In marketing-speak, the term “landing page” refers to a standalone webpage created as part of a specific marketing campaign. The visitor will “land” on this page after hitting a link the website owner has strategically placed elsewhere, such as in an email or online ad.
Therefore, a landing page is precisely geared towards spurring sales – rather than also encouraging visitors to explore other parts of the site. So, how can you engineer your own landing pages to generate those sales – or, to put it more succinctly, “convert” visitors?
Capture the visitor’s attention with the headline
Why should the visitor read the landing page once they are there? That’s the question you should answer with your page’s headline. If you don’t lure people into reading past the headline, work you’ve put into whatever’s beneath it can ultimately end up going to waste.
As it’s hard to strike the perfect balance between a snappy headline and one that also encapsulates what your brand is about, writing the headline isn’t something you should rush.
Insert just one persuasive call to action
One common mistake when putting together a landing page is including multiple calls to action. However, if someone sees, say, one invitation to buy, another to subscribe and a third to download something, that person could too easily feel bewildered and just decide to leave the page.
For this reason, you should limit your page to just one call to action – and be specific with it. You should also let the user know exactly what they can expect from taking this action.
Include lots of social proof
This is important because whoever comes across your landing page could see a certain level of risk in doing what it asks them to do. Hence, you should demonstrate to the user that many people have already taken you up on your offer and benefitted immensely from it.
The social proof can be in the form of customer reviews – and, if you’ve got any relevant qualifications or accreditations from respected bodies, don’t be afraid to list those credentials, too.
Make the page’s layout easy to navigate
This means resisting from going overboard with the number of paragraphs, colours, menus and other elements on the landing page. The call to action needs to be front and centre.
Some elements, however, can work well at boosting your conversion rate. Just make sure you keep things relatively simple and to the point. For example, if you are advertising a product, the page should probably visually show it only in one static image and a few explainer videos.
Attract enough qualified traffic
Even a very well-designed landing page could garner disappointingly few returns if many of the people you draw to it aren’t naturally inclined to buy the kind of thing it advertises.
Your success in luring the “right” people to your landing page could be driven by other aspects of your marketing strategy – and we can help you to polish those if you get in touch with our web development studio.
