All of the marketing and press in the world cannot help a company or entrepreneur that cannot put together a good landing page. In fact, many studies have been done that show that slight changes in the structure of a landing page can double, or even triple conversions overnight. That is a lot easier than spending hours on SEO, PR, Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and other expensive marketing tactics. The only real hard part is figuring out what those slight changes need to be.
Here are four keys to creating a successfully converting landing page and examples.
Simplify
Companies and individuals often get so caught up in trying to explain how incredible their product or service is that they forget they have time constraints. The average user will not show up to a web page and read all of the copy and then make a well-informed decision. Many consumers give a webpage less than 10 seconds to capture their attention or their information and then they are gone.
Bills.com has a great landing page that simplifies its purpose into one question, essentially asking why they are on the site. Then Bills.com is able to direct them to the most relevant information for them and keep them long enough to start building rapport.
Explain the benefit
Once you simplify, then you focus on explaining the benefit to your product or service in as few words as possible. If you are selling an app that can help people manage their time more effectively, you might write something along the lines of “Eliminate wasted time and double your productivity with X”. You have helped the user see what problem your service solves, helped them to see how it will be solved, and done so in just a few seconds.
Conveniently, a great example of this is Unbounce, a leader in conversion page optimization. Their homepage quickly explains the benefit and keeps the benefit explanation as close to the call to action as possible.
CTA location
CTAs can be sometimes hard to work in. Any SEO worth their salt will explain that a webpage needs a lot of words and written content in order to show up in search engines. Companies like Google do not have a lot to go off besides words, meaning words matter quite a bit.
Many companies and especially new entrepreneurs make the mistake of writing their 2,000 word landing page and then putting the CTA at the end. After all, it makes sense to do it this way. Sell first, ask for their business at the end. That model doesn’t work when they are a click away from leaving.
Here is a great example of a page with lots of content that is useful, but offering the CTA at the beginning for those that are ready to make a decision already. Then the top of the page offers links that can take you to other places in the page that may answer specific questions.
Design around CTA
Remember, your entire goal is to get the user to click the CTA on the page. This needs to show in your design. The first thing a user’s eyes should go to on a landing page is the CTA. They can then browse other parts of the page that they find relevant, but they always know just where and what the CTA is.
Trulia, and most real estate sites, do a great job of this. They start getting information from you as soon as they can and make it very easy to dive into the funnel and get started.
The real thing to remember with landing pages is that there is no one guaranteed strategy. That is why true marketers are constantly testing and improving their landing pages. It is usually much easier to improve conversions than it is to increase traffic quickly.
