10 Foolproof Ways to Earn Your Landing Page Visitors' Trust

Landing pages are a critical tool for meeting your ever-increasing lead generation goals. Actually, only 8% of marketers reported that dedicated landing pages were ineffective, according to MarketingSherpa's 2011 Landing Page Optimization Benchmark Report. I'm not sure what those 8% are doing, but the effectiveness of landing pages for the other 92% of marketers hinges on one component that isn't often discussed -- visitors have to trust you enough to give away their personal information on your landing page forms to obtain your offers.

The thing is, we've all been burned too many times by companies that don't deliver on their offers' promises, sell our personal information, and SPAM us with irrelevant emails. As such, we've all accrued some keen Spidey senses that kick in when we visit landing pages that tell us whether a company is trustworthy, or whether we should cut and run. But what are those landing page characteristics that kick in our feel-good senses and also help to reduce landing page friction? Well, there are at least 10 of them that I know of, and this post will break down what they are so you can earn the trust of your landing page visitors and capture more of them as leads.

10 Ways to Earn Your Landing Page Visitors' Trust1) Ensure your call-to-action (CTA) offer and landing page offer align.

When a visitor clicks on a CTA and gets to your landing page, they expect something -- they expect to see what that CTA button said they would see. Unfortunately, what happens all too often is the ol' bait and switch. There's a call-to-action that is so amazing every visitor is going to click on it (congratulations, your CTA has a great click-through rate!), but when they get to your landing page, they abandon because they realize they've been duped (congratulations, this exercise was a tremendous waste of you and your visitors' time!).

If your CTA offers a guide about how to unclog a clogged sink drain, make sure your landing page promises to deliver a guide about how to unclog a clogged sink drain -- not a tangentially related 15% off coupon for plumbing supplies.

2) Write clear copy that explains what visitors will get with offer redemptions.

Much of trust is based in perception. So you very well may be delivering on the offer you promised, but if the language you use seems different, visitors will assume you've tricked them, and they'll abandon your landing page without completing the form. For an example of someone using language to clearly explain their offers and align their CTAs and landing pages, let's take a look at one of HubSpot's customers, Andrew Harper's Luxury Travel Blog.

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