Marketers know that well. Creating a good landing page can make the difference and convert your prospects into customers. But first, let’s start with the basics.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a destination webpage where you send your visitors in order to attract them and convert them into customers. In most cases, a landing page focuses on one goal like email leads, sellings, offers, invitations, registrations, etc.
The Landing Page Courses says that:
“ Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”
In order to be efficient, a landing page must be compelling and fulfill some criteria.
How to create a landing page that converts?
The call-to-action
This is what you want your visitors to do. It is clearly the element which will make the difference. Whether it is a “show now”, “sign up”, “contact us”, “try it”, it has to be compelling and you should not place more than one call-to-action (CTA) per page.
Testing your CTA with A/B testing will help you know which CTA is the most efficient.
About the design, make sure that the button is clearly identifiable in a distinct area where you have no doubt you have to click on. It is all about catching visitors’ eyes on that button. Moreover, if you have content displayed below the fold, you can repeat the CTA.
In one word, you have to encourage the visitors to take the desired action by seducing him.
The promise
The promise is what you offer to your visitor in exchange of getting what you want them to do. It can be a discount but also a free trial, a gift, etc.
But it is not just about offering something. You need to maximize what the conversion funnel can give to you. For instance, if you are offering a free trial for a month, you should ask your visitors to sign up and connect their accounts before they can fully enjoy the service. A deadline will translate a sense of urgency and your visitors will be invited to pay to keep using your product.
About the design, it has to be simple to avoid distractions from the CTA.
The focus
Be concise. The more choices you offer people, the more distracted from the main purpose they will be. You thus have to be clear about what you are doing and what you expect from them.
With your homepage, avoid to overflow your page with useless form informations, navigation bars, company history, etc. It is all about eliminate clickable things that will pertubate your CTA. For you history company for example, you can move it to the “About” section.
You need to give attention to that homepage because a lot of your traffic is going to land on that primary page.
Be careful to:
- Be brief and only mention relevant elements
- Even if your homepage is important, do not send all your visitors there. Create paths for each personas, it will be more efficient
- Create a compelling design to keep the attention on important features
- Do not bother your visitors with header or side links.
The insight
Focus on what is important for your visitors, on what they might be looking for and how your product could respond to their expectations. Your offer must give an answer to a specific insight and only focus on two to five most important things about your product.
In most cases that focus will highlight:
- Your product features
- Your product benefits
- Your product pain points
Anyway, try with different attributes, make A/B testing to check which insight works the best.
Moreover, be careful with your attributes, they must not distract your visitors from the CTA. So place them above the folder and illustrate them with attracting icons and pictures.
The resolution
The most common resolution in the US is 1024×768. That is why you need to be careful with your design, logo, headline, CTA and place them in the center top of the screen. Try your layout with different resolution and on different devices to check if everyone is able to see your headline and CTA without scrolling. That is the most important.
The visuals
Keep them clear, simple and qualitative. You do not want to distract people from you CTA. Big fonts, bullets and optimized UX designs such as images, video and graphics are the key.
You can test your designs and see which ones impact the best. Is it pictures or illustrations for example?
Be careful of your site speed. Adding extra sliders, graphs or HD pictures can lower your page speed and increase your bounce rate.
The headline
Once your visitors have land on your website, you have to convince them to stay thanks to your headlines. It must be compelling and attracting but in any way outrageous or dishonest.
Your message must be clear and explanatory at the first glance and your headline must be designed in order to catch your audience instantaneously.
To learn more about how to write compelling headlines, you can check our previous article.
