Your landing page is arguably one of the most important parts of your online sales funnel – it’s where you turn website visitors into sales and leads and whether it links from your Google Ads, your social media or your email marketing, your landing page is where your business begins. So why are so many brands choosing to send their visitors to a landing page that isn’t fully optimised?
A landing page has one goal: turn visitors into conversions.
Landing pages are specially designed pages with the main goal of getting your message across, engaging with audiences and generating sales or leads and are a key component of a marketing strategy. As the main destination of paid traffic, there’s a lot of thought, money and time put into generating results from these pages.
Ultimately, optimising your landing page allows you to achieve a much higher conversion rate, however landing page optimisation can also lower your acquisition costs, help you attract more customers and maximise the value of your ad spend.
Optimising your landing page allows you to identify potential problems or errors, letting you understand how your landing page functions and whether it works well enough to generate conversions. Through testing, you can monitor your improvements and measure the effectiveness of your page and it’s conversion rate.
If you’re looking for ideas of where to start, we’ve put together a short guide to landing page best practices in order to generate better results:
Limit The Number Of Actions
The fewer number of actions there are to take on a landing page the less opportunity there is for visitors to get distracted by. If your landing page has too many elements such as navigation, extra form fields or any other functionality that could lead to the user looking elsewhere, it’s a good idea to remove these elements, even if it means you have more white space. In fact, a landing page that features fewer elements and more white space can actually lead to more conversions.
Keeping it simple is the best strategy to follow, imagine being your audience and think about what they want to see from the page do they want to be left confused? Or left knowing exactly what they need to do?
Clearly Show Your Message
Never underestimate the power of a great headline! Your landing page needs to include a headline that clearly tells the audience what they can expect from your page and from your company, it’s very possible that some visitors will only read your headline, which is why it needs to be snappy, relevant and to the point. It’s not just your headline that counts, however, your body text needs to be clear and concise, communicating the benefits of your product with your audience, encouraging them to take the next step and inquire or purchase your product.
By using a long form of copy that incorporates keywords into the text you can target search results too, helping improve your search engine rankings and getting your brand get above the competition.
Keep It Consistent
If you’re driving paid traffic from an ad to your landing page then you’ll want to keep the layout and overall design of your page looking and feeling similar to the ad users have just clicked, creating consistency. If this is the first time audiences are finding your brand they’re likely to still be trying to gauge your business, working out if you’re to be trusted or not. If they were to connect with your ad but then land on a landing page afterwards that looks completely different they’re going to find this less trustworthy and opt-out.
From your colours and images to your layout and headline, you need to incorporate as much as possible from your ad into your landing page, consistency is key!
Test, Test, Test!
For those looking to continuously increase conversions and keep optimising there really is only one answer: You need to test! Effective marketing is done with consistent monitoring, allowing you to figure out what does work on your landing page and what doesn’t. While we’re all told we need to test and why, there are lot’s of organisations out there who don’t put this into place, don’t let it be yours.
It’s never been easier or more cost effective to test than in the current climate, with so many tools available, you can optimise your landing pages at the click of a button and without all the risk.
So much of your audiences landing page experience occurs within the first 3 seconds of visiting the page, meaning it needs to be relevant and engaging right off the bat. Think of your landing page as a way of telling your story, it needs a start, beginning and an end, you need to have a hook in order to encourage your audience to read right until the end, so to speak.
Why not start generating better results and start optimising your landing page today?
