Landing pages are a critical part of your funnel for bringing in new customers. Putting together a great marketing campaign is only one part of a successful strategy to turn leads into customers. A successful marketing campaign will implement the best practices for landing pages that convert.
The Landing Page – Why It’s Important
It is reasonable to assume that not every customer who sees your ad will follow through to click the link to check out your company and that not everyone who does click the link will convert to customers. Implementing landing page best practices can make the difference between a good marketing campaign and one that brings in a disappointing number of new leads.
Think of your marketing campaign as a funnel – your ad campaigns on social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Google – are your first impression intended to generate enough interest for someone to want to dig deeper. Your landing page is where the link takes interested potential customers, and it is where you will present your call-to-action (“CTA”).
Consider some of these landing page design best practices to use with your next marketing campaign.
What Should Your Landing Page Include?
Your landing page should be unique and not cookie-cutter. Visual appeal is necessary to keep the attention of your audience. Too much clutter or a design that causes anxiety may turn off an otherwise interested customer. Your landing page design should make it easy for someone to fill out their information and click the “submit” button.
- Well-Placed Hero Image. A hero image is a prominent graphic, video, or animation placed on the page that reminds visitors of the product or service you’re promoting. Images are important – there are many studies surrounding this subject, including one published by IEEE Computer Society on December 14, 2018, entitled Emotional Attention: A Study of Image Sentiment and Visual Attention.
Including an image on your landing page will aid in keeping the attention of your audience. Images evoke a subconscious emotional response in the viewer, which can have a positive impact on driving your marketing message and influence them to follow through on your call-to-action.
- Unique Selling Proposition. The first consideration is that your landing page should match the theme of your campaign. Keep in mind what caught the attention of your potential customers and stick with that theme for your landing page. Focus on your product or service and how it is superior to what your competition is offering. This theme is also known as your unique selling proposition (“USP”). It should be very easy to identify your USP in both your marketing campaign ads and on your landing page. Keep it short and direct. You can use a supporting statement to add below your USP headline, but it should not distract from your focus.
Sell Your Product or Service. First, you have your hero image and your unique selling proposition. Next, include focused information about the features of your product or service. Keep it very clear and focused; do not add clutter or “fluff” that might distract from your call-to-action.
- Only include compelling information that supports your message of why they need YOUR product or service. You don’t want so much content that they become bored and move on. Instead, make use of bulleted lists that are easier to digest and still drive your points home visually.
This information can go beyond the fold, so you’ll want to include visual cues to keep your reader scrolling to read more.
- Drive your point home. Remind your audience what brought them to your page in the first place by re-stating your USP. Then, make a solid and final point supporting why they should respond to your call to action.
Landing Page Design – Best Practices
These are other things to keep in mind for landing page design best practices.
Keep your call to action above the fold. If they have to scroll back to find the call-to-action form, it’s too much work, and you may lose some interest.
Remove unnecessary clutter. This includes page navigation tabs and external links that take you away from the landing page. Remember that the purpose of a landing page is to get them to fill out your form and click the link.
Faster is better. Consider that you have probably taken them away from their scrolling to catch up with friends on social media or going through their email. You’ve captured their attention for a few moments, and if your page takes too long to load, you will lose them back to their social media abyss. A page that takes longer than 2-3 seconds is a liability.
Optimize for different platforms. Have you ever felt frustrated because a pop-up covers your scrolling capabilities, or did you have to move the page left to right just to read the content? Poor presentation and function are also liabilities. Avoid this by optimizing your landing page for different platforms and making it mobile-responsive. The page can detect the device the viewer is using to load the page and output the appropriate coding for optimized viewing.
Build trust. Use authentic customer testimonials to show your product or service in action. Highlight testimonials that make a distinction between your product and “the others.”
Offering real testimonials is critical instead of using creative licenses to write your own. Dishonesty can permanently mar your company’s reputation and create an expensive mess to repair (if it can be repaired). If you can, use real photos of customers instead of stock photos.
Assure your landing page viewer that their information is safe. While this might seem like a minor nuance, it’s an essential consideration for landing page best practices. With the rise in digital crime, people have become more discretionary in their willingness to provide personal information, including an email address. So offer a short assurance that their data is safe with a pop-out link to review your privacy policy. If you don’t have one, consult legal advice to create one.
Always say, “Thank you!” Then, after converting a lead through your call to action, bring them to another page or pop-out window that states your appreciation and tells them how your company will follow up. You can also use this page to provide links to your main website or link to another promotional campaign that you might be running concurrently.
Techna Digital Marketing – Best Practices for Landing Pages that Convert
Techna Digital Marketing can help you with effective marketing campaigns that convert leads to customers. If you are ready to ramp up your marketing strategy, contact us to see how we can help!
