This is a guest post by Katrina Manning, a content marketing specialist who has penned thousands of articles on business, tech, lifestyle and digital marketing for a wide variety of global B2B clients. In her free time, she enjoys fundraising for charitable causes, playing with her cat and baking.
Landing pages are standalone pages with the objective of converting visitors into taking a specific action. If you want to sell products or services, you need a landing page. This helps a prospect to understand what you’re offering and turn them into customers. How well your landing page does this is known as the conversion rate. So, it is up to you to ensure your page converts.
Suppose you have online ads set up, which direct prospects to your landing page. When someone clicks on your ad, it takes them to that very page. Now that they’re there, can you convince them to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter? This is why your landing page is one of the most important parts of your sales process. Your landing page must efficiently convert visitors into high-quality leads for your business.
If your landing page can triple your conversion rate, then you can triple your leads for the same amount of ad spend. This is also why it is mind-boggling that many businesses don’t pay attention to their landing pages. When your landing page does its job, you spend less money per lead. Imagine having spent thousands of dollars on online ads, yet, you’re still not making any money. It could be your landing page to blame.
A converting landing page can add hundreds, thousands and millions of dollars in revenue if it works. But, a converting landing page is more than just a beautiful website. In fact, many pretty sites don’t convert well. It actually helps to have a landing page separate from your website. The main goal of your landing page is to keep your prospects focused on the action you want them to take. This should be the best first step for getting people into your sales funnel.
You don’t want to give website visitors too many choices or too many distractions. Instead, mention the biggest benefits you offer and a reason why visitors should contact you. In fact, your prospects should have all the information they need within minutes to decide if they should contact you. So, what does it look like? Here is a real example:
A landing page without a goal is similar to shooting in the dark. So, the first step is to determine what you want to accomplish with your landing page. Getting more conversions isn’t focused enough. You must know how you intend to get more conversions.
For some companies, it can be making that first sale. For others, it can be sign-ups for a newsletter. You might also use your landing page to turn a free user into a premium one. This is why it is essential to have a clear goal in mind before creating your landing page.
You can’t be all things, to all people. Every consumer has different needs and wants. What you can do is segment your customers and develop a landing page around your target market. For example, people who live in tropical climates may have different interests from those who live in drier regions of the planet. In terms of marketing, you must have a deep understanding of your audience’s needs and wants. You want to move your prospects through your sales funnel. But, you must know what drives them to make purchase decisions. Moreover, you should understand their pain points.
What solution and benefits will your offering provide to your target market? How can your company solve their pain points? With all of these points in mind, how can your landing page help your prospects visualize how much better their life could be after they purchase one of your products and/or services? Not to mention, if your product is of greater value, your landing page must excel at conversions.
Get a deeper understanding about your customers and segment them using psychographic data with this detailed guide.
Today’s consumers are very skeptical of ads without proof. You can tell them how great your product is, but they will only think you’re just doing your job. Buyers have been overwhelmed with ridiculous advertising tactics that don’t have proof to back up their claims.
Marketers can say anything about their products, and many do. As a result, consumers have started to distrust marketers. When you tell them how amazing your product or service is, their first response is usually “Yeah, right!” The modern consumer wants proof.
So, what you need are testimonials–even better are video testimonials. But, any form of honest testimonial will do. You should include an image of the person and a real job title. There are many plugins that can pull and display testimonials for you on your landing pages. And, your testimonials should be specific.
You want them to read more than just, “I love it!” It would be better if it said something like this, “ABC’s widget helped us save 25.7 percent on research costs, as a result, we have doubled our production ROI.” Specific testimonials, from real people, will help increase your landing page conversions.
Buyers want to feel connected to companies. They want you to tug at their heartstrings, to be authentic and show a bit of personality. On the other hand, don’t overwhelm them. Because too much personality can come across as obnoxious or even insulting.
You must strike a delicate balance. You can joke with your reader, but don’t take the humor far enough to where it appears you are making fun of your reader. You can utilize A/B testing to figure out how much humor will lead to more conversions.
A video can increase conversion rates by up to 80 percent. People want to see your product or service in action. In addition, your video needs to be clear and straightforward. Furthermore, it should not be longer than two to three minutes. People don’t want to spend 15 minutes looking at a video from a company they’ve never shopped at before. Show interesting people doing neat things with your content.
If people are inundated with choices, they will take much longer to make a decision. This is why it is imperative to keep your landing page short and sweet. Don’t ask your visitors to fill out several pages of forms. You don’t need a link for all of your offices or all of your products. You don’t need to overwhelm them with content. The simpler your page, the easier it is to get someone to make a decision and take the action you want.
Eliminate items that don’t lead to your desired result. After your visitor makes the desired action, you can send them more information about your company. The landing page just needs to be relevant to its purpose. Make sure your visuals focus on your page’s most important features. Remove any distracting links or content. Restraint and focus helps to increase conversions.
Visitors will bounce if your content is boring and unpersuasive. The focus needs to be on the pain points of your visitors and how you can solve them. You also want to make sure your content is easy to read.
A landing page is not the time to get your visitors to read highly-technical documents. Instead, you want a lot of white space with short sentences and paragraphs. Your message should be focused on your visitors, not on your company or products. They want to know what’s in it for them.
A catchy headline matters.Your headline must capture the attention of your potential visitors. You want to keep them intrigued and interested in wanting to learn more. You can have the most effective landing page on the planet, but it won’t do any good without an enticing headline. The headline is the first thing your visitor will see.
It should answer these questions: How will your visitor benefit? Does it clearly describe your product or service. Most of all, your headline should be short and concise. The good news is you don’t have to do it alone. This headline analyzer from CoSchedule will let you know if your headline is compelling enough to attract visitors or not.
What is a call-to-action? This is section of text or an image that compels your readers to take a specific action such as “Call Now” or “Click Here.” Your call-to-action can be placed anywhere on your landing page. Yet, within a couple of seconds, your visitors should know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.
In addition, you should never have more than one call-to-action per landing page. When people arrive at a landing page, they will either skim and leave or stick around. You need to capture their attention quickly with a clear call-to-action. In fact, your landing page should only have one purpose. Everything on your page must be centered around that purpose.
Free stock images are great, but don’t use them on your landing pages unless they are relevant to your CTA. First impressions make a big difference. The right images can help to speed up your conversions. The wrong images will only increase your bounce rates.
Don’t put generic stock images that have nothing to do with your product or service. Only use images that are completely relevant to your message. Also, make sure your images are unique and high-quality.
Landing pages can truly impact your conversions, if they are designed correctly. By using the above tips, you can truly create a landing page that converts.
