Have you ever thought about the psychology of your landing page? How do your users respond to your landing page content? What elements of your web design trigger certain actions or behaviors?
It’s no secret that landing pages are the foundation of any successful digital marketing campaign. In order to boost desired conversions from landing pages, brands must understand and leverage the psychology behind user behavior to adapt their design and copy accordingly.
User behavior is all the activities a website or app visitor performs, such as where and what they click on, how they scroll through a page, and where they drop off the page to leave.
With this in mind, let’s strip user behavior back to its roots and explore the foundations of landing page psychology while we reveal five best practices to leverage data analytics to create landing pages that convert.
What Is Landing Page Psychology?
Human actions aren't arbitrary. A whole set of brain and body functions gear us towards the decisions we make, both online and in person.
How users behave directly relates to how their brain and body respond to the landing page content. Landing page psychology involves understanding why humans react differently to each page and why they do or don't convert.
Understanding what triggers user behavior is the key to designing a successful landing page. Here are some of the psychological phenomenons that drive user behavior, according to Instapage:
The Deictic Gaze. When we see someone else looking at something, our brain acts reflexively and also starts looking at that thing.
The Primacy Effect. When reading a list, our brains are hardwired to remember the first few things more than the latter. Additionally, our brain regards things at the top of the list as more important.
The Von Restorff Effect. Customers are more likely to remember things that stand out from the rest and are different in size, color, and other characteristics.
Informational Social Influence. Known also as social proof, people adopt the actions of others to conform to their choices to be liked or accepted.
Loss Aversion. People are scared to lose something and often value not losing something over actually gaining something.
The question is, can we leverage this data from our live landing pages?
The answer is yes. Using various analytic tools and monitors, it’s never been easier to map consumer engagement and identify user pain points.
Knowing more about your audience's behavior helps you create a landing page that converts. With this data in your arsenal, you can strategically place persuasive copy, eye-catching visuals, and intuitive call-to-actions (CTAs) to convince users to convert.
Here are five ways you can collect, analyse, and monitor user behavior psychology to enhance your landing pages for better conversion rates:
Identify user pain points
Pain points are areas of difficulty or frustration humans experience when using a product or service, significantly impacting their overall user experience.
For landing pages, pain points often relate to usability, including page load speeds and how easy it is to navigate.
There are several ways to uncover the root cause of user pain points, including:
Contextual inquiry. Watch users in their natural environment to understand what affects their experience.
Interviews. Ask participants questions about their experiences.
User journey map. Visualize the user's journey and highlight areas of difficulty and frustration to identify pain points.
Understanding users' pain points is essential for improving the user experience and building a conversion-oriented landing page that addresses these pain points and highlights the benefits of your offerings.
Segment your desired audience
Not every landing page visitor is the same or wants the same from your brand. Some users may be on your website for the first time, while others may have been fans of your offerings for a while.
To increase your desired conversion, you should segment your users based on their customer journeys and target them with different landing page campaigns.
For example, a new visitor may be willing to enter their email address for a 5% discount on their first order. However, the same landing page won't work for a repeat customer already on your mailing list.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as Zendesk can be a powerful way to segment customer data based on customer journey stages.
Zendesk Sell allows you to view essential customer information and see where your prospects and customers are in their buying journey.
Once you've segmented your audience, you can use a landing page builder like Hostinger’s to create custom landing pages that are relevant to the customers' journey and encourage them to convert.
Understand why users bounce
If you are experiencing increased bounce rates on your landing pages, this can be a significant indicator that something is wrong. There can be multiple reasons for increased bounce rates, including:
Your branding or messaging is inconsistent, so users don't recognise or trust your brand.
A bad user experience is caused by slow loading speeds.
Your headline or copy is boring.
You've included no engaging elements, such as an image or video.
You've included no form of social proof.
Your website design is counterintuitive.
Your visitors didn't find what they were looking for.
Once you've found the most probable explanation, you can use A/B testing to confirm it. A/B testing, also known as split testing, involves comparing two landing page versions to determine which one performs better.
For example, if your landing page's visual elements contribute to the increased bounce rate, you can try A/B testing by varying your images or videos.
Heatmaps
Navigation monitoring enables you to understand how users navigate your website and identify high and low interaction areas.
The most common way to track user navigation is with Heatmap tools, such as Crazy Egg and Hotjar. Heatmap tools allow you to visualize user interaction patterns on your website to give insights into where they focus their attention.
There are multiple heatmap types:
Click Heatmaps reveal the most clicked and high-traffic areas of your landing page. This will help you determine where to place CTAs and essential links.
Scroll Heatmaps display how far users scroll down your landing page, allowing you to identify the ideal page length and position to place your CTAs.
Move Heatmaps track mouse movements to reveal areas of interest and potential confusion, helping you identify pain points and make landing page improvements.
Understand traffic sources
Traffic sources are the foundation of any marketing funnel. Some require you to spend a chunk of your marketing budget, while others are free if you put in the time and effort.
Most brands have multiple traffic sources for their landing pages, including:
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
Email marketing campaigns
Social media advertising
Organic traffic from search engine optimization (SEO)
Understanding and focusing on traffic sources that provide a high volume of visitors interested in your offerings helps you improve the quality and quantity of your leads, increasing conversions.
Wrapping Up
No matter what your desired conversion is, collecting, analysing, and consistently monitoring user behavior must be a frequent task.
Now you know the various ways to monitor user behavior and better understand the psychology behind human actions, you can create landing pages that convert.
If you want to create the best experience for your consumers, it’s essential to center your design around thinking and feeling human. If you want to ensure that your landing page design skills are up to scratch, why not check out one of Ironhack’s Web Development Bootcamps?
Here, you’ll learn how to not only build a landing page that converts, but learn new ways to track user behavior long-term for continued design success.
