Designing landing pages the right way can easily double or triple your conversions.Landing pages turbocharge your marketing funnel by getting website visitors to face the decision to convert now. Instead of a soft call to action with your paid search ads that simply says “learn more” or “take a look at what we offer,” high-converting landing pages strongly push one outcome with no alternatives (aside from completely navigating away from the page).Well-designed landing pages push lead decisions without appearing pushy. They present the most compelling information possible while stating clear benefits, unfailingly directing visitors to the call to action, or CTA. Making critical design mistakes derails this experience. Brush up on the best practices for designing high conversion landing pages by considering all of the recommendations below.
Know Your Target Audience and What Motivates Them
“People don't buy products,” asserts user onboarding expert Samuel Hulick, “they buy better versions of themselves.”Your job as a marketer is to identify your high-value audiences and what better version of themselves they want. Only then can you position your landing page offer in a way that grabs their attention.Start by revisiting your buyer personas. Determine the things they care about most in their lives, and then organize what pain points stand in their way. Your main landing page header should promise to relieve that pain point instantly, and then go into further detail about the “hows” and “whys.” If you can address that pain point effectively, you have already captured their attention enough to keep going.Far too many marketers go about this process backwards. They think about the benefits of their product or compelling offer, represent those benefits foremost and then mold the copy to fit the audience’s needs. Don’t fall into this trap. Instead, kick off the landing page by showing your audience what they need to see to get excited before giving them the real sales pitch. Force yourself to do this by eliminating as many first-person nouns as possible (I/we) in favor of second-person (you). For instance, Marketing Experiments A/B tested three headline variations:
- “You Are Master and Commander of a Billion Documents”
- “Cost Effective Litigation Management Solutions”
- “We Sell Unfair Advantages. Interested?”
Can you guess which one was the best-performing? #1 outperformed #2, which spoke of product-centric features, by 259%.
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Make Your Page Skimmable and Mobile-Friendly
We don’t have a lot of time for reading these days, especially when we get inundated with offers on a daily basis. We want to know the basics now. When building landing pages, keep this fact in mind. Think like a journalist — don’t bury the lede. Once enticing them with pain point relief, find ways to answer basic questions a user may have by using skimmable page elements, including:
- What exactly is being offered? What does someone taking up the offer get?
- Who is it for?
- Why does it benefit them?
- How does it factor into existing solutions they use? (Think about integration with peripheral products and competitive advantages against near-identical ones.)
- When can I get the offer? (Also known as, what does someone have to do to get it?)
All of these questions should be answered within five seconds of arriving on your landing page, using the most visible of elements, like headlines and prominent bulleted lists or tiles.Remember that photos also reinforce all of these explanations. Finding a way to partially answer questions through photo choice helps facilitate page skimming. Research from the Poynter Institute found that most people’s attention went to the biggest illustration upon entering a page. They then looked to the largest headlines, then prominent bullets or captions, before finally focusing on blocks of text.Additionally, ensure that your page skims well on a mobile screen without pinching to zoom. Over half of all web traffic is mobile now, and some companies say that consumers are 20% more likely to convert on mobile.
Make Your CTA Obvious and Action-Oriented
Many landing page designers slip up by falling back on generic copy for their CTA button. Know that, in your reader’s mind, that button must be the real action trigger. You can instruct them to do something above hundreds of times, but the button itself makes the magic happen.Yet, far too many marketers use generic CTAs on their buttons like:
- Submit
- Learn More
- Buy Now
- Free Download
All of these verbs sound like chores or something unexciting. Instead, act like the button is a portal toward making the benefits promised above come true. One company raised conversions by 78.5% by simply changing “Free Download” to “Show Me How to Attract More Customers!”Ensure that your CTA is visible above the fold and at all points while scrolling. As your lead delves further into the landing page, they must always be reminded to heed your call to action.
Add Subordinate Details To Close the Offer
Engaging headlines, skimmable copy and a strong CTA serve as the foundation that holds your entire landing page together. You can then furnish the page with more granular details that help convince a lead to buy.Not everyone will read this information, but that’s okay. “It’s true that 79% of people won’t read it all, but 16% read everything,” asserts ConversionXL. “That 16% is your main target group.” They add that research from IDC shows how “up to 50% of potential sales are lost due to inadequate information.”Make your details supplemental to the main page elements, directing the eyes of people reading carefully and allowing for quicker skimming by those in a hurry.Be sure to also include trust signals for those enticed by the offer but skeptical of its legitimacy.
A/B Test Optimization Changes
Once you have your first landing page proof, think of how you can improve it and then use these variations for testing. Even the most scientifically-backed conversion optimization practices may not work across the board for everyone.For instance, conventional wisdom and certain data says that landing pages over 800 words long have a 33% lower median conversion rate compared to short pages with less than 200 words. Yet, an A/B test for one company found that a landing page 20 times longer than the control converted 363% better. Take nothing for granted. Push yourself to drive better optimizations over time by crafting together hypotheses and then testing them.
Build High Converting Landing Pages and Earn More Business With Symphonic Digital
Get the expertise of a dedicated account team at your side with Symphonic Digital. Push optimization further and drive a lift in conversions by using our industry-tested recommendations and rigorously scientific A/B testing protocols.Find out how you can improve your landing page design and find success when you contact us. Start the conversation today and you'll see improvement tomorrow!
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