Tips for a Fantastic Landing Page

By Julie

Tips for a Fantastic Landing Page

So, you want to create a landing page for your website. Maybe you have a new health e-book to promote, or you want users to sign up for a free law consultation, or you’re collecting registrations for a new condo development. You’ve been told that a landing page is the best way to turn leads into conversions, and you already have your Google adwords set up and ready to funnel users to your newest creation.

But is your landing page going to accomplish what you want it to?

It’s surprising how many landing pages fall flat in their design and implementation. Don’t be like those guys. We’ve compiled a few simple tips to give your landing page a boost above your competition.

Tip 1: Identify your goal

This sounds easy, right? But the amount of landing pages with unclear or mixed goals is staggering.

Most simple landing pages should have one goal in mind. What do you want users to do when they land on the page? Fill out a consultation form? Enter your raffle draw? Sign up for an account? If you can’t identify what you want your visitors to do when they arrive, how are visitors supposed to know what to do?

Image of signs pointing in many different directions

Tip 2: Reduce obstacles

Identifying your goal was easy. The tricky part is making sure that your goal isn’t muddied behind a dozen other distractions.

Don’t use your homepage as a landing page

Your homepage has twenty calls to action, five forms, and a picture of your grandma on it. Use a dedicated landing page with one purpose, and one purpose only.

Don’t turn your landing page into a second homepage

Let’s say you run a sporting goods store, and your landing page’s goal is getting visitors to sign up for your recently launched newsletter. While it might be tempting to throw a banner for your 15% off sale on bicycles up there, it doesn’t help visitors achieve your goal. At best, they get distracted looking at bikes and you might get a sale there — at worst, they’ll be confused and leave without doing either of those things! Now you have no newsletter sign-up, and no sale to boot.

Am I filling out a tax return?

Long forms are daunting and — most of the time — entirely unnecessary. Think of each field as one extra hurdle for visitors to jump before reaching their goal. Your job is to remove as many hurdles as possible, so you should only have visitors fill out what you absolutely must get to move them along to the next part of your sales funnel. If there’s any part of the form that can be filled out at a later date, or never, what’s it doing there?

If visitors are signing up for a newsletter, you don’t need to know their annual income.

Reduce extra links

A lot of landing pages will do away with the main navigation, offering at most a footer navigation or a clickable logo back to the homepage. The idea is to reduce the amount of choice a visitor has and keep them from navigating elsewhere on your website.

Why is mobile-responsiveness still optional?

It’s almost 2020. If your landing page isn’t built with mobile in mind, you’re losing over half of your potential leads right there.

Tip 3: Less Is More

Having paragraphs of information on the page to convince users to just fill out your dang form already sounds helpful. But that means trusting that your visitors have a longer attention span than your pet guppy. If there’s too much reading involved — especially the dreaded blocks of pure text — your visitors are going to peace out rather than read through it all.

Your landing page shouldn’t be an instruction manual. Keep your supporting copy short and sweet, in brief paragraphs or bullet points where possible. Instead of writing an essay, make sure it’s easy for visitors to identity at a glance what value your newsletter/consultation/service will give them. Quality > quantity.

Tip 4: Messaging Matters

Consistency

Your visitors clicked on either an ad or a call-to-action to get to your landing page. Make sure whatever they clicked on matches with what they see when the page loads to avoid unnecessary confusion. I’m not even talking about the obvious “I clicked on an ad for a free dog training consultation and now I’m looking at promotions for puppy food” snafus; keeping similar terminology is just as important. If you call it a newsletter in your Google ad, don’t call it an e-bulletin in your page title.

Voice

Write for your audience, in words your audience will understand. This means avoiding both sales-y buzzwords and marketing terminology, and those highly technical 15-letter words your tech team might understand but your average customer just nods to with a hazy, detached look in their eyes. Instead, use persuasive and emotional power words that make people feel, and nudge your visitors to take action.

Sign that says 'Be Authentic'

Tip 5: Prove It

We’re in the home stretch: you’ve got your goal, your revised content, your form, and a solid page design. There’s only one thing missing:

Proof you’re not a scammer trying to steal your visitor’s information to sell on the darkweb.

Yikes.

With the amount of websites out there, chances are good your visitor has never heard of you before. They have no clue what to expect, and the average internet user has seen enough high-profile data leaks to be wary by now. You’re going to need to show them you’re legit and that your site is secure if you want them to convert. Some great ways of doing this include:

Takeaway

Your landing page is a mini social experiment, changing up everything from the content to the form to see what increases your conversion rate. The best landing pages will happen after many iterations, but hopefully by reading through this list of tips, you’ll be in a better position to take that plunge than you were before.

We can design landing pages too! Let us create targeted campaigns with a great layout and design.

About the author

I'm a designer and programmer with a can-do attitude and a song recommendation for every mood. Good design is like music: it moves people. If at first you don't succeed, try again with a different soundtrack.
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