7 Tips for Creating Compelling Landing Pages

Article By Haku Kapule (Contributing Editor at 365 Business Tips)

Whether you want to grow your prospect list or sell more product, landing pages are a valuable marketing channel for boosting leads, nurturing new customers, educating people about your products and driving conversions. Landing pages capture leads at a higher rate than from your homepage. According to HubSpot, landing pages have a 5-15% average conversions rate.

Unlike your homepage, which provides a general overview of your overall business, a landing page is a standalone web page with one sole focus – driving your visitors to act. A landing page is created for a specific marketing campaign – whether it be an email marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), organic traffic or social media. Visitors are driven to the page from a call-to-action link embedded in the campaign messaging.

Setting up landing pages for unique campaigns, audiences, events, or promotions allows you to target your audience better. By offering something of value such as downloadable content, webinar, giveaway, free trial, demo or coupons landing pages help to convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads.

To be effective, a landing page needs to be strictly-focused on its goal and created to optimize conversion rates. Visitors form an opinion on your landing page in less than a second and their first impression will influence all actions they take while on the page.

Here are 7 tips to help you create a compelling landing page that boosts leads and conversions:

1.   Attention-Grabbing Headline:

It’s the first thing your visitors see, your headline needs to catch your audience’s attention and entice them into wanting to read further. Here are three guidelines for creating a captivating headline:

• Ensure reader can know instantly how your offer will benefit them
• Shape headlines around your target audience’s desires and concerns
• Add urgency and energy by starting with an active verb – “Go”, “Save”, “Own”

The headline also needs to be straightforward, concise and easy-to-digest while summing up the offer as clearly as possible.

To establish continuity, the landing page headline should closely match the headline from the source ad. Also, make sure your call to action in the ad is clear and consistent with the headline. If your marketing campaign promotes a webinar, your landing page headline must do the same.

2.   Compelling Content and Design:

Landing pages are more effective and generate more leads when the pages design is clean and content is easy-to-read. Here are some important things to keep in mind when designing the page:

• Break your copy up into major sections, led by a headline with large type.
• Use bullet points to discuss benefits of your product.
• Keep paragraphs short (under five lines) rather than long blocks of text.
• Use a large image to serve as a visual representation of the offer and the benefits they’ll get by filling out the lead capture form.
• Highlight the benefits of your products and explain your message. The image serves as a visual representation of the offer, showing visitors what they’ll get after converting.
• Content needs to be engaging, persuasive and relevant.

Colorescience provides an excellent example of a well-organized landing page that clearly highlights the benefits of joining their affiliate program with headings, bullet points, and a clear call to action. The information listed is relevant to what a potential affiliate may want to know:

Image Source: Colorescience Affiliate

3.   Select the Corresponding Color Scheme for your Target Audience

Color has a tremendous influence on our attitudes and emotions and can influence how and what we buy. In fact, consumers consider visual appearance and color above all other factors and 85% of consumers giving color as the primary reason for buying a product.

Color psychology is the science of how color affects human behavior and can be an important factor in landing page conversions. However, color needs to be used in the right way. It’s important to take psychological color associations into account when you’re designing a landing page. Otherwise, you may unintentionally send the wrong message. The color blue for example is associated with trustworthiness, loyalty, and sincerity. The color blue is associated with trustworthiness, loyalty, and sincerity. Take the family oriented company, Guava Family, for example, the company weaves the color blue into its aspects of marketing conveying a sense of security and credibility among its target audience.

Image Source: Guava Family

Here are some other color associations to consider:

• Yellow – youthful, optimistic color, friendly
• Red – urgency
• Green – wealth, refreshment, balance, health
• Orange – aggressive, fun

4.   Consistency is Key

Your landing page must be consistent throughout and match its intended ad. Ensure the messaging matches throughout the entire conversion path. If your ad says “Download a Digital Marketing Ebook”, the same messaging should be in the call-to-action and on the landing page. Also, make sure the information matches other brand messaging including your homepage.

5.   Clear Call to Action

Call to actions are incredibly important and can mean the difference between a bounce or a conversion. Without a strong call to action, your landing page will be meaningless. A successful call to action must have a verb or action word and an implied sense of urgency. (Download Now vs. Download Here).

Whether it’s to collect contact information, have readers join your program, or make a purchase, the call to action must be clear and accessible.  There should be a clearly defined place to drive visitors to an action. Buttons are extremely useful for this purpose as they come in all shapes and sizes. The color of the button should contrast with the rest of the page so it stands out.

Take this example from WalkMe. Their “Get Started for Free” button stands out from the rest of that page after the benefits are clearly stated:

Image Source: WalkMe

6.   Mobile Friendly:

Mobile landing page optimization is more important than ever with more than half of all internet traffic coming from a mobile device and 62% of smartphone users made a purchase online in the last six months. Take into account the importance of the mobile landing page’s design, as it should be a responsive web page.

Guided Choice, the digital investment advisory firm does just that for its audience. The company’s mobile landing page design is clean, intuitive, and as a plus it includes access to an online chat for interactive real time questions.  Along with that the landing page has a responsive web design where all of the important elements stay in view no matter the size of the page or the device it’s on.

Desktop View:

Mobile View:

Image Source: Guided Choice

Here are some more Tips to Optimize your Landing Page for Mobile:

• Create easy-to-click targets
• Craft short headlines
• Use a font your visitor can read without squinting, enlarging etc.
• Avoid harsh backgrounds
• Use click-to-call for your call-to-action
• Keep forms short – aim for 50% of desktop form fields
• Focus on one goal
• Use action verbs
• Create single column layout
• Optimize for speed – small file size for faster loading
• Ensure site is mobile accessible

7.   Test your Landing Page:

The goal of your landing page is higher conversions but how can you ensure your landing page is optimized to drive a higher conversion rate? Testing allows you to find out what your target audience wants so you can deliver it to them.

There are two different types of testing – A/B and multivariate. In A/B testing, you test two versions of a web page, splitting traffic evenly between the two. Multivariate testing is the testing of different elements within a single web page. A/B testing is the most used for landing pages as it enables you to see which pages work best. Multivariate testing is used more on high-traffic websites.

What should you test? Since your goal is more conversions you should test the elements responsible for driving visitors to act when they are on the page. Things to test include:

• Main headline
• The call to action
• An alternate or variation of your main image. Try a variation of your main photo (if you have one)
• Button design. Use design principles to accentuate the appearance of your CTA (contrast, whitespace, size). Above all, try making it bigger.
• Button color – green for go, blue for link color, orange or red for emotional reaction.
• Form length.

Summary:

Landing pages are one of the most important elements of lead generation because it supports a singular advertising or promotional objective. Landing pages have higher conversion rates because they provide a clear, direct call to action and make it easy for visitors to buy your products or sign up for your list.

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