A high converting landing page can be the difference between success and failure for an online business. Excellent landing pages make a particular difference to product launches and software promos. I’ve personally been involved with product launches that have netted hundreds of thousands of dollars each; largely thanks to well-optimized landing pages.
You need only look at online marketing company Moz, and the work they did with Conversion Rate Experts, for further proof of the efficacy of great landing pages. By optimizing, testing, and marketing only one landing page, the two firms were able to boost Moz’s revenue by $1 million a year.
If you rely on landing pages to generate revenue, or have a vital product launch upcoming, you’ll want to read on. This guide is going to teach you five essential landing page design lessons that I’ve learnt from working with some of the top affiliate marketers on JV Zoo. Take those lessons on board and you’ll be able to build a landing page that’s ideal for your business.
Understanding what makes for perfect landing page design is the first step to building a page that will take your firm to a new level. That’s what this guide is all about. Read on, and our five essential landing page design lessons will help you produce a high converting page.
Five Landing Page Design Lessons
Landing pages are standalone web pages dedicated to initiating any conversion of your choice. Landing pages are crucial to the success of many sites, products, and businesses. The problem is that most people are unsure as to how to create an excellent landing page. They don’t know the right elements to include. They don’t have experience of landing page design to fall back on.
You can – and should – design each landing page specifically to receive campaign traffic. It must be wholly optimized to achieve a particular purpose. That might be to generate pre-launch emails, to sign people up to a webinar, or to sell a product. Whatever it is, the page can entirely focus on achieving the goal.
To get your landing page design just right, takes practice and knowhow. I’m going to give you the benefit of my own experience to help you along. Below are five vital landing page design lessons that will help you get the design and building of your landing pages just right.
Properly Prepare Before You Start
Before you even think about the actual elements of your landing page, you need to have a plan. You can’t just expect to bang out words on your keyboard and expect them to magically convert into a conversion-focused copy.
Point is, creating landing pages is an intensive project. From customer research to extensive testing, there’s much more that goes into creating landing pages (no matter how short it is). For this reason, I recommend breaking down your project to inform effective and efficient execution.
For instance, reaching your target audience is an important step of creating landing pages.
After all, landing pages – like many aspects of your business – must be customer-centric. Their success depends on them being relevant to your target audience and providing them with a desirable customer experience.
Your landing page must make visitors want what you have to offer. It needs to persuade those visitors to take the action you desire from them. For that, you must know who those visitors are and what drives them. Only by gaining that understanding can you know how to speak to them. It’s only with that knowledge, too, that you’ll see the pain points those prospective customers have.
An excellent way to get in the minds of your target audience is by building a customer persona. Use all the data you have on hand to create a profile of a typical customer. Learn things like their age, gender, interests, and income level. All that helps you to understand their needs and motivations.
With the desires and needs of your target customers in mind, you can start to define your product’s USP. What is it that makes your offering ideal for those customers, and means it can solve their problems better than anything else on the market? It’s the answer to this question that should form the focus of your landing page.
Include the Right Elements
Now you have a vision for your landing page and its message you can think about the physical elements it must contain. There are a handful of essential components that every great landing page needs:
- A compelling headline
- Clear sub-headings
- Obvious CTAs
- A visual focus
- A striking rundown of the benefits of your product
Every landing page must have a headline that hits visitors between the eyes. It’s the first thing that a visitor notices and must enable them to understand your value proposition. The best headlines are clear, bold, and focus on the most significant pain point your customers have.
A sub-heading to support your headline is also crucial. You should use it to add context to the headline and give visitors a reason to read all of your copy, not just scan it. Other sub-headings down the page help break things up and keep a reader’s attention.
Your page’s CTA or CTAs are how you achieve your conversions. They need to grab the attention and show visitors how easy it is to take the action you want from them. Most good landing pages use CTA buttons as they fulfill both of those requirements.
As crucial as your landing page copy is – and it is – you should also include a visual focus. That might be an image, a video, or even an infographic. It helps catch the attention of visitors and gives them an instant idea of what the page is about. Any visual that shows a person achieving a goal using your product is ideal.
A bulleted list or another clear rundown of your product’s key benefits is also essential. Make sure it’s apparent even to those visitors who only scan your page. Also, be sure that the benefits focus on solving your customers’ pain points.
Get the Layout Right
Where you place your page’s elements is another crucial factor to consider. One of the essential rules for modern landing page design is to feature major components ‘above the fold’. ‘Above the fold’ is a phrase borrowed from the newspaper industry. In that niche, it means the upper area of a broadsheet that shows when the paper gets folded in half.
Online, ‘above the fold’ refers to what a visitor to your page sees immediately. The information that’s visible to them without needing to scroll down. Your visitors should grasp the action you want them to take almost immediately.
The above from Voila Norbert, for the email verify page is a prime example. The area above the fold has every element required for a quick conversion. The headline, supporting sub-heading, CTA, social proof, and a visual focus.
Some landing pages keep everything above the fold. That’s ok, but to increase conversions, you need to provide visitors with answers to questions they might have. Below the fold, you find a supporting argument, with additional social proof, and an overview of the service. It’s this additional text that helps increase the conversion rate.
Craft the Ideal Copy
It’s your copy that makes up the meat of any sales page. As such, it’s critical to get it right. Once you’ve drawn a visitor in, your copy needs to do your convincing for you.
I’ve learned from product launches that long-form copy tends to convert better than short-form. The best long-form landing page copy typically shares some of these characteristics:
- A clear focus on selling one product or service: that selling process is often achieved by using a problem followed by a solution.
- A narrative structure: the copy has a logical construction that helps pull readers deeper down the page.
- Centered crossheads: these are sub-headings that run across the whole page. They break up the copy but also tell a story, which keeps the reader’s attention from wavering.
- Bullets and other lists: these elements also break up the copy and stand out to those visitors who scan rather than read the page.
At every stage, your landing page copy must focus on the problem you are solving and the benefit the visitor will gain. Don’t fall into the trap of listing product features or telling your backstory. The landing page isn’t about you; it’s about how you help your readers achieve their aims.
When it comes to structuring your copy, the AIDA model is a staple of good online marketing. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Those are the four stages through which your copy aims to take readers.
First, you grab their attention, and then you build interest followed by desire in your product. Finally, you compel the readers to take your desired action. It’s a straightforward and traditional model that works.
Feature Bonuses & FAQs
The best landing pages often boast a few added extra elements that help to push visitors over the edge and turn them into customers. Two of the most effective of these are bonuses or rewards and FAQ sections. They each work to boost conversions but in different ways.
Bonuses work for the simple reason that people like free things. Offer someone close to purchasing a product a limited time bonus, and it often pushes them over the edge. Such rewards help to generate a fear of missing out (FOMO). People don’t like to think they might lose an opportunity. Good examples of bonuses include:
- Access to webinars or online courses
- Free eBooks or other downloads
- Limited time trials of premium versions of products
- One-on-one coaching on using a product
FAQ sections at the bottom of a landing page helps to boost conversions for a different reason.
They work best to persuade those potential customers with one or two remaining objections. Take, the above FAQ section. The questions and answers are designed to speak to any queries site visitors may still have after reading the rest of the page.
The answers cover ways users can extend the software offering in the future, and how the offering fits with existing systems. Those are remaining objections that might otherwise prevent a visitor from taking the plunge and buying the software.
Land Yourself a Page That Truly Converts
A perfect landing page can be like a silver bullet for any online business. Getting a landing page right can be the difference between getting a product off the ground and seeing it flounder. It can take your revenue to an entirely new level.
There’s no one template for a landing page that will work for every business or product. What there are, though, are some vital lessons that can help inform your landing page design. The five featured above should help steer you toward the best possible landing page for you. The kind of page that could put your head and shoulders above your rivals.
