Many marketers who set up email marketing, social or PPC campaigns still resolve to driving leads and current customers to their website and blog pages. However, if these pages don’t convert them (aka: encourage them down your sales funnel), you are basically throwing money out the window. Better yet, you’re burning your hard-won marketing budget.
You see, a website homepage or a section on your website is meant to display general information about your company, products and services. Each website page has various links and encourages visitors to explore.
That is why landing pages are so important. There are mainly two types of landing pages: lead generation landing pages, which allow you to capture a prospects email address for continued 1-to-1 marketing, or click-through landing pages, which provide just enough information on a product or service to entice them to buy. Landing pages can also be used for people to sign up for an event or webinar, subscribe to a newsletter, download content and countless other marketing initiative.
Here are some examples:
On the other hand, a landing page is created for one purpose, one message and one potential click. You remove all possible distractions to make sure visitors have clear vision and carry out the action you want to provide.
This means that you need to create landing pages for each specific marketing campaign—each of which will have specific goals. And a successful landing page takes more than just slapping on cool graphics, text and a call to action. With landing pages, it’s not boom, and you’re done. It takes strategy, creativity, A/B testing a whole lotta’ KPI monitoring.
Here are our 4 tips to creating stunning landing pages that convert:
1. Design your landing page to create a good first impression
Did you know that it takes only about 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) for a human to form an opinion on your website? That means that your entire design—from its structure, colours, fonts, spacing and amount of texts must be developed with visitors’ short attention spans in mind.
With landing page design, less and sleek are more. Don’t inundate a page with too many graphics or text. Keep everything tidy and clutter-free. Use blocks if needs be. Remember, you want visitors to retain one message and do one thing.
2. Keep your messaging simple and interesting
Landing pages are not the time to start offering an onslaught of promotions or trying to stuff as many features and benefits onto that one page. Match your message—that means your headlines, texts and call to action—with your visitors’ specific intent. For example, if a visitor clicked on a PPC ad for a free ebook, promote why the ebook is of value. What will visitors get by reading it? You most definitely do not want readers thinking you are only serving up clickbait.
Compelling copy is key, no matter how awesome the design is. Pique readers’ interest with an inspiring or intriguing headline. The body of the text should be relevant, clear and solution-driven. Avoid “we” and make it all about “you.”
3. Don’t squeeze everything above the fold
Despite some design pundits who say that people hate to scroll, that is not necessarily true. Concrete examples are everywhere that point to the fact that people don’t mind scrolling if the page is designed to encourage scrolling, with arrows that move back and forth, for example, and if the content is eye grabbing.
That being said, above the fold is nevertheless your prime screen real estate as readers will skim. Make sure you have a headline, sub-headline, call to action and a stellar hero shot available above the fold that engages visitors. You can always add additional benefits and social proof later on in your landing page.
4. Promote only one call to action
Too many choices confuse people. If you add a bunch of links and buttons, visitors are bound to think “What the heck should I be doing?” For landing pages, only give readers one option: to sign up, subscribe, buy, etc. Be clear and explanatory. Calls to action are no time to start showing off your cleverness or dictionary prowess.
Furthermore, make it explicitly clear, from both a design and messaging perspective, of what will happen next after a visitor performs the desired behaviour. If the call to action is signing up for the webinar, the ensuing thank-you page or email should simply detail the next steps, including reiterating the date and time, providing the link to join the webinar, etc. Make the entire process as seamless as possible so that visitors are “rewarded” for their action, not left scratching their heads.
Your landing pages matter a lot to your overall marketing campaign’s success. After all, you are investing a lot of resources into attracting prospects and upselling to existing client. Nudge both of these initiatives along with landing pages that simply rock.
