Landing pages are a critical component of inbound marketing. They need to be done well, or your campaigns won’t be as successful as you would like. A standard landing page is made up of a few components like a headline, sign up form, and a call to action. These are fairly straightforward, but it’s easy to make an easy mistake if you aren’t careful. Avoid the following at all costs!

Lack of a compelling headline.

A headline is the hook that you lure users with. A great headline can secure many leads, while lackluster ones will only drive bounce rates. Make sure your headline is concise, compelling, and straight to the point. The point of the headline is to keep users on the page, and drive them to the forms below. Try A/B testing to see which types of headlines resonate the best with your audience.

No clear call to action.

A landing page isn’t complete without a clear call to action. The point of a landing page is to acquire leads, and a clear call to action facilitates this. It’s important to ensure that the user knows what he/she is supposed to do on the landing page. Don’t confuse them with tons of links to click on, or a variety of call to actions. Keep the decision tree as simple as possible so your users can get from A to B without having to visit C and D first. More choices equals more confusion. If a child can’t figure out what to do your call to action isn’t clear enough.

Too complicated of a sign up form.

A user’s worst nightmare are long, complicated, tedious forms. Users love great content, but will decide to forego that content if they are greeted with an enormous form. It’s crucial to keep your opt-in forms as simple as possible. Focus on the bare necessities. If you can live with just an email address, use that as the only field on the form. Again, A/B testing with different versions of contact forms is a great way of finding out the perfect number of fields to use. This will help to balance consumer insight while minimizing bounce and form abandonment rates.