Last updated on November 30th, 2010
I recently was finally able to take an hour and watch a webinar put together by our friends at Marketing Experiments. Originally airing on Sept. 1st, the webinar provided some great tips on optimizing a homepage to maximize conversions and revenues.
Homepages are different than landing pages according to Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, who says the homepage serves as the “entry to the house that explains all of the rooms in the house.” Landing pages on the other hand are very specific to a particular product or service.
To put it another way – landing pages introduce offers while homepages introduce the company behind those offers
Therefore, your homepage should describe all of the products and services you offer in a general sense so readers can clearly understand how you can solve their problem…a homepage shouldn’t try and do everything but rather briefly explain all of the “rooms in the house.”
According to a survey of the webinar’s live audience, one of the most common challenges webmasters face when designing a home page is having too many messages for such a small space.
Unfortunately, many homepages do not live up to their potential because they get trapped in at least one of the following five pitfalls:
1. Trying to achieve too many objectives with the homepage
2. Failing to start a conversation (either you have no copy at all or it’s very plain and boring)
3. Over-reliance on multimedia to communicate value
4. Making the homepage a landing page
5. Assuming best practices will work for you
I found pitfall #5 to be very interesting – assuming best practices will always work for you can be a recipe for at best mediocrity and at worst disaster. Flint and the team illustrated this quite well with a site that had a popup box to enter contact information, which goes against some “best practice” suggestions. Amazingly, the site that did this saw an incredible jump in conversions!
Avoiding these 5 common pitfalls can go a long way toward ensuring your homepage generates conversions and engages visitors.
The webinar takes about an hour of your time so I urge you to take a look…they also discuss eye-path and ways you can control what people see and hear on your homepage…enjoy!