What Makes a Landing Page Successful?
The quality of your landing pages really decides how successful your site is. As one of the earliest points of contact between you and potential customers, you need to be sure that your landing pages are fully optimized.
That said, knowing exactly how to build a great landing page is often not entirely intuitive, leaving you missing out on potential signups and sales. It’s time to start doing better with your landing pages, transforming them into genuinely powerful sales drivers.
Here are 8 essential points to consider when designing your landing pages:
The Perfect Headline
Headlines are an absolutely essential part of any landing page. Sum up your page’s content (and the reason your product exists) in a simple, short phrase, and make this one of the first things that your visitor sees.
Headlines need to be clear and concise — if it’s more than a short sentence, your readers will likely lose interest.
If SEO is important for your landing page, you’ll also need to make sure your headline is tagged correctly. Make sure your page only contains one H1 tag or search engines can become confused about the content.
A Clear Message
Whenever possible, landing pages should offer a single, very clear message. It’s always going to be tempting to expand upon your message, adding in other tangents and approaches, but your readers generally don’t want to go back and forth through content.
You’ll be able to craft a far more compelling message by resisting the temptation to overcomplicate it. If you’re personally writing the copy, it’s often worth getting feedback about whether the text is easy to follow.
Engaging Imagery
So, your site is full of well-written, engaging, and clear copy. How does it look? If your landing pages don’t visually pop, your visitors just aren’t going to be interested enough to convert. You may need a more effective option.
You don’t necessarily need an imagery team, as there’s an almost infinite range of stock photos available out there. However, you do need to choose powerful imagery that suits your branding and emphasizes your key marketing points.
Proving Your Legitimacy
Everyone knows how uncertain shopping online can be. Customers increasingly need some kind of reassurance that their bank details aren’t going to be stolen. Trust badges were designed to provide that reassurance.
Issued by various companies (Trustpilot, McAfee, Verisign, etc), trust badges verify that a company is operating legitimately, and can seriously improve landing page conversion rate.
Interestingly, while it’s not clearcut, some research indicates that the specific function of a trust badge matters far less than the issuer’s brand recognition — you might want to consider that when picking your trust badges.
A Great Guarantee
If you offer a guarantee for your products, make sure that you mention that fact on your landing page. Like trust badges, referencing your guarantee (particularly using an image/ badge) is a fantastic way to build customer trust and improve your conversion rate.
Again, you don’t want to overcomplicate your guarantee — make the offer clear, and it will be far more appealing to visitors.
Using Effective CTAs
Just like your headlines, your call to actions need to be clear and visually distinct from the rest of your copy.
It’s generally worth doing some experimentation to find out what kind of CTA works best for your audience — something as simple as ‘Buy Now’ isn’t always going to outperform a more contextualized choice, but the effectiveness of CTAs can dramatically vary between cases.
Checking Device Performance
Currently, it’s estimated that about 50% of web traffic is mobile-based. Despite that, with most web design being done on desktops, many forget to look into how their landing pages perform on mobile.
If you’re not reviewing your landing page performance on mobile, you’re almost certainly missing out on sales. Mobile users are increasingly unwilling to deal with the frustrations of poorly-optimized landing pages — oversized imagery, non-functional features, and awkward menus.
Most web browsers allow you to simulate how a page will look on mobile, but keep in mind that this is rarely an exact representation. Some technical features simply won’t work on various smartphones, so the best option is always to test on an actual device.
Improving Loading Speeds
How fast does your landing page load? If it takes more than a couple of seconds to display the content of your page, you’re going to be losing out on valuable conversions, particularly when it comes to mobile users.
Not sure how to speed up your landing pages? Check out our guide to technical optimization, and get ready to build a quicker, better converting version of your page!
By Richard Parkin
