OK, you’ve got your nonprofit marketing plan and budget in action. You’re generating a ton of clicks. But you’re just not getting the conversions you wanted. You’re not getting enough people to your events, the newsletter is not hitting enough inboxes and bottom line, the donations just aren’t coming in the way you had hoped.
It might be time to start experimenting with your nonprofit’s landing pages.
Below you’ll find some tips for inspiring more of your visitors into action.
*Note that you are only generating a few visits a day to your page, you should probably focus on more on widening to top of your funnel and getting more people to your site. Otherwise, you’ll be waiting a long time to get the data needed to conclusively say one landing page variation worked over another. There are many ways to get more visitors to your site. Using the up to $10,000 monthly in free advertising Google Ad Grant can be a great way to widen your funnel.
Check Google Analytics
Don’t just trust your gut. Get the numbers. How do people get to this page and what do they do once they’re there?
Talk to site users
Numbers don’t tell the whole story. Get some qualitative feedback from people who visit your site. If you have 500,000 visitors a month, you might want to invest more seriously and run a paid UX test. If you have more along the lines of 500 or even 5,000, you can start by talking to someone who has visited the site before and asking their opinion. Try to watch how they navigate. Some obvious problems might be made obvious.
Test broadly and then dive into the details
Before deciding on whether the button should be red or green or if you should make people fill in their emails and names or just email (and trust us, form length is certainly worth testing at some point), try to test out what call to action is most effective. What step are people visiting your site for the first time most likely to take? How about people who have been on your site 4 or 5 times? Which people are you targeting for this particular page? Think through the target audience for your page and come up with 2 or 3 calls to action that can inspire them to test against eachother.
Build up to your bigger asks
In the same way you build connection, slowly working your way up to that big ask, do the same online. Make sure your call to action matches the with the target audience’s conviction about the nonprofit. For example, first time visitors are probably not likely to donate.
Location, location, location
Generally speaking, include the call to action at the top of the page. People sometimes don’t scroll to the end of the page. Think about where your call to action is located and how you are using its location to draw attention to it.
Make it interactive
Ask a question. Add an overlay for when they’ve been on the page a certain amount of time. Or a chat. Add an FAQ. Test out an interactive sidebar. You don’t want to take too much attention from the call to action, but try to engage people – even if it’s just by writing compelling copy.
Focus your audience on the call to action
Don’t leave many, if any ways to escape. You may not even want to have menu items. Audiences vary of course. However, a landing page without any menu or external links outside of a privacy policy is worth testing.
Not having 3 ways to “DONATE NOW” on every single page may sound strange to some nonprofits, but helping visitor take the intended action on that particular page can be helpful. Make it obvious what they should do next.
In general, try to tie your call to action fairly closely with the content – including the other copy and image(s).
Use the right tools
We already mentioned Google Analytics. You might want more insight into what is taking place. You could try Crazy Egg. If you do install these tools, keep in mind you
This landing page analyzer from Unbounce is worth a shot too.
Conclusion
Every day you wait to get to work on your landing pages is another day you could be losing conversions. If you have a large audience, you need to get to be testing how best to get them to take action. Check the data you have already and set up one test, even if it’s a small one, today.