When you have established and hosted a landing page directly on your website, you can generate important leads and perhaps even increase your sales. However, like anything else in life, you can suffer from less-than-stellar numbers. These figures are symptoms of something greater.
Abandonment issues, a soaring bounce rate and ineffective PPC campaigns are some of the problems that you have to deal with when you haven’t come up with a superb landing page. When you do it right, though, you can see spiking conversion rates of visitors into leads.
Indeed, this is much easier said than done. Here are some landing page stats to ponder over:
- The average landing page conversion rate is just 2.3 percent.
- An estimated 80 percent of traffic is allocated to the top 10 percent of landing pages.
- Only half of companies perform A/B testing of their landing pages.
- A one-second delay in your landing page can result in a seven percent conversion reduction.
- You only have eight seconds to make an impression with your headline.
There are landing page fundamentals that every single marketer and brand needs to mull over. By doing so, you can garner incredible ideas relating to trust and security, search engine optimization (SEO), data analytics and what you shouldn’t do to irk your customers.
Simply put: you need to have a clear and clean landing page design template. Or, as KISSmetrics opines, you need a landing page that CONVERTS.
C = Clear Call to Action
O = Offer
N = Narrow Focus
V = VIA: Very Important Attributes
E = Effective Headline
R = Resolution-Savvy Layout
T = Tidy Visuals
S = Social Proof
Unsure where to begin? Well, here are five crucial tips to create a landing page that converts.
The Critical Elements of Effectiveness
As you devise a compelling landing page, otherwise referred to as lead-capture pages, you have to understand the critical elements of an effective landing page. These aspects will help perform the original purpose of a landing page: collect contact information or complete a transaction.
Here are the critical elements of effectiveness:
- A headline, and perhaps even a subheadline (see below).
- Compose a concise but detailed description of your offer.
- Insert a minimum of one supporting image for your product or service.
- Think about adding things like user reviews and security badges.
- Produce a form and add it to the page for get visitors’ personal data.
These are elementary design features of an effective landing page that will help your brand.
Landing Page SEO
Aside from email marketing campaigns and social media initiatives, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential to get your landing page noticed. Without SEO then potential customers can’t find your product, service or offer. Although it’s important, it’s often neglected by marketers.
One of the best ways to ensure your landing page is completed with SEO is to ensure your target query matches the landing page’s content. For instance, a lot of users will type into the search engine bar “how to” or “top 10,” which means you’ll need to refine your content to match that query. When you’re in the middle of penning your content, you should perform a simple search to find out what individuals are typing in that somewhat matches your landing page.
Here are several other tips for your landing page SEO:
- Use a text headline for your primary message and write it in an H1 tag.
- The single landing page should be fully optimized in HTML.
- Know your keywords and short phrases ahead of time.
- A lot of people neglect the META description, but take advantage of it because it’s a free sign for Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
- For your images, insert the alt attribute of img HTML tag.
- Make the content easy to share on social media (search engines love Facebook and Twitter).
- As much as possible, avoid making spelling and grammatical errors.
With these SEO tips for your landing page, you can generate good results on Google or Bing.
A Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
Without a strong but clear call-to-action (CTA), you won’t see any rising conversion rates.
For each landing page that you have – the average website can have between five and 12 – you should have a clear and concise CTA. But it’s more than just “download now” or “act fast.” A little bit of creativity is necessary to produce an effective CTA.
Let’s look at the basicsfirst behind writing a CTA that you may be unaware of:
- CTAs should only be a couple of words; five should be the maximum.
- CTAs have to invoke verbs, such as “download,” “register” or “act.”
- CTAs must be easily located by all of the visitors and big enough to view at a distance.
- CTAs can definitely have a different color that contrasts from the landing page.
With that out of the way, let’s take a gander at the various clever and unique ways you can use CTAs today:
- Social Sharing CTA: want your visitors to become a part of your brand? Encourage your visitors to follow you on Facebook or Twitter and become immersed in the growth of your company.
- Event Promotion CTA: when you have an event coming up – webinar or Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) – you can promote it with a CTA to attract visitors and create awareness.
- Closing the Sale CTA: converting a lead into a customer is the purpose of a CTA. When the CTA is really good then it will certainly encourage the visitor to become a customer of your brand, but you have to make sure the CTA enables them to feel comfortable and confident in their purchase decision.
- Lead Nurturing CTA: one way to make visitors interested in your product is to entice them with something free, whether it’s a free white paper, free ebook or free demo. Always place these CTAs in hot spots of your landing page as well as in your blog posts.
CTAs are imperative features of your landing page. An ineffective one will just waste your precious resources and waste the time of your precious visitors. Nobody wants that.
Produce a Stellar Headline
It takes a certain level of talent and a specific amount of creativity to compose an intriguing headline. A headline is crucial because it compels users to click on the landing page link or encourages visitors to click elsewhere around the landing page. Headlines can also generate leads and perhaps even give your sales a boost.
How do you produce a stellar headline?
First, you must realize that a headline must be clear, relevant and empathetic that does not have to rely on clickbait or misleading language.
Second, a headline should be right to the point and is direct. In other words, it tells you what you need to know without trying to be too smart for your own good. Your audience is likely busy so they don’t have the time nor the inclination to appreciate any “smart” headlines.
Third, there are three types of headlines to consider using: the “how to,” the “action” and the “number.” Each of these will then lead the visitor to content that relates to that headline.
Lastly, you will need to conduct split testing to find out what headlines are working and what headlines aren’t doing much for your bottom line.
Optimize a Landing Page for Phone Calls
In an era where we communicate primarily through emojis, tweets and texts, why would anyone want to make a phone call online? Well, there are plenty who do, and the results are sublime.
All kinds of marketers in every industry are trying out all sorts of fancy tricks and methods, but sometimes it’s good to resort to the good old-fashioned phone call. That’s right. You can optimize your landing page to accept phone calls from visitors. This is the easiest way to generate leads and then turn them into conversions. It offers clear communication and is personal.
Does it work? Here’s a statistic to relish in: phone calls on landing pages have 30 to 50 percent conversion rates, compared to just one or two percent for clicks. Moreover, 70 percent of mobile searches engage with click-to-call landing pages.
With that number in mind, are you interested in making your landing page call-friendly? Here are a couple of ideas you can try in the near future:
- Click to call: a visitor clicks on a number and immediately contacts the company.
- Call-back widget: a user leaves their phone number and your brand calls them back.
- Vanity numbers: the thing with 1-800 numbers is that you can make a word with them.
Final Thoughts
A landing page is your opportunity to generate leads and convert visitors into customers. But a drab and dreary landing page is a wasted opportunity to boost sales. With a stellar, welcoming and creative landing page, you can see more interest, more leads and more sales for your firm.
Landing pages have greatly changed from the days of dial-up Internet and “you’ve got mail.” These landing pages are not only designed better, but they’re also analyzed better by marketers and brands alike. You won’t find false promises and too much eye candy in the average landing page today because companies and marketing professionals have evolved and advanced.
As soon as you mastered your very first landing page, start to work on your next landing page.
