Great landing page design can make a big improvement to your websites performance in fulfilling your business goals. Many landing pages are put together with a focus on the product and business. However, for the design to be successful you need to shift your focus to your visitors and what they want. In this post we look the 7 key steps to designing a great landing page, and show you how you can use them to optimise your own landing pages.
The 7 Elements to Great Landing Page Design
1: Landing Page Headline
Your headline should be powerful and consistent, it has to grab people’s attention and persuade them to click on the landing page. To get a high conversion rate your headline should be specific, succinct, have a singular focus on what your visitors believe to be desirable, and reflect the viewer’s expectations. It may seem like a simple task but there is actually quite a lot to writing effective landing page headlines. This guide to writing landing page headlines from Unbounce should get you on track quickly.
2: Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful persuader. Failing to show social proof on your landing page is a mistake, you’ll be missing out on a significant improvement to your conversion rate. Show comments from customers, video testimonials, and content from your social media followers. Numbers can also help, consider for example showing how many people have downloaded the offer so far.
3: Landing Page Copy
Don’t get carried away writing lots of copy for your landing page, you want to keep it succinct and to the point. A wall of text is a fast way to bounce potential customer off the page. You want you copy to support your headline, outline the main benefits of your offer, and address any major objections. Save more detailed explanations for once people have signed up. For a great landing page design your goal should be to keep all of the content above the fold.
4: Call to Action
Use a strong direct call to action. You should use compelling action words that encourage people to click, and avoid dry words like ‘submit’. The form should be minimal as well, people will soon get bored with filling out lots of fields. As a rule the less fields you put on your landing page the higher the conversion rate.
5: Fast Loading & Mobile
The time it takes for your landing page matters. Fast pages get ranked higher in Google’s search results because they lead to a better user experience. Amazon have found that for every 100 ms improvement in page loading time they get a 1% increase in their conversion rate (see Greg Linden’s presentation Make Data Useful).
6: Measure & Optimize
To get the best out of your landing page you will need to measure and optimise its performance. Make sure you’re setup with Google Analytics, you’ll want to configure the goal tracking and split testing settings. However, this can get a bit complicated if you’re not familiar with analytics. Crazy Egg have a great guide to A/B testing with Analytics to help you through the process.
7: Keep it Simple
The final element is really a guiding rule, ‘Keep It Simple”. You’ll may find yourself adding in answers to every question you think of, and listing every last feature of your offer. Before you publish take a long careful look at your landing page, do you customers need each block of information in order to make a decision, or is the information better located on a different page. If it’s not contributing to converting the customer it has no place on the landing page.
If you follow this guide you will end up with a great landing page design for your business. You may not get it right first time, but through a process of tweaking the content and measuring the results you will discover the key to getting your visitors to take the action you desire.
This infographic by Infusionsoft summarises the 7 Steps to designing great landing pages.