It’s a fact: Landing pages can help generate qualified leads and increase your sales and business goals while lowering your advertising/marketing costs.
The easier you make it for your visitors to see who you are, what you’re offering, the value you provide and what you’re asking in return, the more likely that person is going to convert.
Here are 30 tips you should immediately use to make the copy, design, layout and ease-of-use of your landing page more effective today.
Easy to Navigate
Keep your page free of too much information, too many pictures and too much clutter. Make it easy to see why your visitor is on your page and what they need to do. Keep in mind, online users have an attention span of about a few seconds, if you can’t clearly deliver your message within a few seconds to a visitor who lands on your page, you’re doing something wrong and it’s costing you big time.
Bullet Points
Make it easy to understand your advantages and more people will want what you are offering. See how Wishpond does this properly on one of their many landing page templates with easy-to-read bullet points.
Clear and Concise Headlines
Being one of the first things your visitors will read, your landing page headlines should not confuse or bore, but convince a visitor to take a closer look and pay attention. Addressing a specific point that is related to the content of the website will catch a reader’s attention more than having an imprecise and boring headline. Use your headline to immediately show how your visitors will benefit if they keep reading and click on your CTA.
Whitespace
Use clean designs and direct your client’s attention to your offer, benefits and Call to Action. Leave empty space on your page to increase conversions by providing a clear design of what it is you’re offering and what your visitors’ next step should be, no better way to do that than by using whitespace to your advantage.
Images
You know that pictures tell a thousand words. This is specifically true online. Images are the most shared and liked content on social media. They can be very productive and convincing on your lead-generating landing pages too. The more a potential customer likes your page and relates to your design/images, the more likely they’ll convert.
Complementary (and contrasting) Colours
Colour design is extremely important in optimizing your landing page. Use complementary colour schemes to make your page appealing to the eye. Make your Call-to-Action in a contrasting colour to stand out.
If you don’t have a graphic designer, there’s a number of free colour scheme tools online such as Hex Color Scheme Generator or Adobe Kuler! Check them out!
5 Second Rule
The ‘5 second rule’ applies to landing pages too. You’ve got about 5 seconds to attract and draw in your visitors. If your page doesn’t appeal immediately, your potential customer won’t hesitate to visit a competitor, which might even be your competitor’s one!
Impeccable Grammar
Not just landing pages, but all website grammar needs to be perfect. Always double and triple check your copy, and have someone else read it through. In the case of an online retailer who is asking for visitors to purchase and provide personal and billing information, the trust of the customer will be risked if there are spelling errors and grammar mistakes.
This page has one small grammar error, but that one error can make a difference in conversions. You’re asking visitors to trust you. Grammatical errors are not a great beginning.
Call To Action
Your Call to Action (CTA) is the action you are asking your visitor to take. Your CTA should be the most noticeable characteristic on your landing page. Make your Call to Action buttons clear and use contrasting colours. Keep them short and use action-oriented words to invoke an immediate reaction. When possible, try to include a benefit in your CTA.
Blue Apron has a strong call-to-action on this page. It’s clear what the user should do and even highlights a per person price.
Buttons & Call to Actions Should Stand Out
Determine the keywords people interested in your service might be looking for and use words such as free,
new,
buy,
or download now.
A conversion button should stand out and be placed right below a call-to-action or have the call-to-action as the button. In addition, the button should be big, bright, and above the fold.
Keep it Above the Fold
The space a visitor sees without having to scroll is where the most relevant parts of the webpage should be. Place the call-to-action button above the fold and in a location where the viewer’s eye will scan to. Never have the button or form in a place where it has to be searched for.
Competitive Advantage
Use your marketing smarts to show how and why you’re better than your competition. Show off your unique selling point for your campaign. The more convincing you are to your market, the more sales you will get.
Sense of Urgency
Use scarcity tactics such as a limited supply of your product offering, limited time for your offer, or a coupon that expires shortly for example.
To create urgency, use phrases such as “only two days left”, “limited supply”, “don’t miss out”, “click now, while supplies last”.
Know Your Offer
Before you create your landing page, figure out what your offer is. Answer questions like:
- What problem are you solving?
- What are the specifics of your campaign?
- How will your offer most benefit your customer – and why should they care?
Know Your Customer
In order to design and create a fully optimized landing page, you need to know who it is you’re marketing to. Make a list of demographics for your target market, or even write out a number of buyer personas that detail the daily behaviours of your intended consumer. Make customer personas to understand your consumer, their needs and their online behaviors.
Taking Advantage of Trust Indicators
For an effective way of building trust, include testimonials, reviews, press mentions, and 3rd party trust and security certification.
This landing page from Mayflower uses the company’s average rating to display trust in their service.
Always Be Testing
Optimize a landing page for conversion over time. Run A/B tests, change copy, images, and call-to-actions to see what resonates most with users. Moreover, testing two completely different site designs against each other will be beneficial in the long run.
Know your competition
It’s business. Check out your competition and do a competitive analysis for their landing pages. Your research can help you reach two goals: inspiration to outperform their page, or generate creativity to innovate something unique.
Contact Information
Show your phone number, social network links, and even the address and a map of your location. The more accessible you are, the more friendly and ‘open for business’ you look. Don’t hide from your customers if you want their business.
Example of a renovation landing page with a clear phone number in the upper right hand corner.
Don’t Oversell
Don’t over-promise only to under-deliver. That is the fastest way to lose trust – and customers. Say what you’re offering, and give your customers what you’ve promised. Once they’ve got what they want, then give them a little more. You may be pleasantly surprised at the word-of-mouth marketing you gain as well as returning customers.
Use Oversized Buttons
Donʼt be afraid to design big shiny buttons that really stand out. They donʼt need to be grey or be the same height as a standard text field. Go big to stop your visitors from going elsewhere.
Don’t Repeat Errors of The Past
It might sound simple, but unless you make the effort to record problems in old campaigns you will never learn from them. Put a big poster on the wall with your top 10 things to avoid doing, or reminders of things you’ve learnt from previous landing pages.
Colors
Colors that attract a visitor will vary between different sites, audiences and so on. Applying the right colors might draw in traffic, bore viewers, or scare others away. They set the mood of a landing pages and influence a viewer’s actions. It’s important you choose the right colors for your lander, product and even more so, your visitors. Pick a color that associates itself with trust in your industry.
Go Easy on The Links
Links connecting the user to a a lot of other sites or pages will distract them and have a negative result on conversions. Lots of links may make sense on a regular home page, but on a landing page, simplicity is key.
This landing page is well designed, but look at all those headers links getting in the way of the message! Remove excess links in order to reduce the distraction level on your landing page!
Show a Face
Studies have shown that using smiling faces increases trust. Show the face of you, you and your team or a happy customer. Increasing trust is a big step towards increasing conversions.
Speak to Your Customer
Use “you” in your landing page copy. Think of your landing page as a place where someone is visiting you in-person. If your demographic is the millennial generation, use language and images that relate. if you’re marketing to a geo-location target, use local references to give trust that you’re a business that relates to them personally.
Use Customer Testimonials
Share good quotes from your customers – and show their face and name or website if possible. People trust the opinions of other people, particularly those of friends. Social endorsements are an efficient way to gain trust in future customers.
Use Images and Videos that Relate to Copy
Implementing motivational speeches, videos of user testimonials, and product images into a home page can have a positive impact on viewers, as well as give shoppers additional motivation to look further into a product.
Bellroy uses great imagery and videos on many of their pages. Every product page has a great video and a large number of pictures of that wallet. This makes selecting the right wallet extremely easy for buyers, it’s a close as a visitor can get to actually touching the wallet without being in its physical presence (in a retail store for example).
Use Keywords in Your Page Title
Make sure to include your targeted keywords in your page title, this will help less with conversions but more with SEO, and who doesn’t want free traffic?
Include Social Sharing Buttons
Google “likes” a highly shared page. Make your social sharing buttons easy to see on your page. Put them at the top of your page, and make them highly visible on your landing page. They help with SEO, getting more social traffic for free, and most importantly they serve as social proof which definitely helps increase your landing page’s conversion rate.
Start with a few of these tips – or try them all – to immediately increase your landing page’s success.
Which ones are you already using, and which ones are you thinking of trying out? We’d love to hear about optimization strategies that are working for you, so leave a comment below and make sure to let us know how your next landing page performs!