The first impression is the last impression! True to each word, the first impression does matter, at least when we are talking about landing page design. With thousands of websites competing for attention, getting traffic to your site is clearly not child’s play. Once you get traffic, it’s a shame that you’ll just let it go to waste just because your landing page design is sloppy and not made to fulfill its role. A poorly designed landing page with poor navigation, shabby colors, and unreadable fonts is sure to turn the users off.
So how a landing page should be ideally designed? What are the various factors that define the efficiency of a landing page?
There is a popular misconception that a landing page or a home page should contain all the possible information about the company and its services. But unlike other web pages of your website, a landing page is a page that offers further information after a potential customer clicks on a smaller entrenched advertisement on another web page. In fact, for a landing page to be a good one, it should contain only the necessary information that will engage the visitors and give them a good overall experience. It should contain a catchy message for one and all and should be attractive enough to draw more and more attention.
Let’s talk more about this in detail. Check out the effective landing page creation secrets that work here!
There are some prerequisites to consider while building an affluent landing page for your website.
Before creating a good landing page, you must have a clear-cut idea and a goal for your landing page plan. Then you must figure out an appropriate strategy as to how you want to reach the goal in the first place.
Only when you know where you are heading and the path to choose, can it lead you to the ultimate success! You have everything in your hands.
Be very clear about what you want your user to do. Should he just go happy about it, or take a call to action, should he visit your store, should share his email id or whatsoever?
One must realize who they are up against. Having knowledge about competitors and judging their strengths and weaknesses can be beneficial on the path to success.
Keep your competitors close to you! Have a look at all the strategies that worked for them. Work on the same strategies with different flavors as per your brand’s identity.
Determining the target audience is essential. If the target audience can be fixed beforehand, it can help the maker of the landing page create the content of the page in such a way that it can cater to their basic requirements, needs, and wants.
How the audience was directed to the landing page, is an important factor in determining the kind of message that the landing page will have. Obviously, there is no one-fit solution for all. The landing page that one lands on after getting redirected from Facebook should be different from the one when he lands from AdWords, and so forth.
Now that the prerequisites for creating a landing page have been taken care of, one must move on to consider the things required while building a landing page.
The landing page should be short and sweet and should contain only the necessary information in the right form. Keep it balanced.
While too less information can keep various questions of your users unanswered, too much information can overwhelm them. Thus, the information should be provided just in a short form but should describe everything in it.
The overall design, look and feel of your landing page must have a huge impact on the mind of your visitors, and then only it will be able to drive conversions for your website. The primary aim of your landing page should be inclined towards converting the traffic on your website to fruitful leads.
Hence, it is equally important that all the elements of your website must work towards conversion objectives, no matter whether it is related to filling a form, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a PDF document.
Clean design means that it should have high-quality images with a clear background to compel the visitors to stay for a longer duration on your site, which will eventually improve your chances of generating revenues.
A clean page with user-friendly navigation and without any distractions is necessary to offer a better user experience to visitors. A good landing page should include all the information required for a compelling visitor to do extra for just visiting your website.
However, offering too much information can also irritate the visitors, so try to maintain a balance between the information and the graphics used on your landing page to ensure improved leads.
Take into consideration what key information should be displayed above the fold within the visitor’s direct line of vision. A good landing page must maintain a clear and organized design while allowing visitors to access the information in an intrusive way. If the information provided on the landing page is not inspirational, it might not be as alluring for the audience as you want it to be. The visitors should be drawn to the website and inspired to know more about the website and all it has to offer.
You can also use effective videos for offering more information to your visitors. Do not forget to highlight the key points that you are going to provide to your clients if they choose to subscribe to your services
A good landing page must show a strong offer and also explain why this offer is important in concise and clear terms. Most of the impressive landing pages confirm their offers with the headline while they use the subheading for explaining their offer to share their value proposition.
Some landing pages prefer to push their value proportion to the main headline and use their subheading to discuss their actual offer. However, you must remember that you have only seconds to compel your visitor for making the final purchase.
Your message is there and your content is in place. However, your site is so gaudily designed that users don’t want to stay in it. Imagine this. You have perfectly good leather but you wasted it by making it into a badly designed pair of shoes.
Your landing page should be visually appealing. Pay attention to typography, color scheme, graphics, layout, and other aesthetic elements. Make sure that your design reflects the personality of your brand builds your credibility and contributes to achieving your business objectives.
A landing page with crisp content is the best thing you can have. The design should be made such that it is more approachable to the audience and should be user-friendly. Navigation should be kept simple and information should be provided in an attractive format so that it can be viewed right away.
Speaking of clutter and saying too many things at the same time, your landing page should be as single-minded as possible. Some marketers have the mindset that since traffic is already there, might as well say everything they want to say. When faced with several options, consumers get confused and do not choose at all. To achieve conversion optimization, identify what your objective is, set a call to action for that goal, and stick to it. Also, keep your call to action above the fold.
After all, this is what you have designed your landing page for, right? If you expect your audiences to fill out a form, make sure it is properly placed. Similarly, pay proper attention to other call-to-action buttons like ‘register’ and ‘submit’ buttons.
Always make sure to keep your messaging constant in both your call-to-action and the headline of your landing page. If the visitor clicks on the CTA for catching a free offer and found that is only a catch to your landing page, you will surely lose their trust. Also, if the headline does not match with its corresponding CTA, it might lead to confusion.
Therefore, eliminate the chances of confusion or losing your visitor’s trust by including a matching headline with its corresponding CTA.
Basically, this is to make sure that the audience should not have any trouble following various instructions.
Without a good headline, you are like catching a fish without a hook or bait. Once a visitor arrives on your landing page, you literally have seconds to convince them to stay. In fact, an arresting headline can be the single most powerful tool for conversion optimization. A good headline should capture the visitor’s emotion. It should be concise and direct to the point and at the same time, should be creatively written in order to engage visitors. It’s best practice to perform split testing on several headline variations before launching your landing page.
Headlines are what grab maximum eyes. ‘Lose extra weight in 5 days with proven results is far better than ‘How to lose weight’. Do you notice the difference? The headline should be such that it excites the users and prompts them to take the required call to action.
If the headlines are dull and boring, the audience might not be as interested as the landing page owner wants them to be.
If you have an impressive offer and you are promoting it well, then you will likely be able to drive more traffic from different sources. Customize your landing pages as per the requirement of different audiences for better productivity through your online business.
Talk about what the visitor will get if they do business with you. After all, not many of them will be interested to hear only about your inspirations and aspirations. They would rather want to know what service and information the company can offer them.
You must know that a visitor who arrives at your website through Twitter or Facebook is quite different from a visitor who arrives at your website through PPC. Therefore, tailor your landing pages to cater to the different needs of your individual visitors.
Who wants to read those boring piles of texts one after the other? They hinder readability. The better way here is to make the content easily scannable such that the important points get attention in the blink of an eye.
How to do this? Simply by bolding the important points! Pointers also work well. Representing the info in various subheads and pointers not only enhances its readability but also makes it look organized.
To work on the quality of the landing page and make it more attractive for the audience, colorful images that are relevant to the page should be added as and when necessary. This will help to hold on to the interest of the audience all along.
If the landing page has clickable share buttons, there are chances that the visitors will like it more. This is because in the present day a lot of people like sharing their experiences and purchases with their friends, family, and others.
‘Like’ and ‘share’ buttons have proved to be beneficial for various brands time and again. How many times have you checked the products when your friends have shared them on Facebook? The same concept applies here.
As an online marketer, you must want to collect more information from your visitor once he or she visits your website. However, when it comes to implementing an effective and optimized landing page, keeping your forms short is more important to save your traffic from moving away from your website without filling out the form. If your form has lesser fields to be filled by the visitors, then there are greater chances that they will fill your form, but if it has more fields, then they might feel irritated and leave your site without filling the form.
As most users prefer to visit pages and make transactions and purchases from mobiles these days, it is essential that the landing page of any company website should be mobile-friendly and easily accessible.
This is one of the important elements of modern web design. It not only pays to have a mobile-friendly landing page but having a mobile-friendly website is equally important too.
To prove the authenticity of the services, the landing page should contain trust signals and logos of big, well-known, and popular companies on their website to build trust for the visitor. Trust signals can be of different types, but testimonials are considered the most effective type of trust signal as they reassure the visitors with the endorsement of their past client’s experiences. Logos of companies that you have worked for or provided services to can be the right signal as well. It will prove the goodwill of the company to the audience in the first place and will be very beneficial for the business.
You can also implement trust badges on your landing pages for generating trust among your visitors that your site is safe to carry for all types of transactions. Trust badges always refer to some reputed brands with whom you have worked in the past in the form of certain certifications or recognitions. They serve as an advertisement for your skills and trustworthiness.
It is very necessary to ensure that the landing pages are in accordance with your requirements and behave as you intended.
To achieve this, A/B testing is conducted wherein a simultaneous test is conducted between two or more pages and the page which performs the best is studied. Tests are conducted to check headlines, call to action, content placement, etc. on the landing page and the traffic so achieved is calculated.
To excel in the art of landing page creation, it is necessary that the landing page is simple, lucid, and readable for the dedicated audience.
Make sure you use the simplest font, highlight the heading, and put in the main information in the subheadings. The information should be put in a bullet format to make it more approachable to the audience.
Thus, just creating a random landing page for a good website is not enough. Following the necessary steps and meeting the prerequisites is essential to lead to a good landing page and attract more and more visitors to the page altogether.
An effective landing page must match its page copy with the PPC ads displayed over them because repeating the same key phrases or language reassures visitors’ consistency and reliability.
It is equally important to offer visitors the content they are looking for directly. If a user clicks a PPC ad on your landing page, don’t drive to another section because if you are able to match your user requirement closely, then the chances of a better conversion rate increase.
How can we forget the importance of social sharing when it comes to generating impressive revenue through your landing page? Always include social media sharing widgets to maximize your site’s chances of evangelizing your offers and content.
Only include those social media widgets, which are commonly used within your network. Even if your social contact doesn’t make a purchase from your site, it improves the chances that someone will definitely make a purchase in their networks.
Digital marketing is not just about optimizing your website to increase its ranking in search results of popular search engines, but it is also about how efficiently you have designed your website’s landing page so that the driven traffic on your site yields definite conversion rates. After all, the complete success of digital marketing depends on the perfect execution of ideas and thoughts.
Oftentimes, marketers focus too much on what is happening above the fold that they ignore the possibility that these site visitors will scroll to the bottom of the page. Your landing page cannot be superior on the upper half and inferior on the lower half. Stop taking shortcuts and ensure that your landing page in its entirety is peppered with good content and great visuals.
Today in the age of this digital era, every business owner understands the importance of online presence in order to stay connected with the customers. Landing pages are different from a website’s homepage and they give you an opportunity to create marketing campaigns for your customers and are the most important aspect to generate leads for any business owner. In case of the absence of appropriately designed landing pages, there are very few opportunities available to convert website visitors into potential customers and generate sales. This is because landing pages help us to redirect the website visitors to the right pages which can capture leads at a higher rate than any other web page.
Remember that these landing pages should be professional in their design and should have good technical as well as a content base in their structure.
To excel in the art of landing page creation, it is necessary that the landing page is simple, lucid, and readable for the dedicated audience. Make sure you use the simplest font, highlight the heading, and put in the main information in the subheadings. The information should be put in a bullet format to make it more approachable to the audience.
Thus, just creating a random landing page for a good website is not enough. Following the necessary steps and meeting the prerequisites is essential to lead to a good landing page and attract more and more visitors to the page altogether.