Email is only one part of your digital marketing campaign. Sure, email marketing has the best ROI of all digital marketing initiatives, but your emails will only be successful for your brand if you’re constantly looking one step ahead.
When your contacts open your message and click the CTA, your job isn’t over. Instead, you should also encourage customers to continue their journey on your landing pages.
This is an area where a lot of marketers admit they aren’t as successful as they would like to be. In fact, 40% of companies say they aren’t getting the desired ROI on their landing pages. Many times, users end up on the page, fail to make a decision, then leave. In analytic terms, this is known as a bounce. Unfortunately, the problem may be with your email list and email time, rather than with the pages themselves.
Sound familiar? Keep reading to discover how a properly established and optimized customer journey can reduce landing page bounces. Plus, we’ll give you four tips to fix your landing page bounce rate.
What is a customer journey?
First thing’s first: You need to understand how to create and use a customer journey.
When creating a customer journey, consider everything your customers do, from the moment they learn about your brand to the time they become a customer. Identify each stage your customer goes through and determine the best time to reach out to these contacts.
For instance, an IT company might send a business-focused, tech webinar to users who have been loyal for several weeks.
The customer journey you establish for your leads might be different than those used by your competitors. You might even have different journeys for different types of customers.
If you operate a rental property service, for instance, you would have different customer journeys for tenants and landlords.
How to use your customer journey
This strategy should be utilized with all your digital marketing initiatives, especially email.
Set up a campaign that establishes a workflow, so contacts are automatically moved from point to point in your journey. Not only do these automated journeys save you time and resources, but they’re proven to increase results.
Automated email messages tend to receive up to 70% higher open rates and more than 150% higher click-through rates than a standard one-off marketing message.
Remember these important factors when setting up your customer journey:
- Always have a plan: You need to have a reason to reach out to your customers. Consider the intended result of your customer journey before you start creating it. This way, you have a clear destination in mind and can get there in the most efficient way.
- Use list segmentation: As mentioned above, not all of your customers will be on the same journey. And you might have some customers that skip a few steps depending on their actions or demographic. List segmentation can help you separate your contacts into specific groups.
- Decide on your touch points: Depending on the segmentation and specific journey, you’ll need different and unique ways to engage with your customers. Do research to determine their pain points, then create content that answers anticipated questions. Personalize your content as much as possible based on segments and journey points.
Some of those touch points will likely include emails that push contacts to a landing page. Once on the page, contacts will hopefully make a purchase. But if you don’t create your pages with some forethought and planning, your landing page performance could suffer.
Your customer journey plays a big role in your landing page bounce rate
It’s fairly easy to tell if your landing page isn’t performing well: In addition to a low click-through rate, you might also notice a high bounce rate from this page.
Landing pages across many industries can have anywhere from a 46% to 65% bounce rate. This means that about half of the page’s visitors will immediately leave. Average bounce rates are up around 50%. Anything higher than 85% is a big problem.
Image Source: RocketFuel
If landing page’s performance is down, it could be due to a technical error. Or perhaps you aren’t following best practices when you built the page. So, what does this have to do with your customer journey?
If you believe your page is optimized for the best performance and you’re still struggling with bounces, you can actually look at the specific steps in your customer journey to see if there’s a simple way to fix landing page bounce rates.
1. Alter your timing to fix landing page bounce rate
One of the easiest solutions to your high landing page bounce rate might simply be timing. Perhaps your customers simply aren’t ready for the offer you sent.
Don’t assume customers are only interested in education and digital resources early in the journey. A Gartner study found that 83% of buyers were still using digital channels late in the purchasing stages.
Look at your customer journey to determine when you’re sending people to your landing page, then make adjustments accordingly.
2. Adjust your message to meet customer journey expectations
No one likes surprises. Especially your customers.
If they end up on your landing page and determine it’s not what they wanted, they’ll bounce. This could be a problem with the wording in your email or social media, or it could be a problem with the content on the page itself.
Try different types of content to see what resonates with your audience. Videos can help improve landing page conversions by 80%. See if adding videos or other types of interactive content can keep people on your page longer.
Image Source: Biteable
However, you need to make sure your video speaks to your audience. Dollar Shave Club has been using the same video since it first went viral. It works for them because it aligns with audience expectations.
In order to fully optimize your landing page, you need to understand your audience and understand what they want to see.
3. Change your audience to fix landing page bounce rate
If you think your message is correct, consider adjusting the audience. Depending on how detailed your customer segmentation is, there’s a chance you’re directing uninterested people to your offer.
Reflect on your customer journey and see if there’s a different group (not currently being targeted) that would benefit from the landing page.
4. Avoid sending customers to the same landing pages as new leads
You wouldn’t send an existing customer a welcome email or introductory drip campaign. You should follow the same guidelines with your landing pages for several reasons.
The messaging you use for a new lead will be different than the messaging for a new customer. You don’t know anything about the habits or needs of a new lead, so your content and copy are likely to be generic. However, using your customer journey, you should have an idea of where your existing contacts are in the funnel. You can then cater your message to their specific pain points.
Additionally, you don’t need to collect information on a form from your existing customers because you should already know that data. Consider this landing page example from PayPal:
Image Source: PayPal
This is a great form to use for lead generation. But if you send an existing customer to this form, they most likely won’t want to enter in their information again.
In some cases, you might not need a landing page at all. If the page is just providing more information and a CTA, you may lose engagement if you force customers to keep clicking.
Wrap up
Landing pages are a vital part of your digital marketing strategy. Even if you build your page with the best code and design, you can still struggle with performance if you aren’t considering your customer journey as a part of their hollistic experience.
To cultivate an engaging customer journey and reduce bounce rates remember to:
- Adjust your timing
- Alter your message to meet customer expectations
- Reevaluate your audience
- Send customers and new leads to different landing pages
You can fix landing page bounce rates if you make sure you’re targeting the right people at the right time. Make sure your message is on point with where your customers are in their journey. Try to keep content relevant and personalized to their specific needs and questions. And most importantly, deliver what you promise.