Does Your Landing Page Suffer From TMI?

A disease is inflicting a huge amount of damage on businesses all across the world. It attacks them where they can be most vulnerable, the landing page. The disease is TMI, or Too Much Information, and it might be impacting you and you don’t even know it. But don’t worry, its easily cured. Below I’ll show you a landing page suffering from TMI, and then show how it can be cured. Together, we can rid the world of the scourge of TMI.

When your landing page suffers from TMI, your visitors know it right away and it can cause them to immediately leave your site. Too Much Information means that you’re asking for a huge amount of information on a contact form from your potential customer, in most cases before they’re comfortable sharing that information with you. Most people are comfortable with providing basic contact information, and they do so multiple times a day. But when you start to ask very detailed questions, they begin to wonder “Do I trust this company, and do I want to give them that kind of information?”. And trust me, that isn’t the first thing you want your potential customer thinking about you.

Let me show you what I mean, and how you can solve it. Here’s a landing page I recently ran across that suffers from TMI:

On this landing page, they start off fine. They ask the basics, like Company, First Name, Last Name, E-Mail, and Phone Number. But then a visitor is confronted with the horror of TMI.

“What industry is are you in?”

“How many items do you sell?”

“What services are you currently using for your catalog?”

“How did you hear about us?”

As I scanned through this I started to think… is this a landing page or an interrogation? And I’m not the only one, potential customers were thinking the same thing. And if it turns them off they’re going to leave, and end up somewhere that doesn’t ask all of these questions.

Curing TMI is easy, and it starts with removing all non-essential information from you form. On every single field of your landing page you need to ask the questions “Do I need this information in order to begin the sales process?”. Depending on your business you may need to ask certain questions, but your rule of thumb should be less is more.

I took a sledgehammer to this landing page in Photoshop to give you an idea of what this landing page form should look like, and here’s what I came up with:

That looks much better. And most of all, a visitor to this landing page is exponentially more likely to fill out this information. Sure, the sales rep that has to contact this prospect won’t have all the detailed information that they would have with the old form. But in my book, it’s better to have a prospect to contact than no prospect at all. All of the questions I removed from the original form can be asked on the first call with the prospect, which can begin the sales process on a good foundation.

So now that you know what TMI is and how to cure it, take a look at your landing pages. You might be losing business because of it and you didn’t even know it.

Tagged as: Landing Pages, tips