It doesn’t matter how much time, money and effort you spend on SEO, pay per click advertising, link building and driving traffic to your website, if you haven’t put just as much thought into creating effective landing pages then you are going to be losing potential customers.
And the worst thing of all, these are potential customers who generally are ready to hand over their cash, hot leads who have landed on your site deliberately after actively searching for whatever product or information you offer. The landing page is the home straight, it’s the place where your willing traffic has parked up ready to fill up on petrol and hand over their debit cards.
But get it wrong and they will do a u-turn and head back towards one of your competitors.
To use a real world example, it’s like spending months on a marketing campaign to drive people towards your brick and mortar store, only for them to get inside to find the shelves are confusing, messy and unattractive. Nobody wants to waste their time trying to find food in the wrong aisles, or searching amongst a jumble of items to get what they want.
You need to make your shop attractive and effective or those customers will turn round and head off down the street.
Here are five tips to make sure you’re getting the most out of your landing pages:
Make the design stand out
Your landing page needs to stand out so make sure it doesn’t look like just another blog post. If you have a three column web design for most pages then make the sell page a single column, funneling the reader’s attention to the action that you want them to take, whether that’s signing up to a mailing list or hitting the ‘Buy Now’ button.
Test, test, test
It’s no good just assuming you’ve got the best design then doing nothing to find out whether you are actually leaking customers. Don’t be afraid to ask your designer to tweak layouts (or do it yourself) and split testing and keeping a close eye on your analytics are essential to help show you which design options are most effective.
Be the customer
It sounds too simple but people so often ignore it when they get carried away with the cleverness of their own design. Just put yourself in the customer’s shoes and think about what sites you use which are most effective at converting you.
Obey the fold
The days of seemingly endless landing pages with yellow highlighted text are (hopefully) over. Web users are increasingly savvy and bounce rates show their patience and attention spans are growing ever shorter. Give them the crucial information above the fold and make things as easy as possible for them to find out what they need to know.
Keep it simple
The landing page should have one distinct goal, don’t try and dazzle your customers with endless options, links and other adverts, it will just confuse them and send them running into the arms of your competitors. One goal per landing page and make it as simple as possible for visitors to score.