How to Create a Great Landing Page That Converts

Creating Landing Pages That Convert

Landing pages are a great way to sell and market your products and services. So what elements are needed to create high converting landing pages that generate leads or money for you business. We get asked a lot “should a landing page be different from your website?”  We wrote up a good blog post about the differences between your website and a landing page, check it out for more information.  There are lots of tools available online to help create landing pages. We have our own tool called My Page Creator which allows you to focus on creating quick landing pages that convert! When using those tools you should keep these guidelines and tips in mind to create landing pages that produce results for you. 

Clear call to action 

Use a clear call to action

When creating a landing page you want the Call to action to be front and center. You do not want your visitors to spend time finding the buy now button or form to enter their information. Using bright colors for these buttons or areas help these items standout from the rest of your page. The call to action should be labeled appropriately, meaning if it’s a buy now button the label of the button should be something like “Buy Now” or “Learn More” Never make your visitors work or spend time finding what it is they’re coming to your page for. Keep it simple!

If you have a long form landing page make sure to put your call to action everywhere on the page as the user scrolls. This will make sure they don’t have to work to find your button or CTA

Powerful headlines

Headlines make people act. Taking action is what you want to have happen. You might want them to read over your product information, your offer or whatever it is your landing page is promoting. Having quality headlines that provoke action can be the difference between 2x or 4x conversion rate and when you’re most likely paying for traffic it’s all about getting the highest conversion rate possible. 

Quality images and videos

Images help create emotion behind your words, when you match your images to pages call to action you’re essentially doubling down on the effectiveness of your landing page goals. Be careful of how you place your images, images should help support your claim not take the focus away from your content that needs to be read. Often people will use a large image at the top of the page which takes up 90% of the browser window because the image is so pretty or does such a great job at explaining emotion but this can lead people away from reading and isn’t great for SEO. Have you headline and CTA front and center and use the image to add to your message, not take away. 

Using video to help support you message can increase your conversion rate also, but again don’t take away from your message, use video to support and validate your message. 

Free of distraction 

FOCUS!

I can’t stress enough how important this piece of information is. When you send traffic to your landing page have it focused on one goal and one goal only. You want to remove buttons or navigation bars that might tempt people to click away from your landing page. The last thing you want to have happen is spend money on traffic and have your visitor get distracted with something else on your website. Do not link to other information of any kind. If you put a link it should scroll to the next section of your page and not a new page. If you have a long version of your website always keep the call to action present. Example if a user is reading more than 2 paragraphs of content, put the call to action at the end of the section so they don’t have to scroll down or up to find the button to or call to action. Again don’t make your visitors work for the CTA, make it simple to buy or act on the call to action. 

When we create landing pages for clients we remove all navigation and out bound links. Often times we’ll use a separate domain name to fine tune the message and keep the visitor from going anywhere else. An example might be marketingebookoffer.com – you’ll notice the domain name makeringbookoffer.com can let the customer know this is a special offer unique from any other offer you might find. We’ll keep the branding the same but remove all distractions. This also is a good trick to keep the regular customers away from the offer in the case that we’re using landing pages to attract new customers. No sense in giving discounted product away to your already loyal customers. 

A/B Test everything with analytics 

AB Test Everything

Our last tip is the MOST important part of all. After you’ve implemented all of the above elements into your landing page you MUST and I can’t stress enough MUST have analytics on all your traffic and A / B test EVERYTHING! Clients will tell us, “I don’t know what to write or how to price my product” and we say. “Just start with something and A/B test to get the best results” 

A/B Testing simply means you have two versions of something, be it a headline or price and you compare which one generated more results or in most cases conversions! For example, let’s say you have a landing page selling a fancy men’s watch. For one week (how ever much time you decide on is fine) you try have version A that has a catchy headline. You send traffic to this page via paid ads and at the end of the week, pause your traffic and look at the numbers, this is your baseline. Update your catchy headline to something completely different or even a small tweak, it really doesn’t matter. You turn your ad back on for the same amount of time as Version A and once the same amount of time has passed you pause your ad and compare the two results and pick the winner. When you deploy this technique you’re basically after the best version of your ad or website and looking for the winner. You can test as many versions of everything you want. In fact doing this long term you’ll start to understand what headlines resonate well with your audience and what doesn’t. This means you can fast track your way to better conversion rates from the start. 

AB testing your content, ads, images and pricing is a must in order to get the most out of your paid traffic. There is a massive amount of gratification when you are running a paid ad for your landing page and you start with 2% conversion rates and end up with proper AB testing with 6% conversion rate. This is like putting money back in your pocket. You’re not spending any more money, all you’re doing is getting the most value for the money you’re already spending. 

We’d love to talk to you more about how to properly leverage landing page marketing to help grow your business. Landing pages are great for generating leads for your inbound sales floor, affiliate marketing business or ecommerce business in general.