Your landing page is like your LinkedIn profile photo.
If you still have the same one from your senior year of high school instead of a professional photo, don't be surprised that your profile isn't exactly popular.
Don't do the same thing to your landing page, which is the first impression your customers get about your business.
So read on, and make sure you implement these five landing page best practices techniques for higher conversion rates to your business and run-of-the-mill business digital hygiene.
Landing Page Best Practices: The Extended Edition
Landing page best practices, or rather landing page optimization techniques are not only a great way to get more visitors to your website, but it can make or break your business.
Landing page optimization is about improving and upgrading every element on your page to achieve a higher conversion rate in total. To reach that plateau, you need to use data that you have gathered personally from your website and anecdotal evidence.
Sounds tough? No worries, we're here to tackle all your landing page concerns through these five tips and strategies for a killer landing page.
1. Clarify and Simplify
Let's start with your offer. A clear offer is about not only making your organization look smart but effectively transport this brand image to your customer and make it theirs.
In the simplest terms, you need to convince your customers that they are smart for choosing you.
The way to achieve this lofty goal is through a well-planned optimization and conversion strategy that have positive emotions and language as a core aspect.
What are your customers' goals? Once you have a firm grasp over what their goals are, turn it into a straightforward message and headline.
This tackles the text, now the visual component must follow.
The main focus should be on the call to action and making sure that it is given enough emphasis through your landing page design.
2. Let's Talk Design
Design entails many elements, so let's start with the basics: colors.
Contrast in colors is key to bringing attention to your call to action, which pours straight into your conversion rate. Using sharply contrasting colors like black and gold or red and white is a great way to go.
Another important aspect of a homepage design is keeping things "above the fold".
"Above the fold" started with newspapers, with the top stories placed above the fold of the physical newspaper and thus placing all the attention to the titles. Customers usually bought a newspaper depending on how interested they are in reading that top article with the enormously-sized title.
The same concept goes for your landing page.
Keep your important elements above the digital "fold" — which ends at the point where your visitor has to scroll to read more information.
You can find out how your website fares with a scroll map that shows where your average fold is on a variety of devices, so you can correctly place your call to action and other important elements.
3. Mix Scarcity with Bluntness
By creating a time scarcity and utilizing scarcity techniques, you can gently nudge your customers to take an action on your website faster than they would have originally.
Stating keywords like "for a limited time only", or even "available for the first 10 customers", presents an image of scarcity and rarety for your product or service. By implying that your offer is so valuable you can only afford to have it running for a limited time compels your visitors to take action before it is too late.
Tying this strategy with design savviness (remember tip number 2?), you can add elements like a countdown timer to visually showcase the time constraint to your visitors.
In addition, sprinkling some bluntness to your call to action is the way to go.
By bluntness, we don't mean be rude! Simply make your call to action as straightforward and to the point as you can manage.
We know that sometimes you feel that a more fancy call to action might be an opportunity to help your brand image, however, a clear and simple call to action will be more effective in keeping your visitors on your page for a longer period of time.
Some great examples for a call to action would be:
- Join Now
- Sign-Up Here
- Buy Now
- Free 30-Day Trial Here
4. Provide Information and Provide It Now
Congratulations! At this point, you have managed to keep your landing page visitors on your page long enough to attempt some solid conversion techniques.
Your visitors are now legitimately interested in the service or product that you are providing, so the next step would be sharing every tidbit of information that would enable your customers to create an accurate picture of your product.
The way to go would be having them fill a simple form.
Figuring out how long your landing page form should be in not an easy pursuit.
Some marketers swear by the shorter-the-better approach, others see that if your product or service is more niche; then a longer form will enable you to gather as much information about your customers as possible.
Both approaches work for different companies. You'll have to try out different lengths and see which one works best for you and provide the higher quality of forms.
An important note to keep in mind; when you are continually asking for information form your customers, make sure that you are providing as much information back as well.
So don't neglect to provide your contact information in case your visitors had questions or further inquiries that weren't addressed on your website.
5. How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Testing. Testing. Testing.
Nothing will give you more accurate information on your targeted audience than your own data.
So A/B test everything.
The more tests you run, the more up-to-date and on point your data gets. You can do that by changing one single variant at a time like your call to action.
Make sure to take it easy and maintain all the other elements constant, so you can see how that one element is affecting your conversion rate and other stats.
These variants range from the most obvious ones like the call to action and the form length, however, make sure you aren't forgetting about your headlines and copy.
While we're immersed in a more visually-centric world, your visitors still read your text and your headlines. Make sure they are performing well by testing multiple ones and seeing how they fare with your top call to action and highest performing form length.
Are You Ready for More?
Now that you know these five top landing page best practices, you are ready for implementing an amazingly dynamic landing page.
However, it would be a shame to have such great strategies for your landing page and still not know how to calculate your conversion rate.
Make sure to cover all your bases for everything digital marketing and more by checking our blog for more information!