Targeted landing pages provide an excellent way for your sales and marketing teams to generate leads and create user personas. A well-designed landing page can lead to a huge increase in conversions for your business, but building one can be an overwhelming task at best. Here's how to build a landing page that works.
There are so many design options available that many business owners struggle to find the “perfect fit” and paralysis by analysis becomes a very real thing. With the 100s of possible ways to build a landing page, how do you combat this indecision and create a landing page that actually converts users?
First, let’s examine the key elements of any successful landing page.
Identify And Address The Need Of The Visitor
Research by Statistic Brain has shown that a user will generally spend around 8 seconds on a landing page before deciding whether to hang around. Every landing page should have one clear purpose and this is where your UVP (unique value proposition) comes into play. Your UVP should be the first thing visitors see when they click on your landing page. This is something you really need to spend time on, i.e. test, test, and test again until you find the UVP that provides optimal conversions.
If you’re not sure what your UVP actually is, here are a few ideas to take into consideration:
- Customer needs: what need or want does your product meet or fulfil?
- Your niche: what do you offer that your competition doesn’t?
- Target audience: who are you targeting with your USP and have you identified their personas?
- Clarity: is your USP clear, concise, and direct?
Common Landing Page Uses
Here are a few common landing page usages that your UVP might be based on:
- Promote an event
- Gain subscribers
- Drive newsletter signups
- Offer a free trial
- Host a competition
- How-to guides
- Price discounts
Remember, your ad is what gets your user to your landing page. Your UVP is what hooks them once they’re there. If what you’re offering isn’t good enough, or clear enough, your users will click out of your site as quickly as they clicked on to it.
Provide A Solution To What Your Customers Need
The focus of your landing page should always be on the potential customer. Your key aim to is to tell your visitors what you do/offer, why they will benefit from what you do/offer, and how your product or service can ensure they receive those benefits.
If someone has clicked on an ad to reach your website, then it means that your ad sparked their interest. Why? Because you’re promoting a solution to a key concern, want, or need that they have. It’s imperative to ensure that your landing page provides a solution to this need or you risk alienating your visitors.
Synchronizing your marketing content and landing page/s is extremely important. For example, if Joe see’s an advert promoting a cure for hair loss and ends up on a landing page for synthetic wigs, he isn’t going to be very impressed. The design of your page must also match the email/ad campaign that’s linked to it.
Here are a few things to watch out for this this regard.
- Always try to use the same fonts, colors, and images where possible for familiarity.
- Use the same keywords and phrases in your landing page and marketing copy.
- Make sure your offer/product is immediately visible on your landing page (i.e. your UVP).
- Ensure your content provides the solution your visitor has been promised by the ad they clicked on.
Encourage Conversions
Once you’ve hooked your visitors, it’s time to convert them into customers. A clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) will get you over this hurdle. A badly written CTA will get you nowhere, fast. Yet research from Small Biz Trends has revealed that almost 70% of SMBs don’t have a CTA at all!
Upon reviewing 1000s of CTAs over the years, we’ve found that the following tips are the key to getting users to pay attention and convert:
- Make your CTA stand out: place it above the fold and also in various places around your landing page if possible. Users shouldn’t have to keep scrolling to find out where to convert.
- Design: your CTA should jump out of the screen with big fonts and colors that helps to contrast it from the rest of the page. The rest of your page should be simple. The “cleaner” your design is, the less distractions the user has and the more likely they are to focus on your CTA. Ideally, your CTA should be the only clickable link on this page.
- Make it an extension of your USP: your CTA should be a natural extension of your USP. Your USP sells your offer and your CTA provides a way to act on that offer.
- Use buttons where possible: buttons are easy to use and it’s pretty obvious what they mean. It’s a literal call to action.
- Use clear and concise copy: only ask for the bare minimum of information required if you’re trying to get visitors to sign up for an ebook or newsletter, or anything really. Asking for too much information decreases the likelihood that they’ll complete and submit the form.
“My favorite technique was just asking for a username rather than a full account sign up at first. It's the foot in the door principal — ask people for something small (a username) before showing them fields for more personal things like email and password. Once they fill in their username, they feel like they've already invested some time in creating the account and might as well finish.” – Alexi Schiff, cofounder of Fetch Notes (source: kissmetrics)
Let’s Look At The Most Efficient Way To Design Your Landing Page When You Have This Information Nailed Down
If you only have one or two landing pages, then a regular landing page builder (such as Wishpond) might work for you. If you’re dealing with 10, 100, or 1000s of pages, you need something much more advanced – and that’s where automatic landing page software such as Rallymind come in. Regular landing page builders such as Instapage are fine if you’re only dealing with a few pages, but can you imagine trying to create over 100 pages with it? And what if you need to make a minor change to all of those 100 pages? I feel stressed just thinking about it.
Automatic landing page builders allow you to create optimized landing pages by using tags. This means a lot less work for you as a business owner because you no longer need to create landing pages for every possible thing that visitors could be searching for on your website. Rallymind is an even more innovative service that’s powered by Google Sheets to allow you to create and manage 1000s of landing pages at once. So updating your content becomes as easy as updating a spreadsheet.
Rallymind uses a process called “centralized control” which creates a master template for the design layout and then personalizes each landing page using a Google sheet. Using one Google sheet, you can fill out all of the variations required to bulk update your landing pages in real time. So instead of taking weeks to simply update a few fields, Rallymind saves the user both time and money by making the process much more streamlined, cost efficient, and accessible to non-techies. You can also easily clone temples for new campaigns and perform A/B tests with the various plugins available.
And Finally, You Can Never Have Enough Landing Pages!
More landing pages = more conversion opportunities for your business. The main reason that most companies only have 1 or 2 landing pages is simply because they aren’t comfortable with creating them or confident enough in the results that can be achieved. Using a landing page builder like Rallymind, you can create 100s of landing pages in less time than it takes to create 10 of them with a regular website builder and then test them to see what’s working and what you need to work on. So if you’re looking for some peace of mind before putting the work in, it’s definitely worth adding Rallymind to your toolkit.
