How to use animation on your landing pages to increase conversion rates.

Hey Ben here, let’s talk about animation on landing pages and how we can use it to increase conversion rates.

Lots of things affect conversation rates and it varies depending on the offering and audience. But, for the sake of this insight, I’ll list out a few more general tips to increase conversion to make it more accessible for everyone. And then we can dive into how animation can take them to the next level and get you real results.

So to increase conversation, we can provide a clearer or more detailed definition of our offering. By communicating more effectively we can get the user up to speed on their problem and our solution much faster, making them feel much more confident in converting. This is an often overlooked aspect of landing pages as some marketers just want people to fill out the form as quick as possible. But now more and more landing pages are becoming long-form with detailed descriptions of their offering, benefits and social proof.

Another way is to lead the user better through the flow of information ending with the CTA and make sure the most important elements aren’t missed. Most users scan web pages so creating a more visually appealing landing page can not only help them navigate the information but can also build trust by demonstrating the care and attention in everything your business does. We don’t want to overload people with an endless wall of text, we need to make this long-form content easy to digest whilst making sure they don’t miss any key points.

So, how we can use animation to make these more effective?

One of the best ways to improve conversion with animation is to create an animated explainer video that sits on the page. This video is an overview of the offering and how it solves a problem. As well as conveying your message it also shows off your brand's personality and builds a connection with the viewer. You can extend this idea down the rest of the page by having animated gifs or svgs that support a block of text and can help explain the words in a visual way. This can help people who are more visual learners understand the message as well as be a confirmation of understanding for others.

To create a better landing page flow, we can use animation to catch the user's eye, highlighting key information including the CTA. This is useful for those who skim-read webpages as they can just get the gist by following the attention-grabbing parts of the page. We can also animate sections of the page to be shown when we want them to be viewed. This can be great to prevent overwhelming people with a lot of content all at once and having animations alongside text lets the brain take a short rest to process the information before continuing. And remember anything that moves on the page is an animation.

For these animations to become reality, a few people in your team need to be involved. You need someone with UX and marketing skills to make sure the basic journey is user-friendly whilst leading them to convert. You then need someone with design and animation skills to create the assets ready to go on the page. And finally, someone with web development skills to add them to the page in the correct place. Depending on your organisation you may have one person with all these skills or you might have a department for each. The technical level required to make these animations live on your page varies based on the animation format but any good developer won’t have a problem. It’s a good idea to have someone with UX and marketing skills to check over the page once the technical work is done just to make sure the landing page journey still works.

One big concern for marketers is how this animation affects things like page speed and SEO. And the answer is, honestly, it won’t have much effect on the page speed if implemented correctly, nothing that will have an impact on your SEO. As for SEO itself, having a video on the page (especially one uploaded to YouTube) will slightly increase your page rank in the eyes of Google. The bottom line is that there are way more important factors to how your page performs in SEO than animation on your page.

Another concern is cost. All this animation must cost a fortune, right? Is the ROI worth it? A quick search returns hundreds of facts about how valuable video and animation are for marketing. One study by EveView found that adding videos on a landing page increased conversions by up to 86%. And another found that longer landing pages with more detail can generate up to 220% more leads than above-the-fold pages. You get the idea, it’s worth it. Especially because it doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think. Whilst animation can easily get into the tens of thousands most animators will be happy to work within your budget. You can get a basic animated explainer video for your landing page for as little as a few hundred pounds, which can also use elsewhere like chopped up on your social channels.

So hopefully this sparked some ideas to make your next landing page full of life, animation and users converting.

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