Easy Ways to Reduce Your Landing Page’s Bounce Rate

As an online marketer, chances are you feel like you are “drinking from a firehose”; probably, you are feeling a little overwhelmed by new technology and all of the different terms you hear thrown about so often.

One of the terms you may be wondering about is “bounce rate”. So let's talk about it today. Let's talk about why you would want to reduce yours and how you can reduce it.

We will also discuss bounce rates on landing pages, something that can be a critical problem for online marketers like you.

So what is a bounce rate? According to Google Analytics, bounce rate “ Is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).

As an online marketer, you want a strong website presence; you want to drive traffic to your site from a number of different sources such as email, social media, smartphones and SEO. A lot of marketers get this; they understand they need traffic.

Our online marketing culture is obsessed with website traffic!

But while (because?) we are putting so much emphasis on traffic, we sometimes neglect the importance of keeping that traffic on our site once it arrives,

directing that traffic from entry pages to other pages within the site, converting that traffic into leads or new customers and getting that traffic to return to our sites again and again.

But while (because?) we are putting so much emphasis on traffic, we sometimes neglect the importance of keeping that traffic on our site once it arrives, directing that traffic from entry pages to other pages within the site, converting that traffic into leads or new customers and getting that traffic to return to our sites again and again.

Think In Terms Of “People”, Not “Traffic”!

Although you need traffic, could it be that the term “traffic” is a big problem? When we think of “traffic”, we often forget that each person who makes up that traffic stream is a person. And each individual person who visits your site or landing page has wants, needs, emotions, dreams and goals.

They are busy. They are perhaps even overwhelmed and probably (very) distracted. Your Landing Page needs to grab their attention in a bold, unforgettable way. It needs to make them want to stay awhile. You need to set it up in such a way that visitors, that is individual people, not “traffic”, want to visit other pages in your site and want to find out more about how you can help them.

Do you want to enjoy lower bounce rates and more conversions? A great first step might be to remember that you are dealing with people, not nameless, faceless, anonymous traffic!

Understand this: you can pour your time, effort and money into a traffic generation black hole. You can have a flood of traffic and not a single dollar in e-commerce sales or not a single lead for your sales reps to call. What does all the traffic in the world do to help your business if it never converts?

In Marketing, As In Life, First Impressions Matter

And to get a substantial portion of it to convert, you need for these new visitors to spend some time on your website or landing page. How do you do this?

You need to capture and keep their attention from the moment they arrive on your page. You only have a few seconds to capture it initially. Here are some of the pieces of your  landing page that can either help you keep visitors or can drive them away:

1. Your headline

In content marketing and copywriting, headlines, titles, email subject lines, etc. are all crucial to your success. They can draw visitors in or repel them in a split second. A bad content headline can murder your bounce rate!

If your headline is dull, boring and focused on you, your company and your product, chances are it will drive your visitors away. In order to have the opposite effect, focus your headline on your reader.

Grab his attention. Arouse his curiosity. Promise him one or more strong benefits. He loves to hear about himself, so use the word “You”. Conversely, he doesn't care about you, your product or company, so avoid the words “I” or “we”.

A bad headline can hurt your bounce rate by driving visitors away immediately. Bad content can drive visitors away but is a little more subtle. Like your headline, your content and copy need to be centered on your reader, not you, not your company and not your products.

In a very conversational tone, it needs to empathize with your reader about his painful dilemma – the one your product solves. It needs to give him hope for a solution. It needs to clearly show your product as the solution he's looking for.

2.Design and graphics (including images)

This can affect your bounce rate. When you are building your website, or having it done by professionals for you, put yourself in your visitors' shoes, so to speak. Think hard about the user experience your site or landing page gives your visitors.

Remember that your goal is to convert visitors into buyers. That's so important I'm going to repeat it: Your goal is to convert visitors into buyers!

You goal isn't to impress them with flashy, cute graphics. So avoid the “design trap”. Don't get so caught up in cutting edge design that you lose sight of your goal of converting.

If your visitors, who are on your site because they are looking for a solution to a nagging, painful problem, get held up for even a few seconds while your super-duper graphics intro program plays, chances are they will jump ship causing your bounce rate for that critical entry page to go sky high.

Here's a related user experience problem that can cause kill your bounce rate – web page load time. We've all been there: you are visiting a web page, and it seems to take forever to load. And when it finally does, it still performs poorly.

As you scroll down, it takes a ridiculously long time. It ties up your computer's processor and memory; it may even cause your web browser to crash. Not a scenario conducive to a healthy bounce rate or high conversion rate, don't you agree?

Bounce Rates And Your Landing Pages 

As an online marketer, whether your run an e-commerce store, or you are a B2B marketer whose conversions involve not direct sales, but rather signups for your webinars, white papers and so on, you need landing pages.

Landing pages can help you channel your page visitor's attention; properly set up, they can reduce  interference from the web – interference that can kill your conversion rates. The key here is “properly set up”; more on that in a moment.

Like your other web pages, landing pages can be negatively affected by a high bounce rate. As we've said before on this blog, the online marketing process is fragile. Your “almost” customer can quit at any moment.

Put yourself in his shoes: you're asking him to take his credit card out of his wallet and spend his money on your product. This can stressful for him. Subconsciously, he may be looking for an excuse to quit.

To keep him on track to buy, to keep him from leaving your landing page and adding another percentage point to your bounce rate, you have to give him plenty of reasons why it's to his advantage to stay.

The factors that can hurt your landing page bounce rates include the same ones that can hurt your other pages:

• Copy and content, including those crucial headlines
• Design and graphics, including images (by all means, do not use irrelevant, generic stock photos as space fillers on your landing pages or any place in your online marketing, if you can help it.)
• A poor user experience; both of the items above can affect this

There are so many steps you can take to increase your landing page conversion rates, steps that can contribute to more sales for you. This blog has many articles with valuable information to help you do that.

An “Unfair Advantage”

But as you're working to put together the very best landing page you can, remember that not all landing page platforms are “created equal”. Don't handicap your online marketing efforts by using inferior landing page technology. Don't put up with a landing page platform that's frustrating to set up and manage.

When you are setting up your next landing page, why not give yourself an “unfair advantage”? Why not go with Lander, the easiest to set up landing page platform in the Universe?

Lander is engineered to help you enjoy a lower bounce rate and more conversions.

It comes standard with bounce rate-lowering features like

• Spectacular, eye-catching images and graphics to arrest visitors' attention the second they first visit your page!
• Built-in video support – 52% of consumers say online video makes them more confident in their buying decisions!
• Eye-catching headline areas – content headlines are one of the first things visitors notice when they arrive on your landing pages. Wouldn't it be great to be able to put your compelling headline in a special place optimized to make it even stronger?

This brief list only scratches the surface of the wonderful features and benefits Lander offers you. And here's something else: as much as you will love the way Lander helps you enjoy a reduced bounce rate and higher conversion rates, you may like this “feature” the most: You can try any of our landing page templates free of charge and with no obligation!

Any questions about how Lander can help you launch your online marketing campaigns into the stratosphere? We've got answers, and we'd love to chat with you. Contact us today.

Happy Marketing!