Reducing Bounce Rates With a Great Landing Page

When we talk about a ‘bounce’ or 'bounce rate’ in the context of websites we are referring to the percentage of people who come to your homepage or landing page and quicky leave.  This will always happen to some extent, but it can be minimized with a really great page that entices people to stay.  Here are some tips to creating a great landing page that will reduce your bounce rates:

1.  Put a 'call to action’ immediately visible  at the top of the page.   A call to action is something like a button or link that says “Learn More” or “Contact Us Today” or “Sign Up Now”.  It may link your customer to sign up for your email list, order a specific product, or take them to an educational video to help them understand better the value of your product or service.  
2. Make the content relevant to your customers.  This may seem obvious but sometimes the traffic that is coming to your page is for the wrong reason.  This means people immediately leave when they realize the page that has come up isn’t what they expected.  Using web analytics will help you to know how people are finding you and how to adjust online methods driving people to your site.  Click here to learn more about free analytics from google: http://www.google.com/analytics/
3. Use a lot of imagery.  Pictures are a great way to convey the value proposition of a product or service in a relatively small amount of real estate.  Show your products being used, pictures of satisfied customers, and even images of friendly looking people in the office who will be providing services.  
4. Make sure imagery is high quality and legal.  It is difficult to help people understand you are displaying a picture of a happy customer if their face is blurry or the picture looks out of context.  You may want to employ a professional photographer to get original and unique images which are also touched up to match the theme of your page.  It is worth investing dollars in your homepage/ landing page imagery since that is where people get the first impression of your company.    Do not just hunt around the internet and grab pictures!  Just because you can save an image to your desktop and upload it to your site doesn’t make it legal.  Most of these images have copyrights and using them without permission is illegal.  Using original images resolves this or you can also use a service like flickr.com or istockphoto.com to purchase legal copies of stock photography for commercial use.  
5. Avoid tons of tedious text.  A landing page is not the time to be verbose.  Well-placed text to concisely explain imagery or introduce a key section of the page is all that is needed.  When people come to your page they want to find what they expected quickly and if they have to wade through lots of text to get to it they will likely leave and look elsewhere.