Guide To Designing Landing Pages That Sell
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The best way to ensure a successful presence on the web is to design a professional website. However, if your aim is to generate lots of sales, referrals, or leads, you’ll need a breathtaking landing page.
Landing pages, known also as landers or lead capture pages are designed to generate conversions. So, let’s begin.
What is a landing page?
A well-designed landing page targets specific audiences and drives traffic (for instance, email campaigns for the promotion of an ebook or pay-per-click webinars). Be sure to consider landing page design best practices for each of your online offers.
Creating a unique landing page
Yes, you could easily find a template, or choose from the numerous landing page examples available on the internet. However, wouldn’t it be more awesome to start from scratch and build a page of your own?
Uniqueness is the answer for designers who want to guide their users’ experience. Might seem like a difficult task, but we assure you that it is a simple and interesting procedure.
Guide to creating an efficient landing page
There are many different offers you could promote through a landing page – you can either enable your users to download promotion offers (webinars, papers, ebooks), or to invite them to subscribe for additional offers, such as demo/trial versions of your products. Whatever the purpose may be, a great landing page will target the audience, provide valuable offers for the visitors and transform a larger percentage of visits into leads.
When it comes to content, landing pages are supposed to transmit a single simple message – to inform your user what is the action you want them to perform and to expose the benefits of complying with this requirement.
Therefore, conveying this message is the single and most important purpose of landing page design. Each of your actions should strive towards simplicity; and removing items that could distort users from the original message.
Regardless of whether you’re starting from scratch or not, you have to grab attention and to keep the focus on the offer. It is the only way in which you could extend your marketing funnel and to bring in more sales.
The information your landing page needs to provide
A great landing page should take no more than few seconds in order to respond to the basic questions your visitors have:
- What are you offering them – This is how you answer it: “This is the benefit you’ll obtain if you give me the information I require”
- What will they lose if they don’t accept your offer – Remember, you must point out that the offer is essential and irreplaceable!
- Why it is essential not to waste time – Urgency is the most important feature of your offer.
- How to obtain the offer and its benefits – Conversion should be easy and intuitive.
The anatomy of a landing page
Step 1: Employ an original design
Even if you’re planning to start from scratch, it is a good idea to look at efficient landing page designs and to consider basic derivatives and essential elements:
- the CTA
- the value proposition
- the inclusion of visual media
If you prefer standardized forms, choose a value proposition that has nothing more than a heading and a short description, or divide the content in a list numbering the benefits of your offer/s.
At the end of the day, appearances and format are not the focal point. You need to communicate value to your users.
Start with basic page design-employ simple elements, such as text, videos, images, or whatever you think might be useful for the attractiveness of your landing page.
Continue with graphic design elements and make the page catchy-you can either use some serious personal inspiration, or hire graphic professionals which can do the work for you. Bold colors, brave contrasts, or bordering are an excellent choice for drawing more visitors in.
Step 2: Writing the copy
Writing the copy is the most complicated part of a landing page. You need to show your users that your page is unique, different than the piles of useless information they find online. Well-written copy can strengthen the connection with your users, inspire them to undertake action, and keep them on the same page.
Step 3: Optimizing the content
Text may not be essential for the first impression, but it is absolutely crucial for maintaining attention. You have to insert SEO-friendly and at the same time reader-oriented and natural text which can lead your website to success.
Modules for applications/usable forms for the visitors
Efficient transactional pages should have core modules that provide activities for your users. You need to write them and to plan them properly if you want them to function flawlessly.
Landing-page functionality can be ensured through an auto-responder. It is a mechanism which enables the site to send email messages to frequent visitors. With an auto-responder, you will be able to use all visitor information for your needs.
Your visitors deserve options, but limited ones
Remember that your website will be accessed by different visitors, in different phases of the purchase cycle.
When a visitor accesses your site during the Research, Awareness or Comparison phases, make sure to provide options for more information. What you want to achieve is that your visitors will have all the information they need to use the offer.
Using a landing page template
Many businesses opt for already made landing pages. They can be an excellent option for people who lack time, knowledge, or support to build their own landing pages, or whose budget allows professional support for the increase of sales and traffic.
However, there are serious drawbacks for using already made landing pages.
Limited customization options
Basically, you would have to invest in the same landing page, each month… for the rest of time.
It is because ready landing pages replace the huge initial expenditure with smaller monthly installments. Businesses find the model to be useful because it excludes the risk of massive investment in future, and because it guarantees functionality even before purchasing a fully-functional system.
However, purchasing already made landing pages makes sense only for companies who need landing pages often; and who are likely to change them once in a few months.
‘Hiring’ out for designing landing pages is not expensive, as it is a ‘pay at once’ cost. However, there are additional costs, such as copywriting, since already made landing page services don’t handle that for you.
Long story short, price is one of the reasons why you should go for the DIY option.
There are many ways to create a landing page from scratch – you can either be inspired by someone else’s page and model yours after it with small modifications, or you can employ the three basic elements and add visually appealing motifs.
Why not? It is not complicated at all! Once it is done, you could apply simplified A/B testing, to see whether you’ve achieved the ultimate purpose: excellent-looking design with flawless performance.
If you are not brave enough to experiment, you can always stick to the basic, standardized version, and to employ value propositions with nothing but a heading and simple description. As we already mentioned, you could divide your content and make a separate part for each benefit you offer.
Once again, it is not about the format. It is about communicating valuable benefits. The customers’ first interest is not who you are and what you do. It is whether you can do something for them.
Think about the personality of your visitors, their aims, interests and the phase of the purchase. If your visitor appears in the Comparison stage, for instance, give him additional research options and the possibility to learn more about what you have to offer.
The easiest way to do this is to list hyperlinks with additional information.
Meanwhile, don’t forget your landing page is just the entrance of the purchase funnel – you don’t want to go too far with explaining browsing experience, but to intrigue and to ‘catch’ customers. Each item/option on the landing page should communicate an intention, and give direction for users to move forward inside the funnel.
For example, if you own a real estate page where people come to look for a house, they will expect a clear option for moving ahead and making a call.
While looking for the perfect house, make sure they can move intuitively and that they have enough ‘lead magnets’ tailored to help them find what they want.
The importance of social media links on the landing page
The best way to target diverse and modern audience nowadays is to connect your work with social media. Therefore, you should provide links on the landing page which can help users perform tasks and do research, or, more importantly, share the page.
The most important feature is functionality
Remember – a landing page is not a blog, news website, or corporate page. It is a completely separate element of your online presence that has to be functional on its own.
Still, functionality is possible even without separate and complicated plugins.
Functionality has to respond to the initial purpose – it has to collect emails from potential clients and to make this information work for you, or to generate direct sales. You need your visitors’ email data so that you could send them information about new products, services, special events, or marketing improvements.
You need to create a great design and adjust it to the needs of your brand. In addition, write amazing copy; provide a bunch of worthy, but limited options; and guide users deeper into the purchase funnel.
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