Home Improvement
Fix Up Your Landing Pages with More Positive Language
OVERVIEW
Key Insights for Home Improvement
This past year, it seems like everyone has been baking sourdough, bingeing Netflix, and gettin’ their houses fixed up. So if there’s a time to pull out all the stops and build high-converting landing pages—it’s now.
Prospects perk up when you stay positive.
Sometimes marketers feel like they’ve gotta pressure the pain points to win over their customers. But our sentiment analysis indicates you should take an alternative approach.
Get more leads by simplifying your forms.
The home improvement industry is all about lead gen, which means form-fill pages are essential. But how do you optimize them for more conversions? See what’s getting your visitors to hit “submit.”
Want quality traffic? Social is a solution.
Although the sample sizes are smaller, social traffic seems to outperform paid search traffic—the leading traffic source for this industry. Find out where you oughta be spending your ad budget.
Accelerate results with simple CRO
Access the full Conversion Benchmark Report for detailed industry benchmarks, in-depth conversion rate insights, top-performing channels, and more.
Key Insight: Conversion Rate
Landing pages for heating and cooling convert under the industry baseline.
Conversion Rate: 2020 vs. 2021
What’s this mean? This graph (called a “box plot”) shows how the conversion rates of landing pages are distributed. The dotted horizontal line is the median conversion rate, while the “box” shows where most pages sit. The vertical lines (or “whiskers”) represent the range of the remaining pages, excluding any extreme outliers.
Key Insight: Sentiment
Lean into the positivity. (Hey, everyone likes a good home makeover.)
Compared to other industries, home improvement pages rank pretty high for negative language (and use a lot of emotional words in general). Since last year, we’ve seen increased use of all sentiments—especially the, ah, not-so-nice stuff.
In some cases, we get it. The pest control subcategory, for example, shows lots of words associated with disgust. (Ridding homes of bed bugs, ants, and rodents isn’t exactly glitz and glamour.) And while some of this negative language is unavoidable, it’s not helping your conversion rates.
There are a few emotions that might help your performance, though. We see a slight correlation with higher conversion rates when there’s a greater percentage of words associated with joy, anticipation, and surprise. Try using more positive language—“achieve,” “happy,” “wonderful”—and see how visitors respond to your page.
Include more words related to joy, anticipation, and surprise on your page, then turn on Smart Traffic to see if it revs up your conversion rate.
Home Improvement
Sentiments: 2020 vs. 2021
These types of emotional language saw the biggest change in use (increase or decrease) on home improvement pages over the past year.
+24.6%
More Disgust Words
+13.4%
More Fear Words
+11.3%
More Sadness Words
Key Insight: Conversion Type
Renovate your forms by reducing the number of fields.
Form-fill landing pages make up the majority of home improvement landing pages, but here’s the thing: they’re also the lowest-converting. As an industry that relies on lead gen, you need your forms to perform—so you’ve gotta make ‘em more approachable.
Shortening them up is a good place to start. While most home improvement forms have four fields, we see a correlation between using two fields and higher conversion rates.
And hey—two fields isn’t a lot. We can’t tell you which exact fields you should include, but we’d suggest holding off on asking for a phone number. There seems to be a relationship between phone fields and lower conversion rates.
Try keeping your form to two fields. Simply asking for a name and email could get your foot in the door, then you can follow up with more questions later.
CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION
Haul in more home improvement leads by optimizing for conversions.
Wanna get the most outta these insights? Here’s how we recommend you use ‘em in your marketing.
1. Pick the insights that are most relevant to you.
Do pages in your industry convert better when they’re short? Maybe your copy is giving off the wrong vibes? Take note of the findings that are relevant to your campaigns.
2. Apply the recommendations to your pages.
Create a variant of your landing page and make the changes recommended in this report. Use A/B testing to see how it performs.
3. Get new insights and keep on optimizing.
Use the results from your landing page variant to inform the creation of more variants. Keep improving your pages and watch as your conversion rates climb.
Key Insight: Traffic
Lookin’ for more high-converting traffic? Nail your social campaign.
When it comes to form-fill pages, social channels are bringing in some of your highest-converting traffic. (Hey, maybe prospects don’t know they need a sparkly new kitchen until they see it on Instagram.) But these platforms are only sending a fraction of total visitors (9.8%)—search engines remain the main traffic source for home improvement pages (66.2%).
Sure, the performance gap isn’t huge (4.0% versus 2.9%). Given the increased competition for search clicks, though, it might be worth using more of your ad dollars on social. You can find out for sure by shifting some of your Google Ads budget over to Facebook during your next lead gen campaign—then compare the results.
Experiment with using social platforms to send higher-performing traffic to your form-fill landing pages.
Home Improvement
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