7 High-Impact Landing Page Tests You Haven’t Tried Yet

Today I’m going to give some love specifically to landing pages. These are standalone pages that usually have specific goals of generating leads or selling a product. Smart online marketers make use of these in addition to their regular website to boost their conversion rates.

To increase the chances of the highest conversion rate from them, its essential you test elements on them to find the best performing variations. To help you do this, rather than repeat basic landing page tests, I thought I’d create a list of more unusual landing page tests that you probably haven’t tried yet. So let’s get started…

Test #1: Create a completely different style of page to test

Testing small changes like headlines and call-to-action buttons often works well, but to really push the conversion needle much higher you often need something more radical. And creating a completely different style of landing page to test against can often give your conversion rates a big boost.

The best way to do this is to create a few versions with much different layout than your current page (like moving major page elements around or changing column layout) and even change the style and color scheme. You could also change your call-to-actions and headlines to emphasis different key points. WriteWork.com gained great results from doing this type of radical test.

Test #2: Use a tabbed mini-site instead of a long sales page

One of the biggest mistakes that long landing pages make is trying to cram too much information on one page, often hoping that some of it will ‘stick’ with visitors. Unfortunately it is often hard for them to find key details buried within the non-essential information, resulting in much lower conversion rates.

A high-potential unique test idea is to actually turn your landing page into a mini-site with tabs instead. These tabs should contain key details for visitors to learn more about, without actually leaving the mini-site. In the very least it’s vital you have a ‘why us’ and a ‘testimonials’ tab to build value proposition and social proof. Here is a great screenshot of a landing page to learn from that is making great use of tabs:

Test #3: Show a prominent video testimonial

Want an even greater impact from the testimonials on your landing page? You probably haven’t tried turning one of them into a fantastic compelling video testimonial. Doing this helps make your testimonial seem even more believable, and its pretty cost-effective to film your testimonial giver. You can also add a great call-to-action button at the end of the video to learn more about what you are selling, or see more testimonials.

To take this social proof effect even further, you should try obtaining and using a testimonial from an expert in your field. For example, if you are selling online services, you should obtain a testimonial from someone who is known in that industry (think of someone like Avinash Kaushik or Neil Patel).

Test #4: Offer great free incentives to sign-up or purchase

A great way to get your visitors to sign up for your landing page offering is to tempt them with something of value for free to sweeten the deal. For example, you could try creating an ebook relating to what you are selling and give that away, or you could offer a free trial of what you are offering.

Don’t forget to mention how much your freebie is worth (people love getting something of value for free), and if possible try to mention the incentive in your main call-to-action button, as you can see in this example:

Test #5: Ask a compelling question in your main headline

The first few seconds on your landing page are critical. If your headline doesn’t engage and intrigue them to read the rest of your page, your chances of them converting drop considerably – with many visitors leaving, back to Google to find another site.

To help prevent this and engage your visitors better, one great angle to try with your headlines is to test asking a question that will help identify with and solve your visitors main problems – test a few question types until you find the best converting one. Here is a great example of a great headline question on a landing page:

Test #6: Make use of great tweets as testimonials

What makes a great testimonial? It has to be authentic, and short and sweet. A great simple unique way to achieve this is by showing tweets on your landing page that contain testimonials from your customers. These tweets make it much easier for visitors to read testimonials because they are short, and are more believable because they can see the person that gave the tweet.

To test this you can either directly embed the tweets on your page (allows visitors to interact with them and retweet them) or you can just take a screenshot of several of the testimonials together (see example below). To learn more about other ways to embed Twitter for improving your testimonials, read this great guide.

Test #7: Use multi-step sign-up form instead of long form

Another more unique landing page test you can try is to split your sign-up form up into multiple steps, and really simplify the first step. This is particularly beneficial if you are asking multiple questions in your signup form, or have multiple offerings to sign up for that meet different types of visitors needs. The other benefit of this is that because the form is much shorter, it takes up much less valuable real estate on your landing page.  Here is a great example of this in action on a landing page:

Conclusion

Don’t just try testing simple things on your landing page like images and buttons, think outside of the box to come up with more unique tests that are highly relevant to your audience. Hopefully these 7 unique test examples gave you some good inspiration.

What ways have you created unique landing page tests to boost your conversions?