Attention is the new currency. With so many businesses competing for a single internet user’s attention, it takes an expertly crafted customer journey and an optimized marketing funnel to engage a “window shopper” online. But to successfully turn them into a customer, you need to direct them to an excellent landing page that drives them to take your desired action and convert.
A high converting landing page includes key elements that make or break your potential sale. A time limit on your special offer, captivating images and compelling action words – all these contribute to landing pages that convert. When designed well, a landing page captures your prospects’ attention, piques their interest and turns them into a customer.
This blog post covers 1) what is a landing page? 2) what makes a good landing page design? 3) evaluating your landing page conversion rate and 4) improving your results through landing page optimization. It answers some of the most pressing questions on landing page design and how to create a high converting landing page, including:
• What is a landing page, and why is it important?
• How to create a landing page
• What is a good conversion rate for a landing page?
• What is landing page optimization?
• How to do landing page optimization
• How to build a landing page the right way
What Is a Landing Page?
What is a website landing page? A landing page is a standalone, focused web page where potential customers make a purchase or take a vital step towards becoming your customer. It is often just like any other page on a website, but with specific calls-to-action (CTAs), including checking out, leaving contact information, scheduling a consultation, signing up for an event and subscribing to an email newsletter.
Now, let’s dig deeper into the definition by exploring specific landing page examples.
Landing Page Examples
Most of your landing pages extend from your website (hence the name website landing page) and differ according to the goal. If your site is on WordPress, for example, you can have a WordPress landing page for your webinar registration form and a different WordPress landing page for your free trial offer, but these won’t necessarily be part of your main website content. They can be viewed through a link and as a desktop or mobile landing page, just like any other web page.
Here are two of the most common landing page examples:
1. eCommerce Landing Page
An eCommerce landing page drives your customer to check out and purchase the product you’re selling online. This can also be called a product landing page, but most call it an eCommerce landing page, to be more specific.
2. Lead Capture Landing Page
So, what is a website landing page designed for service businesses? Here, the goal is to connect with your leads, build a relationship with your prospects and turn them into customers over time. The most important first step is a lead capture landing page that obtains your customer’s information and permission to contact them.
The ultimate goal has always been to generate sales, regardless of the objective of the landing page. Having landing pages that convert works toward this goal and contributes to a robust and results-driven marketing strategy.
What Is Landing Page Optimization?
Landing page optimization, a subset of conversion rate optimization (CRO), is the process of improving the conversions you get from your product landing page or lead capture landing page. Your landing page conversion rate is calculated by how many people converted divided by how many people visited your landing page, expressed as a percentage.
What Is a Good Landing Page Conversion Rate?
So, what is a good conversion rate for a landing page? There isn’t one single answer.
Landing page conversion rates vary depending on the industry and the historical data of a business. Crazy Egg reported that the best landing pages generally convert at rates of up to 27.4 percent, but this figure is meaningless without insight into the quality of your conversions. After all, people can cancel a purchase after checking out or not show up to their appointment after scheduling one.
“Good” conversion rate aside, focus on how your results are improving based on real-life data in your business’s unique context. There is no concrete formula to the most successful landing pages, but understanding the core principles behind the best landing pages provides a solid foundation.
Breaking Down the Anatomy of High-Converting Landing Pages
At the point your potential customers are ready to commit, your landing pages should seal the deal. Focusing on the building blocks makes your landing pages perform better and gets you the results you want to see.
Let’s break down the six must-have elements of landing pages that convert:
1. Compelling Landing Page Copywriting
You can lose a user’s attention very quickly. But using the right words helps you keep it:
1. Have head-turning headlines to give your target audience a reason to browse through the rest of your landing page.
2. Win them over with landing page copywriting that is relatable (subtly addressing their pain points), conversational (keep it lighthearted) and value-adding (the benefit is clear).
3. Have a well-defined CTA: Tell your customers the precise action you want them to take.
Remember: There has to be a hook. What is your unique selling proposition (USP)? What do they lose if they don’t take action? What’s the benefit of acting right now? Explaining this in your copy makes your offer more compelling. Throughout your landing page, your copy must be succinct, persuasive and action-oriented.
2. Superior Visual Elements
No one wants to read blocks on blocks of plain text – intentional copy and high-quality visual elements make a great team.
You want your customer to focus on you, so make sure your landing page design or layout guides their eyes, tells a story and reinforces your value. For example, your landing page layout and color choices should drive users to scroll down or direct their attention where you want them to. Include images and videos – which are increasingly preferred and proven effective – of the actual product or service to help them visualize the benefit.
Finding an effective layout and combination of visual elements involves testing different versions, but providing an immersive visual journey is your top priority.
3. No Distractions
A landing page is meant to be a lot more focused than a website. Instead of giving your target audience complete freedom to explore, you want them to follow a single thought process to absorb the information relevant to why they’re on the landing page in the first place.
This means omitting all external links that would send users off the landing page and leaving out a navigation bar to prevent them from skipping through and likely exiting the page. It also means taking a hard look at your landing page elements and removing everything that doesn’t contribute to your message. Finally, keep a smooth flow throughout your landing page for the highest chance of conversions.
4. Customer Testimonials
The same way online reviews influence purchase decisions, featuring a testimonial from your existing customers (with their permission) can be the last push your potential customer needs. Positive reviews provide prospects with confidence in your brand by showing – not telling – that clients have had a good enough experience to want to share it with others.
Testimonials can exist in the form of:
• A video testimonial from a long-time client
• A screenshot of a 5-star review with detailed positive feedback
• A personal thank-you message from your customers
All these showcase a sense of community around your business, evoke trustworthiness and can be the fastest way to compel a prospect to take your desired action.
5. Short Forms
Leveraging data to provide personalized and optimized brand experiences is the standard of digital marketing today. The goal is not to sell to a customer once and have them move on. Instead, it’s making your business valuable to them by staying in touch, which, naturally, requires them to provide their contact info. Your landing page contact form should only ask for the minimum information you need to increase the chances of form submissions.
6. Clear Call-to-Action
Your CTA button should jump off the page – driving action is the purpose of the landing page, after all. One best practice is to have a visible CTA button regardless of where your customer is on the page, such as a small banner at the bottom of the page or even in multiple placements on the top-most, middle or bottom-most part of the landing page.
It’s also essential to stay consistent with what you’re asking from your potential customers. For instance, if your email CTA button is “Download the PDF,” your email landing page CTA button should also be “Download” – not save, not open, not share, but download. Experiment with its design, color and word choice to identify the type of CTA button your target audience is most receptive to.
Now that you know how to create a high converting landing page and what goes into landing page optimization, it should be much easier to drive visitors to your specific desired action.
But before you create a landing page, let’s analyze existing landing page examples and pick out best practices from some of the most effective landing pages out there.
3 Successful Landing Pages You Can Learn From
The best landing pages go through many rounds of optimization before becoming the effective lead-generators that they are. Luckily, newer business owners have many landing page examples to take inspiration from and get started on their business goals sooner.
Here are three successful landing pages we can all learn from:
Airbnb
Source: HubSpot
• Why it’s good: Personalization is at the core of the Airbnb experience, and that’s immediately evident in this landing page. It features estimated earnings in • Boston because whoever landed on this page is located in Boston.
• The hook: Get your hands on up to $903 a week.
• CTA: Sign up to host.
GEICO
Source: Instapage
• Why it’s good: This is a unique example featuring GEICO’s famous no-fuss communications. It eliminated all distractions and intentionally left out all external links (no social media accounts and no website link on the GEICO logo!). It’s not asking for all your details yet, but just a five-digit zip code to get started.
• The hook: Make your days brighter with the peace of mind and savings you get from car insurance. While the value is not immediately apparent, GEICO’s branding success in the car insurance world contributes to why this landing page works.
• CTA: Begin a quote.
Dadz
Source: SeedProd
• Why it’s good: A potential customer lands here from a Google ad targeted towards parents. The messaging is consistent and personalized for on-the-go parents and strengthened by visual elements and trust signals: an engaging video, positive reviews and case studies (trust is a big factor because the product is a supplement).
• The hook: Busy parents need a little help to be at their best.
• CTA: Buy.
Don’t worry; there is no perfect in the realm of digital marketing, only progress. You could create a landing page by patterning it after an existing email landing page or product landing page, but you won’t necessarily find the same success. How to build a landing page correctly should always depend on your business’s branding, audience and goals.
How To Create a Landing Page the Right Way
How to create a landing page depends on your purpose. What action do you want your customer to take and what’s in it for them? Answering these questions helps pin down the business objective behind creating a landing page and user intent – the website landing page bridges the two.
Expert-approved tips on creating a landing page:
✔ Set your goal. Having an end in mind is a guide to designing your landing page and evaluating dips in your landing page performance.
✔ Be creative. Your potential customers have seen many landing pages, so uniqueness is always refreshing. Try new things while staying true to your brand.
✔ Optimize. Once you get past the basic elements of your landing page, you need an optimization strategy to improve your results continuously.
How To Do Landing Page Optimization
Creating a landing page is the first challenge; optimizing is next. We answered, what is landing page optimization? – but the next question is: What really goes into improving your landing page conversion rates?
The best approach on how to do landing page optimization starts with a perfect understanding of your prospects, channels and customer feedback. Then, leverage tried-and-tested techniques on how to make a landing page deliver the results you need.
Key landing page optimization strategies include:
• A/B Testing: Test slightly varied versions of two landing pages on a segment of your target audience to find a “winner” and release the better-performing landing page. This also covers analyzing changes in your landing page conversion rates based on intentional variations on your landing page.
• Landing Page Audits: Professional landing page optimization services can spot things to remove or change to make a landing page successful. This part of the process usually involves pointing out areas for improvement, such as text size or CTA button technical errors.
• Continuous Data Analysis: You can use tools to look at your user behavior through a microscope – a heat map tells you where your customers are clicking; a scroll map gives you information on scroll depth and at what intervals. Make changes according to what your data tells you: Focus on what’s working and fix what’s not.
Keep in mind that to succeed with landing page optimization and increase your landing page conversion rates, you have to prioritize customer experience above all else. It is just as important as the landing page design itself.
Get Started With Landing Page Optimization Services
We’ve answered questions like what is a website landing page, how to build a landing page with the right elements and how to make a landing page that delivers results, so now it’s time to look at the bigger picture.
A high converting landing page forms only part of an overarching marketing strategy to attract and entice potential customers. They might have made their way to your landing page through a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, social media post or CTA button on an email newsletter. They have probably engaged with you in various ways, and your desktop website landing page or mobile landing page represents a decision point to engage further or not.
Landing page optimization services provide holistic strategies that grow your customer base from many angles. For instance, instead of designing a separate desktop and mobile landing page, we can create a mobile-friendly one that utilizes keywords relevant to your business, which also benefits your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.
Similarly, a high-converting email landing page is only possible with a targeted email marketing strategy backing it. In sum, you have everything to gain from getting expert help.
Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is a full-service digital marketing agency creating high-converting landing pages for businesses of all sizes since 2005. Our content writing services cater to your professional landing page copywriting needs for your WordPress landing page or preferred platform.
Contact us today to learn more about how to create a high converting landing page and integrate your landing pages seamlessly into your overall web design and digital strategy.
