What Is A Landing Page? Learn 7 Best Practices

A site’s landing page is its shop window. It’s the first page a visitor (think – ‘potential customer’) sees. It needs to be a sales funnel without making the potential customer feel like they’re being coerced into buying or signing up for something. A smart landing page design is a crucial part of good web design.

Ideally, a good landing page should have the following attributes:

• Conversion-focused user interface design
• Mobile-friendliness
• Eye-catching heading
• Meaningful sub-heading
• Basic information about the brand, product or business
• A short video or a high-quality, nice image
• The (all-important) call to action button – buy now, see more, more details…
• Information about awards won or big-name clients
• Testimonials from previous satisfied customers
• Good overall user experience

The primary purpose of a landing page is to act as the next stage of a sales funnel. This is a term given to the process of bringing a viewer step by step towards buying the product, signing up for the course, agreeing to attend the seminar.

The potential customer has seen the advertisement and been sufficiently engaged to click through to the landing page. Businesses want them to click onwards from here, not click away and look somewhere else. So the sales funnel has to be pretty convincing all the way down.

The best landing pages are clean and uncluttered, with clear and concise information about the product or service. Offers should be prominently displayed, maybe in the header, with more information in the sub-heading.

Testimonials are encouraged but should be from actual customers rather than fake reviews, or this could discredit the business. This is the way to reduce the bounce rate – the number of viewers who click away after simply seeing the landing page. They need to be enticed to stay, read the call-to-action and act on it, in the process of becoming a lead.

When designing a landing page, the following factors need to be taken into consideration.

7 Landing Page Best Practices

1) Effective Landing Page Copywriting

Sales copywriting holds great importance for the landing page optimisation. It’s vital to supplement your text with images and video, but the text on the page is something impossible to overemphasize. Writing should be simple, relevant and concise.

Headlines are the most important part of your text. As David Ogilvy said, “When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.” You should spend some time on writing an attention-grabbing and resonating headline. Resonating with potential customers’ needs and expectations of course.

One of the most simple yet effective techniques in sales copywriting is focusing on benefits other than features. Customers don’t want to buy your products or services. Nope, it is not a joke. No one cares about your product or service. They care about the benefit or solution your product will provide them.

2) High-Quality Images or Videos

You need to use eye-catching images or videos for high-converting landing pages. The human brain responds to visual data more than any other type of data. Proper landing page visuals can help enhance the overall user experience since they keep potential customers’ attention on the page. This will decrease the bounce rate and positively affect the dwell-time.

3) Call-to-Action

The call-to-action button is often large, colourful and plastered with a phrase such as BUY NOW, LEARN MORE or SIGN UP HERE. It is the button businesses want viewers to press, as this means they are one step closer to a sale.

4) Above the Fold

Above the fold content is critical in web design for more conversions and sales. Above the fold was originally used in newspaper publishing for the headline content visible on the front page of the paper before the fold.

On a news website, this will be a headline, a picture with a caption and the first paragraph of the article. On a marketing site or e-commerce website, it should be an area that is clean and simple, with the heading, sub-heading, an image or video, and the call-to-action button, plus maybe drop-down menu options on the navigation bar for more information.

There are some people who argue that a true landing page shouldn’t even have navigation except to have the option of a sign-up form or call-to-action.

5) Simple Contact Us or Sign Up Forms

Contact us and sign up forms are the means by which a business will build a leads database and hopefully, brand loyalty. However, the idea of “Keep It Simple Stupid” applies here as much as anywhere else on the site.

Some people don’t like giving away their every last detail, so a short sign up of email address and post or zip code will provide enough information to allow marketing trends to be analyzed and leads contacted.

If the business wants to be a bit more personal, a name field could be added, although this does leave it open for the subscriber to decide that, for this subscription at least, their name really is Santa Claus.

6) Use Social Proof – Customer Reviews

One of the most powerful landing page elements is happy customer reviews. You literally let satisfied previous customers write for you.

Testimonials increase customer confidence and conversions rates since they show prospective customers what they will experience if they decide to use your service or product.

7) A/B Testing for Landing Page

A/B testing is as simple as customizing a landing page to link to a particular advertisement and seeing what the conversion rate is like for each.

Ideally, two distinct variations with different webpage names should be in operation; maybe with different colours or offers, even if they are both advertised on the same platform. Then businesses can see which variant is more popular by comparing bounce rate and sales from each link.

The advertising and the webpage should tie up though, using the same colours and fonts throughout to reinforce the brand. Many businesses opt for several different landing pages to link into advertising campaigns, promotions or products.

Marketing analysis has shown that this could be as many as 10-15 different landing pages, all funneling through to the same end content but coming from different advertisements and promoted spots on social media.

You can use landing page plugins to create alternatives for A/B testing.

Conclusion

The conversion rate is the number of readers who become buyers. Higher the number, more successful the website.The aim of the landing pages is increasing conversion rates. Converting visitors into customers is the ultimate goal of every website. Many people may click and read, but the business is ultimately only really interested in those who actually buy the product, sign up to the course, attend the marketing event, concert or conference.

This way a business can increase its return-on-investment or ROI. ROI originated in the financial world to describe a profit or loss made on the sum initially invested. Its use has spread to reflect business success generally – the more successful a business is, the higher its ROI is said to be.

This applies to financial profit on items sold at a higher price than they were purchased for, and numbers of people signing up for a course compared to the cost of the time it took the organisers to set it up.

A well-designed, clean, unfussy landing page is potentially marketing gold when linked to a suitable eye-catching advertisement or post. Without this, take-up will be less and leads far fewer.