Your traffic is trending up. Each day you see more and more visitors on your site. Your pages are being found organically, and users are clicking on your ads. But your leads aren’t keeping up with the growth in traffic.
What’s going wrong? Chances are there’s a problem with your landing page.
Sometimes marketers get too caught up in designing a beautiful user experience, but forget the overall purpose of a landing page. The goal is to get people to take action and convert. Landing pages should be strategically designed with this ultimate end goal in mind.
In order to create a landing page that converts, it’s important to clearly understand its purpose, and what makes it different. It’s not just another website page.
What is a Landing Page?
Unbounce defines a landing page as a standalone web page created specifically for the purposes of marketing or an advertising campaign. It doesn’t have any website navigation, and all design, text, and page attributes should keep visitors focused on the desired action of the page.
The metrics surrounding landing pages are important too. Keeping track of individual conversion rates, where people are clicking, and A/B testing different formats will help you experiment with and optimize landing pages to drive conversions.
So what is the strategy behind a high converting landing page? It’s all about being intentional. The following 6 tips will help you structure your landing page effective, creating a landing page that converts.
1. Have a Strong Offer
Every successful landing page must start with a strong offer. If you're not offering something compelling, why would anyone take the action you want them to take?
An offer will obviously depend on your business and the product or services you offer. Maybe you are offering a discount or coupon, or maybe it’s a piece of educational content like a whitepaper or guide.
Whatever the offer, make sure it aligns with your buyer's journey. For instance, if your landing page is targeting prospects in the awareness stage, you might not want to offer a product discount quite yet. Maybe you offer an ebook in exchange for an email address. Then when that prospect moves further down the funnel and is closer to that decision, that’s when you might switch up your offer to a free trial or discount to services.
2. Use Compelling Headlines & Copy
Once you know what you're offering, your landing page needs to effectively communicate the value behind that offer.
The main headline should be clear and direct. A sub-headline should help provide a bit of extra info to support the headline. A sub-headline can be a direct extension of the main headline or offer additional information. A short paragraph can also be used.
Depending on the length of the landing page, you might want to include a secondary headline with its own supporting copy. This information should be located further down the page and provide more details about the benefits of your offer. Don’t get too caught up on describing features. Talk about what your offer or value proposition can do for the user.
Benefits copy examples:
Here are two different examples. One from a B2B office technology solutions provider, and the other from the landing page experts themselves, Unbounce.
- “Intelligent video surveillance and security systems give you peace of mind that your people, property, and assets are safe in a time of uncertainty.”
- “You can create landing pages by yourself, without help from a developer, using Unbounce’s drag-and-drop builder.”
Here are some other tips to help you create compelling copy:
- Utilize persuasive copywriting techniques and power words
- The landing page copy should be similar to any ad copy to create a consistent experience for visitors
- Include contact information somewhere on the page. Best practice is to include this in the top right corner or footer.
- Encourage action. We’ll talk about CTA’s in a little bit, but always remember that any copy on your landing page should have the purpose of driving traffic towards a particular action.
3. Take Advantage of Visuals
Eyes are drawn to pictures, so the visuals you choose will likely be the first thing your user sees. Keep this in mind and use this to your advantage. Your imagery will likely set the tone of your page, and determine what the user does next.
Visuals should make sense contextually. The best images or videos usually show the product or service in use. Consider abstract images that actually convey the emotions related to what you're offering.
For example, if you're a software company, maybe you have a visual of your app being used on a flashy and new device.
Here’s an excellent example of imagery being used effectively on a landing page:
Notice how this Salesboard example shows the product actually being used by a person. This gives users a better understanding of the product, and gives them something to relate to.
4. Include Convincing Social Proof
Socialproof helps communicate to visitors that others have benefited from this product or service. People are always much more inclined to take a specific action if they know of others who have been in their shoes and benefited from taking such actions.
On a landing page, social proof can take many forms:
- Direct quotes from customers
- Case studies (or links to case studies)
- Video interviews or testimonials
- Logos of customer companies
- Review scores from sites like Yelp, Amazon, or Capterra
In many examples of effective landing pages, these tend to be further down the page but can depend on the page’s content and design. As long as your social proof doesn’t get in the way of your offer and CTA, it should help convince your prospect to take the desired action.
5. Have a Clear Call-To-Action
A strong offer presented in a compelling way does a landing page no good if there’s no clear call to action (CTA) for the prospect to take. This is perhaps the most fundamental part of a landing page.
CTA’s should be obvious. From a design perspective, consider placing your CTA button as close to the top of the page as makes sense. But what’s most important is ensuring your CTA is paired with the appropriate copy. Neil Patel actually found that button placement isn’t nearly as important as the copy that’s being used for your CTA.
So what should your CTA say? It should be clear, focused and compelling. Avoid bland text like “Submit”. Instead use language that makes it clear what action the visitor is about to take. Here’s a good example:
Let’s talk about the forms associated with your CTA. To optimize these for conversion, you should only ask for the most important information from visitors. Don’t scare them off with too many questions. Once you have a lead’s information, a team member can contact them personally to get any additional information you might need.
6. Layout Landing Page Intentionally
Every good landing page that converts should have all the above components. But the organization of these components is equally important. Unbounce calls this the anatomy of a landing page. Here’s a look at how they suggest structuring your page.
By understanding the anatomy of a landing page, and by making sure you stick to these rules, you’ll ensure you actually convert. Then you can find unique and clever ways to optimize the heck of it.
Take a look at the illustration. Though your own pages might look a little different, the same basic building blocks of landing page structure should be present. Below, we’ll discuss each in more detail.
Your headline should be the first thing that your user sees and paired with your hero image, video or other animation. Supporting copy should lead users down the page to a form field that is short, sweet and straightforward like mentioned above. Your form should be paired next to supporting copy that illustrates the benefit of this offer.
Following your form field, further down the page, is where your social proof will live. Depending on the length of your landing page, you might consider following this up with further description of your offer and the benefits it provides, or a short and simple reinforcing statement or headline.
This is the basic structure of a high converting landing page. Some marketers won’t like the idea of a formulaic structure. Don’t get caught up in matching this format exactly. You can still add your own spin on your page and make it unique, while still following the basic persuasion principles we’ve listed here.
7. Measure The Success of Your Landing Pages
Alright, so you’ve followed the best practices and launched your landing page. But your work isn’t done. It’s important to constantly measure your page’s performance, and analyze whether or not it’s meeting conversion goals.
Keeping track of industry benchmarks can be helpful as you measure and experiment with your pages. The average conversion rate varies will depend on your industry, but generally landing pages have a conversion rate of 2% to 5%. But the top performing advertisers in any industry generally have a conversion rate of double or triple the average performers.
If you find your landing page is converting below it’s benchmark, it’s time to experiment. Keep in mind that small tweaks such as font or button color won’t lead to a significant increase in conversion. Instead, focus your optimization efforts on the following:
- Change the offer
- Change the flow or structure
- Implement a remarketing campaign
- A/B test
Creating Landing Pages that Convert for your Business
When creating a landing page that converts, don’t get too caught up in designing a repeatable template. Sure, the above tips are used by the majority of high converting landing pages. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to follow this format to a t.
The most important thing to keep in mind if you want to create a landing page that converts is to be simple and clear. Remember, your page’s purpose is to get your user to take some sort of action. So make it obvious to the user what action you want them to take.
And don’t forget about the journey. Use your content toolbox and the above best practices to make that journey to the desired action as compelling and easy as possible for your user.
Then watch as your landing page converts, again and again.
Follow Us