All of the marketing and press in the world cannot help a company or entrepreneur that cannot put together a good landing page. Many studies have shown that slight changes in the structure of a landing page can double or even triple conversions overnight. That is much easier than spending hours on SEO, PR, Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and other expensive marketing tactics. The only tricky part is figuring out what those slight changes need.
Here are four keys to creating a successfully converting landing page and examples.
Simplify
Companies and individuals often get so caught up in explaining 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, read all the copy, and then make a well-informed decision. Many consumers give a webpage less than 10 seconds to capture their attention or information, and then they are gone.
Bills.com has a great landing page that simplifies its purpose into one question, asking why they are on the site. Then Bills.com can direct them to the most relevant information and keep them long enough to start building rapport.
Explain the benefit
Once you simplify, you focus on explaining the benefit of your product or service in as few words as possible. Suppose you sell an app to help people manage their time more effectively. In that case, you might write something like “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 sometimes be hard to work in. Any SEO worth their salt will explain that a webpage needs a lot of words and written content to show up in search engines. Companies like Google do not have much to go off besides words, meaning words matter quite.
Many companies, 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, and ask for their business at the end. That model doesn’t work when they are a click away from leaving.
Here is an excellent example of a page with lots of helpful content but offers the CTA at the beginning for those ready to decide. Then the top of the page provides links that can take you to other places on the page that may answer specific questions.
Design around CTA
Remember, your 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 should see on a landing page is the CTA. They can then browse other parts of the page that they find relevant, but they always know 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 possible, making 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 enhance conversions than to increase traffic quickly.
