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How To Build A Landing Page That Converts Well
Before you build a landing page you should some important aspects first.
18 Landing Page Best Practices
Learn what you should do in order to run successful landing page campaigns.
Learn a wide range of techniques and strategies to improve your opt-in rates.
The best way to figure out what works well is to emulate that of which already works well.
13 Conversion Tactics that Make a Good Landing Page Great
Creating a good landing page can be a very daunting task since there are various different elements that go into it - such as copy, call-to-action, imagery, and videos - that should be skillfully crafted and combined together in order to produce desired outcomes. It’s not a secret that it's a dream of every marketing team to be able to create multiple effective landing pages that can generate leads for their company and drive conversions.
But what about an average internet marketer who doesn't have a team to go around and put together a good landing page, let alone creating multiple of them?
Thankfully, for those of us, this is where landing page builders come in handy and assist internet marketers to quickly develop and deploy landing pages for testing, without having to mess with code or formatting issues.
More about various landing page builders is available here and here. Read on to learn more about what points to keep in mind before getting started with building your own set of landing pages and go through some relevant examples of these proven strategies.
What Factors Make a Good Landing Page?
Before having a look at the examples of some near-perfect landing pages, it's useful to understand about the primary building blocks of a good landing page. There are quite a few elements that a top-quality landing page requires, and getting those elements to stand out would often depends on your goals and also the features that are supported by the landing page builder tools you use.
For example, form length is just one of the various components you'd need to optimize among at least a dozen more, however best practices confirm that both long and short forms perform well and it depends on whether or not you want to generate a huge number of (possibly) low-quality form submissions, or focus on getting a smaller number of submissions that are much higher in quality.
It's important to note that squeeze pages should get focused attention of your website's visitor on an offer, and limit the distractions on your website. The visitors are getting to the landing page for just one primary purpose: and that's to grab an offer by simply completing a form.
Having said this, converting site visitors into useful leads, even with the use of multiple landing pages, is easier said than actually done. In fact, there are more than a few best practices that every digital marketer should keep in mind before setting up and then optimizing their landing pages.
The infographic shared here can be quite useful. Landing pages that are good at successfully driving action would certainly contain these response-oriented and proven copy fundamentals that are response-oriented:
- Catchy headline
- Specific and to-the-point language
- Appealing call to action
- Convincing examples
- Guarantees (if any)
- Listing the product's benefits before its features
While this might sound simple, many online marketers fail to include some of these basic copy elements while designing their landing pages and thus increase the chances of inaction shown by the visitors. This case study explain in detail how these factors can help boost the conversion rate.
13 Tips for Creating High Performing Landing Pages
Thankfully, there are numerous examples of landing pages that execute this well and it's possible to mimic parts of their design in order to achieve similar success. When planning to level up at the landing page game, it's quite useful to know what other websites are doing online, what all goes into creating a great landing page, and also see a few good examples of these elements in action.
Here are 13 tips (including examples of high performing landing pages) for using these copy fundamentals along with simplistic design to drive success:
#1 Less Is More
There's a popular phrase: KISS or “keep it simple, stupid,” and it applies to designing landing pages too. A landing page that appears to be cluttered and full of distractions can confuse or overwhelm the visitor. It can be called "landing page friction". Instead of that, it can be helpful to use more whitespace, and also keep the content on the page to-the-point.
Read more here to learn more about drafting the right copy for landing pages.
Taking an example of a bad landing page below, there are too many calls-to-action and it might be a really confusing sight for the visitor at once.
On the contrary, Square (https://squareup.com/global/en/pos) has designed a landing page with only one CTA and barely much text to read.
#2 Request the information that you really need from your visitors
The best practice is to request only the information you actually need for qualifying the leads. The lesser number of fields there are on a form, the better would be the conversion rate. This is mainly because, with every additional field in a form, it becomes more challenging for the visitor to complete it, and this results in fewer conversions.
Having said this, increasing the number of fields could be helpful in gathering better quality leads as many visitors think that the offer was actually valuable enough for them to fill up the until completion.
It becomes critical to note that only testing can help in figuring out what works best for that specific offer, and the experience comes from knowing what works and dissecting various landing pages like Rand Fishkin (VIDEO: Page Fights: featuring Rand Fishkin:
Codecademy, a free resource to learn to code for beginners, has probably got it just right.
#3 Give them something for free
Who doesn't like getting something for free? Giving away something for free primarily how a majority of lead generation campaigns operate. It's a give-and-take kind of a transaction, in which visitors exchange their personal information in exchange for a free eBook, video tutorial, product or service that can help them.
It's a way of providing a good value at the first point of contact with the visitor, so it becomes important to make the free offering valuable enough for the visitor to spike curiosity.
In the example below, American Bullion is sharing a free investment guide with anyone who will submit their name and contact information on their landing page.
#4 Create a sense of urgency
Creating a feeling of urgency in the mind of readers is definitely one of the most crucial aspects of any form of copy, and landing page design can benefit a lot from it. The visitors to the landing page have to overcome their fear of missing out (also called FOMO), so they convert more.
This tactic would work quite well for special offers that are active only for a limited time. Even if the offer is not a time sensitive one, building a sense of urgency in the visitor's mind is a proven way to get them to act fast, in this case, opting in. Countdown timers are good tools for helping do just this and create the push for action wherever required.
Having a good landing page building software like Marketizator can help you create design elements that convey a sense of urgency.
#5 Hierarchy and sequence of content
Breaking the content properly into smaller chunks can boost the conversion rate. The following sequence of presenting information is a sure shot way to make the content on landing page more concise and hence make it more readable for the visitors:- Purpose- Benefits- Bullet points summarizing the key points- Action statement
Here's a good example of a landing page, though in Spanish, for a marketing agency InboundEmotion and they have got the sequence correct.
#6 Sell the benefits instead of features
Benefits are a good way to explain to your visitors what exactly your product features will be able to do for them. This links deeply to consumer psychology. For example, when someone is looking to buy a bed, all they want from it is a good night's sleep. Internet marketers need to go beyond selling the product with its features; they need to sell what the product will help customers to do - like shared in this example.
KISSMetrics does it successfully by highlighting only what the visitors want: benefits.
#7 Provide Sufficient Information
Design and layout play a huge role in driving landing page conversions, but it’s the content on the page that matters the most - as proven by this case study worth a million dollars.
This is why it becomes important to highlight everything that the user will get after sharing their information – mention it right next to the CTA button. Visitors also want to know if the information they are sharing is going to remain private or will be shared with a third party. Also worth mentioning is the refund period and future costs involved, if any. If you use an effect landing page builder tool like Get Response they will automatically incorporate the necessary legal information into your autoresponders.
This case study shares how SAP achieved a big jump in leads by just modifying a few important aspects.
#8 Build Trust and Credibility
It's tough to build trust online. It's crucial to take care of building the trust factor, considering the fact that people buy from people they trust. One nice way to gain trust and credibility is using testimonials. Other forms of solid social proof include social media and press articles. Also, by creating and giving away high-quality content (video tutorials, e-books, blog posts, webinars etc), it's possible to establish a company or individual as an authority in the market.
Highrise by 37 signal features the image along with the testimonial of a real customer as the primary focus of their landing pages. Interestingly, if the visitor reloads the landing page, the testimonial changes.
#9 Use explainer videos
Explainer videos are used to share the details about a product or service quickly in an informative way. Such videos typically convert well when used on landing pages. Many sites claim that their conversion rates jumped (by as much as 144%) by just adding an explainer video to their landing page.
This happens because explainer videos can deliver a good amount of information in a short span of time and increase the trust that landing page visitors need to have in your business before they sign up for something.
CrazyEgg has a 2 and a half minute long explainer video that gives the website visitors an overview of the products and tools they are offering along their benefits to them - and it has been working really well for them.
#10 Remove the Sidebars and Main Navigation
After a visitor lands on an opt-in page, it becomes important to hold their attention and keep them there. If there are multiple links on that page, they can get distracted and leave the website as soon as they came, which increases lead-gen friction and results in lower conversion rate.
One of the best techniques to decrease this friction and boost the conversion rates is to simply get rid of the sidebars and main navigation present on the page.
#11 Call out the main offer in the call-to-action (CTA)
CTA buttons describe what the prospective leads can expect from a landing page and this helps to convert them better. Hubspot closely analyzed over 93,000 CTAs over a span of 12 months and figured out that CTAs targeted directly to the users tend to convert 42% better than other untargeted CTAs.
A targeted call-to-action is highly specific to the main offer being presented on the landing page. It is much more specific than simply using one single word such as “submit” or "click here" which doesn’t really address what the users will be receiving once they fill out the form and click on that button.
#12 Make it Look Great
The web page should look professional and top-notch before you drive traffic to it. This is proven a study conducted by the Stanford University. A visually appealing site with decent (but not abrupt) use of graphics and rich media makes it look more credible and professional. The right use of colors, graphics, images, and videos on a landing page becomes crucial. For the much-required design inspiration, this website can help.
#13 Data is the key to success
The key lies in split testing (A/B multivariate testing) and utilizing the data to take decisions when it comes to changing anything on a landing page - which is the only proven technique to improve the conversion rate of a landing page with time. Test out different headlines and layout along all the various important components of the landing page to keep optimizing its performance further.
Apart from this, marketers can build multiple landing pages on their websites based on this knowledge, use existing studies to gain insights and make their landing pages convert even better. If you don't have a huge budget to build landing pages, then check out this cheap landing page builder.
Summary
There's no doubt about the fact that the lead-capture forms are one of the most important tools for lead generation. Without using them, online marketers would limit their ability to convert the website visitors into valuable leads, not to mention the possibility of generating re-conversions too by adding them to the respective mailing lists. By testing out various factors outlined above, anyone can build and replicate the success with landing pages in just about any niche or market under the sun.
To take action or not; that is basically what every visitor has to decide after getting to a landing page - and this is what a good landing page should help them decide.
We hope this guide proves helpful in helping you create the best possible landing page for your website.