How to Create a Kickass Landing Page
Have you heard of landing pages? These are pages on your website where a user can take a specific action, like buying a product or downloading a report.
A landing page is different from a typical page on your website because it has a singular focus: just one thing that a user should do on that specific page. A user might get to one of your landing pages after you link to it in a social media post, an ad, or in an email. If you’ve ever clicked on an ad for shoes and went right to the purchase page so you could buy them in your size, you’ve seen this in action!
Why do your landing pages matter? Having a strong landing page can be the difference between 300 hundred customers and 3000. The goal is to send users to these pages and see that they’re taking action right away. On average, you can expect a typical landing page to have a 5-15% conversion rate, meaning that 5-15% of the visitors to that page take the action you want them to take.
You can have the most awesome social media posts ever, or the most beautiful email, or the coolest advertising campaign, but if your user clicks on any of those things and lands on a cluttered, ugly, illogical landing page… you’ve lost that potential sale.
Try these five tips to improve your landing pages, ASAP!
Hook 'em with your headline
First, let’s talk about headlines.
David Ogilvy once said,
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Taking the time to create a compelling headline will do more for you than nearly anything else on your landing page.
Focus on these three elements:
Clarity: What is this page about? Make it immediately obvious for your user, like this.
Relevance: Why should I care about this page? Show your user the value of what they’ll get on this page, like this.
Empathy: Do you understand my problem? Validate your user’s emotions and offer them a solution. For example, remind your visitor of their problem (terrible email service) and validate their emotions (“you deserve more”). This type of headline brings attention to the problem and promises to fix it, so the user can feel better.
Check out more examples of great landing page headlines here.
Create a captive audience
Removing or limiting your navigation on your web page may seem counterintuitive at first. We want people to know us and explore our entire site, right?
Nope. Not when it comes to a truly great landing page. This page has just one purpose: to get a user to fill out a form or make a purchase. This is your sales pitch.
By removing navigation from the page, you keep your visitor from getting distracted and clicking away from your landing page, possibly never returning.
Once a visitor has completed the form or action on the page, then you can direct them to your full website or another page.
This simple adjustment can have a significant impact! Here’s an example.
Give 'em something to talk about
No matter what you’re offering, in return you’re asking for a user’s most valuable information: their contact information. Once you collect their email and name, you have future opportunities to connect with them and sell them on more products or services. So make sure the things you’re offering on your landing pages are truly valuable to your user.
Bottom line, a user gives you their email address because they trust you. Take that trust seriously; if that trust is ever broken, you’ve lost more than just a sale… you’ve lost a potential lifetime of sales, as well as potential recommendations to new customers.
Get some inspiration for high-value offers here.
KISS (Keep It Short & Sweet)
Make your page interesting and informative… but not boring.
There are lots of ways to convey information that don’t involve long paragraphs that your user probably won’t read. Video is a great way to share information about your product, service, or company in an exciting way.
Veem does a great job with this on their website. The videos they share are short, informative, and compelling while being about something as potentially boring as... payment systems.
You also want to keep the page itself short. This reduces “friction” by limiting the amount of work the visitor has to do to scroll through all the content. If you can keep the whole page “above the fold” and still include everything you need, you’ve got it.
However, there are two schools of thought to this. Some argue that longer landing pages can lead to greater conversions, because the user invests more time and effort into reading all your content and feels more invested in it as a result. All their concerns can be addressed up front, and you can put every user benefit and compelling bit of information all in one place.
Is a longer landing page better? Maybe! How do we know? Test it out. Create a long landing page and a short one, and see how your users respond.
Tell 'em what you want them to do
Your landing page has one purpose; to collect the information you need from the visitor. Make sure your call to action is straightforward, easy to navigate, and correctly displayed. Test your purchase process or sign-up form multiple times, and on mobile, too!
The more comfortable you can make it for your visitor, the more likely they will complete your call to action. A great way to do this is to have your form at the top of the page, and at the bottom if your page is long.
BONUS: Make it shareable
Take your landing page to the next level by making it shareable. If you’re offering a great deal or service, your visitors will be excited to share it with others - doing the work for you!
When creating your landing pages, you can build them directly on your website, or you can use a third-party platform like MailChimp. At The Good Lemon, we’ve created landing pages in MailChimp, and it saves us a lot of time managing our email list!
If you need support building your landing pages give us a shout; we would be happy to help or connect you with one of our incredible collaborators.