The Art of the Landing Page: All the Points You Need to Check to Get a Conversion
No matter how good the ad or content that lead the users to your website is, the page that they land on is all the more important for the conversion. Landing pages are standalone web pages created with the conversion in mind. Advertisers will often ask why is the conversion rate low or bounce rate high, but this is something that publishers have no control of. Their task is to successfully get people to the landing page and once they are there, the conversion is up to the advertiser. If you created a great offer with a compelling call-to-action (e.g. save dollars or percentages) and then lead a user to your homepage, they will have a hard time navigating to the offer that got them there. This is why creating specific landing pages has become standard practice.
Think about the User
When creating these action-based pages, it’s important to think about the audience you’re targeting with the ads, its preferences and behavior, and create accordingly. Also, it’s important to know which channel the user is coming from. For example, let’s say one user clicked on an ad that featured a specific conversion CTA (for example register here or save now) and another user clicked-through to the website from a piece of branded content. The first one will expect a landing page that aligns to the CTA they clicked on, while the second one will expect a general information landing page, depending on the content that they came from.If you’re using a multichannel strategy (as you should!) it’s important to define which channel serves which purpose and land the users to the appropriate landing pages. To that purpose you should create multiple ones - the “learn more” oriented vs the ones that focus on a specific conversion, such as filling out a form, registering, buying a product or service etc. Research by HubSpot showed that the more landing pages a business has on its website, the more leads it generates. As users travel down the marketing funnel, their journey should feel natural, moving from awareness to conversion and, finally, a long-term relationship with the brand.
Landing Page Content
While your product catalogs or “about” pages should contain ample information that will help the potential customer decide whether or not they’d like to convert, the landing page should use prioritized and focused messaging. As previously mentioned, this messaging should align to the one that got the user to the landing page in the first place.It should also focus on one or a couple of clear value propositions. In order to define them, you need to focus on the users’ problem that will be solved by them converting. The headline should very clearly communicate the benefit that the user gets. The copy should be trimmed down to explain what the offer is and bullets should be used to list the features or benefits of the offer. Visual assets should also reflect the offer in some way, whether by also communicating the value or linking back to it in an abstract way.
Design
If you’re creating your first landing page, you should start by checking the competition. There are numerous lists of successful landing page examples that can help get you started. However, you should use these only as inspiration, because your landing page should combine the latest design trends with your brand identity.While the trends are in constant change and will get you confronted with different advice such as using greyscale color palettes vs. bright and vibrant color schemes, the landing pages are specific and there are some everlasting guidelines that should be followed. While you can research and choose your palette, it should reflect your recognizable brand identity. It should also contain ample negative space that will enable the eye to easily focus on the important parts, such as the headline or CTA. If your landing page contains a form, it should be placed above the fold or within the first screen on mobile. On the other hand, if it features multiple CTAs, they should be a clear hierarchy and there shouldn’t be more than 3 options. The hierarchy of font size and color should also make it easy to distinguish the most important elements.
The visuals are just as important as the message itself. Video has been proven time and time again as the optimal marketing mediums. Some of the best ways to use it on the landing page are either as a hero background that will fill the entire page or as a visual representation of the benefit that the user is converting for.
Optimize Everything and Keep Optimizing
And we do mean everything – optimize for the device, your page’s load time, the length of the form, how you communicate with users, CTA wording and visual aspect, etc.- Let’s start with the obvious point: it’s a mobile world and if you don’t optimize your landing page for mobile, you’re willingly renouncing a great pool of users that you won’t even try to target or that will arrive at the unoptimized landing page and create a huge bounce rate.
- On the other hand, if you do optimize for the device, but your landing page takes ages to load, the users will again leave it without converting. In fact, per Neil Patel’s infographic on loading time, a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- Even if you aim to provide all the necessary information, the users still might have questions. Having in mind the amazing advancement in AI and machine learning, consider using chatbots to that purpose. Creating and updating frequently asked questions will enable you to streamline the communication.
- Trying out different CTA and headline formulations and design options, while sticking to the general best practices, will enable you to A/B test and optimize towards what gets users to convert.
