The Ultimate Guide to Mobile Landing Page Optimization
Making a connection with potential customers isn’t easy. The modern customer journey spans multiple touchpoints across desktop and mobile devices. More and more, your first impression as a company occurs on a mobile landing page. With mobile traffic accounting for more than 50% of all internet traffic, you need to make sure that the landing page experience is a good one.
But mobile experiences differ considerably from other customer experiences, especially on a landing page—where you have limited space and time to convince visitors to take action.
Mobile landing page optimization is a strategic framework for ensuring that experience is as seamless as possible for potential customers. A great mobile landing page can communicate a product’s value, engage with potential leads, and convert them into paying customers. A not-so-great experience leads to high bounce rates and missed connections.
When you understand how to build and design mobile landing pages that communicate value effectively and make it easy to take action, you give visitors the motivation they need to take the next step toward conversion.
Why You Need to Optimize Your Mobile Landing Page
We could argue that the mobile experience is one of the most important parts of the modern customer journey. Consumers seek out products, read reviews, enter information, and generally interact with people on mobile more than ever now. Understanding how to use that experience to engage with your audience is the key to creating more valuable cross-channel campaigns.
And mobile landing pages are usually the first thing that people see when they encounter your brand. Potential visitors find your product using search or through an Instagram ad or a boosted Twitter post. And when they do, you only have a short time to connect with them before they move on to the next task.
Effective mobile landing pages are said to have an 11.7% average conversion rate, as opposed to a 10.7% for desktop landing pages. This means that your potential for conversion is higher when you optimize your mobile landing pages for these types of consumers.
Design an Engaging Mobile Experience
As soon as someone visits your mobile landing page, they should know exactly what to do next. But space is limited—your mobile landing page design needs to engage the visitor’s interest immediately. Whether it’s clicking on a button to secure their offer, signing up for your email list, or learning more about your product, your landing page has to show visitors where to take action.
The easiest way to do this is by limiting your objectives. Each mobile landing page you create must have a single goal or desired action.
There are lots of ways to convey this sense of urgency, like keeping the call-to-action (CTA) front and center on the page and using contrasting colors to highlight the most important information. If you’re not painfully obvious, visitors may miss the point. Take this mobile landing page from Adweek:
Adweek uses bright yellow to call out important information and their CTA. And they include an engaging background image to make the page feel more personal. The bold color makes their message stand out from everything else, so people who land on this page immediately know:
- when the virtual event is happening
- how to save their place and register
We leverage a similar technique on the following mobile landing page, triggered by a Facebook ad for our product demo:
Notice how the email form stands out from the purple background—it’s clearly the main objective of this page and the only thing visitors can interact with when they access the page. We employ additional design best practices on this page as well. The navigation bar that typically exists at the top of our desktop landing page is collapsed into a hamburger menu on the top right. And we remove any content that doesn’t speak directly to our product’s value.
This ensures that the page renders correctly across different mobile devices and we don’t distract from the core objective of the page—getting potential customers to sign up for a demo.
Both Taplytics’ and Adweek’s landing pages use branding that’s consistent across both mobile and web experiences. Adweek chose yellow because it’s the color they use to call out important information on their entire site. Keeping your brand’s thematic elements consistent ensures that visitors always associate these pages with your company as a whole.
Another design best practice to keep in mind is how you use forms on these pages. We keep it simple with an embedded email-only sign-up form. JavaScript-enabled forms, like pop-ups and light boxes, won’t render correctly on most mobile devices, so be sure to remove them from your mobile-specific landing pages whenever possible. Nothing drives down conversion rates like a poor website experience. Research shows that 52% of users say “a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.”
Both our landing page and Adweek’s also do a great job of keeping important information above the fold. That not only makes it easy for visitors to understand their next steps, but it also helps brands communicate the landing page’s value directly.
Communicate Your Product’s Value Clearly
Your mobile landing page needs to communicate a lot of information quickly. If visitors don’t immediately understand the value your product or service provides, then they won’t convert. That’s why it’s important to have specific goals in mind for each page as you work through the mobile landing page optimization process.
This is why the cardinal rule of mobile landing page content is—keep written content short and to the point.
Mobile landing pages aren’t the place for waxing poetic or drawn-out explanations. Your core value proposition must be front and center at all times. Keep your conversion objectives in mind as you write the content for the page. The best mobile landing pages are able to communicate the most important information quickly and clearly, without making the visitor scroll past the fold.
Take this mobile landing page from skincare and beauty brand Glossier:
Their value proposition is centered on the page, making it clear why visitors should sign up. And they keep their sign up form short and to the point. By entering an email address into this form, visitors know exactly what they’ll receive.
Glossier also includes additional information about their email subscription, ensuring that people who sign up won’t be surprised by additional emails in the future. Misfits Market, a sustainable produce subscription service, also does a great job of communicating their company’s core value and message in this mobile landing page:
Their core value proposition is front and center, using bolded and enlarged type to make it stand out. But Misfits Market doesn’t stop there, they provide additional information on their service to build on that value proposition and nail down exactly how much potential customers will save by using their service.
As you create the content for these pages, consider how the language you use impacts visitors. Including scarcity marketing techniques like “limited offers” and “sign up now” can be a great way to increase the sense of urgency people have about signing up.
Refine the Experience with A/B Testing
To build a truly engaging mobile landing page, create experiments that help you learn more about how and why people interact with each different page. A/B testing is the framework that helps you accomplish this. Whether you want to onboard new users faster or connect with potential customers earlier, understanding what drives conversion is the key to building a mobile landing page experience that really works.
Start by analyzing each of your mobile landing pages based on performance. Tracking pages that convert at a higher rate than others or consistently rank well in search provides valuable context for your team. Use this information to identify the common elements of each page and leverage them across the rest of your content.
It can be as simple as changing the background color of your button or the hero image on the page—when you take a data-driven approach to optimizing your landing pages, it helps you create tests that actually provide results.
Once you’ve identified potential areas for improvement, keep a list of testing variants to work from as you build out your tests. While you should only ever change one aspect of your landing page at a time, understanding the various different elements that drive conversion is key to building experiments with positive results.
Here are just a few elements you can test on your mobile landing pages:
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The list obviously goes beyond these elements, but it’s important to keep track of everything you want to test, as well as what you have tested in the past. Each A/B test you create builds on the previous one to bring you closer to the best possible mobile landing page experience.
Make sure to test mobile landing page design elements separately from the written content. As space is limited, slight changes in the structure of your page can make a big impact. You don’t want to confuse visitors to your page or obscure your results by testing too many things at the same time.
It’s also important that each experiment runs for enough time to produce verifiable results—the more data you have to inform your actions, the easier it is to make decisions.
Drive Engagement with Mobile Landing Page Optimization
The better your landing page performs, the more valuable it will be for both visitors and your business. Mobile landing page optimization ensures that every page you create, whether it’s a newly launched offer or an established conversion machine, gets better with time. As the customer journey continues to move more toward mobile devices, your ability to engage with consumers in their preferred channel will be what sets your brand apart.