Landing pages hosted directly on your website can generate qualified leads and increase your sales.
Optimizing your website landing pages can increase conversions exponentially. More leads for your business equals more ROI for your bottom line.
Here are 25 tips you can act on right now to improve your landing page results.
Clean and Clear Landing Page Template Design
The easier you make it for your web visitors to see who you are, what you’re offering, and what you’re asking in return, the more likely that person is going to convert.
Obvious, right? You’d be surprised at how many businesses don’t get this – or just can’t effectively implement it.
Here’s 7 tips to improve your landing page design for conversions:
1. Easy to navigate – Keep your page free of too much information, too many images and too much clutter. Avoid conversion drop-offs by making it easy to see why your visitor is on your page and what they need to do.
2. Bullet points – Your online visitors are skimmers and scanners. Make it easy to understand your benefits and more people will want what you’ve offering.
Example of Wishpond landing page template with easy-to-read bullet points.
3. Whitespace – Use clean designs and direct your prospect’s attention to your offer, benefits and Call to Action. Leave empty space on your page to increase conversions.
4. Images – You know it – pictures tell a thousand words. This is particularly true online. Images are the most shared and liked content on social sites. They’re very effective on your lead-generating landing pages too. The more a potential customer likes your page, the more likely they’ll convert.
5. Complementary (and contrasting) colours – Colour design is extremely important in optimizing your landing page. Use complementary colour schemes to make your page appealing to the eye. Make your Call-to-Action in a contrasting colour to stand out.
If you don’t happen to have a graphic designer in house, there’s a number of free colour scheme tools online such as:
Hex Color Scheme Generator
Adobe Kuler
Color Scheme Designer
6. Above the fold – Keep your CTA, form fields and benefits ‘above the fold’. In other words, make sure all your pertinent landing page information can be seen on screen, without having to scroll down. (People don’t generally scroll – unless they’re very motivated to do so.)
7. 5 second rule – Yup, the ‘5 second rule’ applies to landing pages too. You’ve got about 5 seconds to attract and draw in your consumer. If your page doesn’t appeal immediately, your prospect will leave to other pages – maybe even your competitor’s!
Marketing on Your Landing Page
Your landing page is the hub of your marketing campaign. It’s where you direct your traffic from social media sites, online advertising, email campaigns and so on. When traffic lands on your page, you need to market effectively to get your interested visitor to convert.
Here’s 7 tips to optimize your marketing tactics for conversions:
8. CTA – Your Call to Action (CTA) is the action you are asking your visitor to take. Your CTA should be the most prominent feature on your landing page. Make your Call to Action buttons clear, with contrasting colours. Keep them short, action-oriented words to invoke an immediate reaction. Show the obvious appeal or value exchange in your CTA – make yours an offer they can’t refuse.
Top action-getting CTA words include:
9. Competitive advantage – Use your marketing smarts to succinctly show how and why you’re better than your competition. Use your company tagline or a unique selling point for your campaign. The more convincing you are to your market, the more leads and sales you’ll get.
10. Sense of urgency – Use scarcity tactics such as a limited supply of your product offering, limited time for your offer, or limited numbers for offer.
To create urgency, use phrases such as:
11. “What’s in it for me?” – Answer your customer’s question by providing a convincing list of benefits your offer provides. Show that your product, service, coupon, contest or whatever it is you’re offering gives so much value that they simply can’t refuse. Show your value proposition with words and images on your landing page.
12. Know your offer – Before you create your landing page, determine what your offer is. Answer questions like:
What problem are you solving?
What are the specifics of your campaign?
How will your offer most benefit your customer – and why should they care?
13. Know your customer – In order to design and create a fully optimized landing page, you need to know who it is you’re marketing to. Make a list of demographics for your target market, or even write out a number of buyer personas that detail the daily behaviours of your intended consumer.
Make customer personas to understand your consumer and their online behaviours.
The better you understand your customer, the more you can appeal to them.
14. Know your competition – It’s business. Check out your competition and do a competitive analysis for their landing page campaigns. Your research can serve two purposes: inspiration to outperform their page, or generate creativity to innovate something unique.
Develop Trust and Consistency on Your Landing Page
Be upfront about who you are and keep consistent about your offer on your landing page. You’ll gain more trust by clearly communicating your business and what you provide. The more a person trusts you, the more likely they’ll be prepared to convert.
Here’s 7 tips to increase trust on your campaign landing page:
15. Contact information – Show your phone number, social network links, and even the address and a map and of your location. The more accessible you are, the more friendly and ‘open for business’ you look. Don’t hide from your customer if you want their business.
Example of renovation landing page with a clear phone number in the upper left hand corner.
16. Don’t oversell – Perhaps I learned this lesson the hard way. I spent nearly a decade working in politics (yeah, need I say more?). Don’t over-promise only to under-deliver. That is the fastest way to lose trust – and customers. Say what you’re offering, and give your customers what you’ve promised. Once they’ve got what they want – then give them a little more. You may be pleasantly surprised at the word-of-mouth marketing you gain.
17. Keep your campaign consistent – This seems pretty obvious, but when you’re running a marketing campaign, make sure whatever your promotion is about remains the same through your sales funnel. This includes your landing page. Keep your list of benefits and unique selling points the same throughout your online advertising and promotions.
18. Show a face – Studies have shown that using smiling faces (particularly the smiling face of a woman) increases trust. Show the face of you, you and your team or a happy customer. You increase your trust – which means you increase conversions.
Example of Wishpond landing page templatewith images of smiling people.
19. Speak to your customer – Use “you” in your landing page copy. Think of your landing page as a place where someone is visiting you in-person. Craft personal marketing copy that speaks the language of your intended market. If your demographic is the millennial generation, use language and images that relate. if you’re marketing to a geo-location target, use local references to instill trust that you’re a business that relates to them personally.
20. Use customer testimonials – Share good quotes from your customers – and show their face and name. People trust the opinions of people – especially those of friends. Social endorsements are a valuable way to gain and reinforce trust in future customers.
21. Determine the length of your forms – It’s a fine balance between asking too much information in your form fields, and increasing your conversion rate. The longer your form, generally speaking, the fewer people are going to make the time and effort to complete it. Keep your form fields to a minimum such as “first name” and “email” as mandatory contact information. You can always have optional fields to gather richer customer data – without losing as many leads.
Improve Your Landing Page SEO
A landing page is part of online marketing. Online marketing does have a technical side.
Getting your landing page found is important too. You need to optimize your landing page for SEO.
Here’s 4 tips to increase your landing page SEO:
22. Use keywords in your page title – The URL path of your landing page should include your keywords. No, it’s actually not that hard to do. Just make sure your landing page has a title, and you use that title when you’re creating the page on your website. (If you’re not the one doing your website stuff – tell your request to your webmaster.)
23. Use keywords and keyword phrases in your text – Make it clear to search engines (like Google) what your page is about. Use your keyword phrases (like, what your offer is about) in the text of your page. Think of this as how to speak to Google, just like you speak to your customer to tell them what you’re about.
24. Include social share buttons – Google “likes” a highly shared page. Make your social share buttons easy to see on your page. Put them at the top of your page, and make them highly visible on your landing page.
Wishpond’s Guide to Landing Pages ebook page has social share buttons.
25. Use relevant meta tags – If you’re not a technical type – don’t go all droopy eyes quite yet, you’ve almost made it through the SEO tips. Meta tags are your site’s backend stuff that Google reads. So, yeah, they’re very important. Use them for your Title, Keywords and Description attributes. Use Alt tags too, for image descriptions.
There are many more SEO tactics to use, but I’ll just stick with those….
Conclusion
Start with a few of these tips – or try them all – to increase your landing page lead-generation success.
As with any online marketing, take the opportunity to test your campaigns. A/B test your landing pages, tweaking and optimizing to obtain a cumulative optimization gain – and get lots more leads and sales.
What do you think? Do you increase your qualified leads with landing pages? How do you optimize your website conversion pages?
Written by Krista Bunskoek @ Wishpond