How to create a great converting landing page

To guide us in this path is a document elaborated by SharpSpring, the American platform of Marketing Automation, and spread by Search Engine Land, which is simply called “Creating Landing Pages That Convert” and, in a score of pages, outlines the process that leads to the creation of a landing page that converts and works.

To be precise, there are 7 elements that characterize a valid landing page, which can really facilitate conversions, but before going into the technical aspects we have to take a small step back to give some informational details.

Let’s start by saying what is not a landing page: the homepage of the site, a product page, the price page, the one of the contacts or “about us” are not a landing page!

In a marketing perspective, the landing page is a specific page that has been designed specifically to achieve a goal, which can be to accumulate email addresses and other personal information of visitors, or to allow the download of a pdf file, registration to a webinar or direct purchase of goods or services.

Whatever the purpose, it is important that the landing page is built and focused only around it, because that is the only way we will not disperse its potential and achieve the desired conversion actions.

Convincing any user to perform a single, particular action on a standard web page is very complicated: our attention threshold is increasingly narrowed (an average of 8.25 seconds had been calculated in 2015, but it is shrinking more and more with the passage of time and with the evolution of the technologies) and the classic web pages offer too many distractions.

Even if the user reaches us with a purpose in mind, he can get lost and distracted with a navigation bar item, a link to another resource, a page advertisement and so on. On the contrary, the beauty and strength of the landing pages are in their ability to go straight to the point, limiting the visitor’s options to a single choice: accept or give up the offer.

Since there are no navigation bars, sidebars, footers, and focusing design and copy to achieve a single result, users are guided and pushed towards that goal, making a path that has indeed a binary term. Meaning that the person can complete the programmed action or leave the page, there is no alternative (tertium non datur, to put it Latin). And when the user completes the action, we get our lead.

An effective landing page is built tailored on the users we are trying to involve: the more this page is customized, the more conversion opportunities we will acquire. So, it is crucial to define the target we want to reach, so we can figure out what the best language to speak and introduce ourselves to this audience is, what graphic look to use, which devices will be used to access the page and which are the personal wishes of the users.

For instance, highlights the SharpSpring guide, if “your product is aimed at older people, it would be better to use a larger font size, have a well-placed call to action above the fold and write the contents in a style that can be convincing for them”. Such landing page will inevitably differ (even in appearance) from one designed for the Millennials, which will probably land on it with a smartphone and are used to scroll a site and also discover any below the fold parts.

Each of these goals creates a completely different landing page, adapted to the specifics of our interest. If we first described the basic anatomy, in order to be excellent a landing page must also have other (few) elements that help to maximize the conversion rate.

Starting from the assumption that “there is no such thing as a perfect landing page” and that every job can be improved, there are however some tips that allow you to optimize your chances, by never forgetting, though, that everything must be included in a superior plan and strategy. A “successful landing page is larger than the sum of its parts”, says Sharpspring.

As with normal web pages, titles are crucial because they are the first – and sometimes only – thing that visitors will read, and so we have to be good at promptly convincing them to stay and complete the action. The key is to explain the benefit of what we offer on the page in a single sentence.

Therefore, the study advises, do not talk about functions, but rather about what people can achieve thanks to our proposal, focusing the title on the user and devoting to its writing the same time and attention that is needed to make the rest of the page. Researches show that 90% of people reading a headline will also be reading the CTA.

“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” has become one of the cult phrases of The Godfather (at the absolute second place of the best quotes in the history of cinema according to the American Film Institute) and this is the secret of an excellent landing page: we can build a technically perfect page, but if the offer is poor we won’t get results.

If the goal is to get new subscribers to the blog, you will probably have to offer some free insights, such as a guide on a specific topic. If you plan to enroll people in the webinar, you will have to highlight the peculiarities of the event: what will they learn and how can they use these information? The offer is the second thing that users read, and therefore the copy must be adapted to the tone and style chosen for the title.

Creating the page does not put an end to our work and to maximize the conversion opportunities there are still some steps to be performed, by doing tests and intervening with optimizations on the parts to be improved.

In practice, all of the landing components should be subjected to a verification process, starting with the title and passing through images, body of the copy, CTA and button color, background page color and size and font type chosen for the texts.

Essentially, there are two possible approaches to this test phase: the A/B test and the multivariants test.

Also known as split testing, the A/B test consists in comparing two versions of the same web page by changing a single detail, to find out which works best. In the case of the landing, we can for example test a new headline, showing the original A variant in the middle of the audience and the B variant (with the new title) in the other half, analyzing and evaluating the conversion rates.

It is history that, in the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States, the candidate (and future president) Barack Obama managed to get $60 million more in donations thanks to an A/B experiment performed on his landing page.

There is no such thing as a better method of experimentation in absolute, because much depends on the type of site and the time we have available: the A/B test provides excellent and certain answers, because it analyzes only one element, does not need much traffic but takes time to complete all aspects to vary and verify.

The multivariants test is much more quicker, but it needs a lot of traffic to verify all the variables.