If you’ve invested in developing an online brand then landing pages should be of paramount importance to your business. They’re the link that collects information about visitors and traffic and turns them into prospects and leads. Though the goal behind landing pages may differ depending on your business, e.g. ecommerce vs. in-store purchase, the elements for an engaging landing page that drives people to take a valuable business action remain pretty consistent. Feel free to use the 10 key points we list below as a check-list to ensure your landing pages are well-built.
Have an objective in mind
Your landing page should be built around a key objective, e.g. do you want this visitor to sign up for your newsletter? Would you like them to request a quote for your services? This is the key point to keep in mind while adding any elements to your page, remember to keep things simple and if you feel that a certain line of text takes away from the objective, then consider removing it instead of cluttering up important space.
Grab their attention
Your landing page should be clear and relatively concise, but it should also be attractive, utilizing elements of design to allow a visitor to follow a logical path with the end-goal of driving a call-to-action. Here are 8 great landing page designs curated by Hubspot.
Stay true to your brand
Ensure that the design of the landing page matches the rest of your site, don’t turn your landing page into a microsite that confuses the visitor. Keep in mind the customer journey your visitor may take, e.g. seeing a social media post, visiting your site, moving through various pages and arriving at your landing page – and ensure that the experience is seamless and consistent.
Think through the customer journey
As mentioned above, you want to really think through your customer journey. How will people arrive at this landing page? Will they come here from an online ad and therefore have certain expectations about what they find? Are you ensuring that you meet those expectations? Will they arrive at this page after browsing through your site? These are all important points to consider when building your landing page, you may require various landing pages based on different customer journeys. If you’re working on your ‘request a quote’ landing page and its linked to from your product pages, then you won’t need to make that landing page discuss product info in detail or you may be repeating a lot of the info they just read on your product pages.
Build trust and confidence
Including testimonials, customer quotes, positive reviews, etc. is a great way to minimize a visitor’s hesitation about going through with the CTA on your landing page.
Have a clear call-to-action
Keeping your objective in mind, create a clear flow in your landing page, basing it around a single customer action that you want a visitor to complete before they leave your page. Not sure how to phrase yours? Here are 101 examples of call-to-actions.
Give incentive for visitors to preform the CTA
Your product or services are great on their own and you will effectively communicate this by listing their benefits, but it never hurts to throw in a little something extra to increase conversions. Are you looking to increase email sign-ups? Offer a discount off on your products, or a freebee when they preform the desired action. Many companies will offer a free trial, e-book, webinar, contest entry, etc. in exchange for a prospect’s information.
Measure and optimize
Make sure that you’re effectively tracking your conversions once your landing page is live. The more you know about where your visitors are coming from, who they are, and how they’re interacting with page the more you can do to ensure they preform the CTA.
Helpful links:
- Google’s customer journey to online purchase
- Formstack’s ‘anatomy of a landing page’ infographic
- Buffer’s ultimate guide to creating effective landing pages
- 10 techniques for an effective CTA
- Unbounce’s landing page course
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