traffic
Your landing page may have a short form. It may also load fast. You have a very clear and compelling
offer. And it can be easily accessed via smartphone or tablet. In short, you probably have one of the
best-crafted landing pages in the world. Yet none of that matters if no one is actually bothering to visit
your website.
To get people to sign up, you need more people to check out your site. Simply put, the more traffic to
your website, the more leads you will generate. To boost your traffic, you need to step up your SEO,
social media, and blogging efforts, among other things. And the number of those visitors should be high
because you know that only a fraction of that number will become leads and customers.
You didn’t require visitors to fill out a form to enjoy your offer
So you created this amazing content, and you quickly published it to your website. The problem is, you
didn’t put your offer behind a form, so you practically just gave away your content without getting
anything for it.
Without the information that a form is meant to capture, there is simply no way for you to follow up
with those who downloaded and enjoyed your content. You can’t even know how many people grabbed
your content, or if they actually know what to do after downloading. To do any of the above, you should
always require visitors to sign up before getting your offer.
Your landing page is boring
So you came up with this incredibly interesting and useful e-book, and you’re offering it to visitors if
they fill out the form on your landing page. Your landing page, however, isn’t even half as interesting as
your e-book. It doesn’t have any images, the forms are far too long and the great walls of text are simply
too boring to read. People are too busy with their lives to care to sign up for something that presents
itself as too uninteresting.
Again, keep the copy and form sweet and short. An eye-catching image of your offer also wouldn’t hurt.
There’s something wrong with the form
So many landing pages from different websites don’t work. They’re supposed to send visitors to a
confirmation page the moment they click on that submit button, but nothing seems to happen. And if
visitors don’t reach that confirmation page for whatever reason, you can also say goodbye to whatever
contact information they typed in, and they aren’t likely to be typing them in again.
The moral of the story is: test, test, and test your form after creating your landing page.
Your landing page takes forever to load
Any slow-loading page of your website is bad enough. It’s even worse if that page is your landing page. If
visitors don’t have the patience to wait for a slow-loading page which they only want to read, imagine
the kind of patience they’ll have for a slow-loading page where they have to fill out something and help
you get what you want.
To find out why your landing page’s load time is so slow, use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. But if
whatever tweaks you make don’t speed things up, it’s probably your hosting company. The server it uses
to host your pages may no longer be up to speed, so you may want to find better hosting services
elsewhere.
The site is not mobile responsive
In a world where mobile users already outnumber PC users, it would be counterproductive to have a
website—and a landing page—that isn’t mobile-responsive. Mobile visitors going to your non-
responsive site probably have to deal with tiny text and buttons on your landing page. Maybe the form
fields and dropdown menus just don’t work. If you were the user, would you bother to fill out the forms
if you can barely make anything out?
It looks and sounds untrustworthy
Poor-quality images. Poorly-written content loaded with typos and grammar issues. Confusing web
design. Inconsistent visuals. Testimonials that sound so fake. Far-out claims... All these make your
landing page—and your website and all that it’s offering—seem untrustworthy. It makes everything look
and sound like you’re just there to get something from visitors, who will instinctively move on to
another website faster than you can say “Submit.”
You need to do the exact opposite of the things mentioned above to get people to trust you enough to
help you generate that much-desired lead.
Too many clickables
Your landing page is designed for one thing, and one thing only: get your visitors to provide you their
contact details in exchange for an ebook or whatever it is you’re offering. But so many landing pages
that exist today contain far too many clickable objects. Some landing pages include internal links, while
others have links to YouTube videos or other websites that have featured the webmaster’s content or
work. If you expect a landing page to work the way it’s supposed to work, it should only have one
clickable object or one CTA, and that’s the “Submit” button, which gets you the information you need.
These are just some of the reasons your landing page isn’t generating the number of leads that you
want. The least you can do now is to try tweaking some aspects of your landing page as suggested
above. The landing page, after all, is at the core of an inbound marketer’s lead generation efforts, and
you need it to become as strong as it can get.