Every marketer knows the benefits of using a landing page. They’re conversion machines… if you use the proper landing page design.
Luckily, they are easy enough for even the least tech-savvy of marketers to build and launch with landing page templates.
The home page of your website is the front face of your business, whereas landing pages are dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only. It is important to understand the difference.
Here are seven simple steps to transform your landing page from just another mediocre page into a lean, mean conversion machine.
1. Keep it Simple
Simplicity is the most important feature of successful landing pages, and it is often overlooked. One of the main use cases of a landing page is to get users’ information, albeit in return for free downloads, event sign-ups or contests.
Make sure the user knows exactly what they’re getting as soon as they arrive on the page.
When you land on the LoginRadius demo signup page below, you know exactly where you are and what’s being offered. The picture (and phone number) also help to reinforce the personalized side of this page and the visitor’s one-on-one demo. All you have to do is enter some quick information and book.
2. Clear, Uncluttered Design
This is the same for any website, if a user comes to your website or page and is left wondering “what the heck is this?”, it’s safe to assume that’s no good thing…
Making sure you have an engaging, creative landing page design will give you the ‘wow’ factor and ensure you aren’t visually assaulting your users. The Machu Picchu page above has a nice feel to it and it is different to the all too often over-crowded page.
Landing pages shouldn’t be heaving with puffs for absolutely everything you offer, and they should be easy on the eye. Take a look at a great example from Salesforce
This design works well because it is simple and doesn’t clutter the page. The minimal text on the SalesForce landing page makes it clear exactly what you stand to get.
All you have to do is fill out your information and click the button to download.
The main takeaways for landing page design are to:
- Showcase the product (or downloadable content)
- Have clear calls to action
- Know your target audience
- Be clutter free
3. Use a Landing Page Provider
Using a provider makes it so easy even your grandma can make a landing page. Okay, maybe not every grandma, but it’s pretty easy. For example, Wishpond allows you to choose one of their landing page templates and have a landing page up and running within minutes – without any code.
All of their templates are compatible with mobile devices and have fast page upload times.You can drag and drop page sections to enhance your design – without using any additional code.
Most marketers aren’t coders, so going with a landing page provider ensures you can get fantastic pages up without hiring or overloading your developers.
4. Enhance with Social Login
You can design wonderful pages until the wee hours of the morning and hope that they convert, or you can make sure they convert by removing registration barriers. Enhancing the user’s experience on your marketing landing pages with social login increases conversion rates.
Social login allows users to log in with one of their existing social accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, Linkedin, etc. Users can opt to enjoy a quick and hassle-free login process and, with a provider like LoginRadius, social login is easy to implement on all websites and landing pages.
When a user logs in with social login you, as the website owner, can also obtain a wealth of accurate user profile data.
Understanding your user base is essential in marketing. Seeing that 92% of users have given incorrect information on a registration form, social login ensures your marketing and sales teams can make well-informed strategic decisions.
5. Prominent Calls to Action
The purpose of a landing page is to get users to go to the next step, whether it be downloading content, registering for a trial, or seeing more features. You need to make it clear to the user what that next step is.
Tell them exactly what is going to happen when they click the button, get them excited and reassure them it won’t take up too much of their valuable time.
For example, this call to action below is very prominent and easy to understand. You can’t miss it.
6. Be Search Engine Friendly
“If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it still make a sound?”
In other words, there’s no point in designing the best landing page ever if users don’t get to see it because it doesn’t show up in major search engine results.
Make sure this doesn’t happen to you by using search engine optimization (SEO) properly.
SEO ensures that your page is found by users who are interested in what you have to offer. This is especially important on landing pages that are meant for long term use and should be continually drawing traffic, such as ebooks or premium content download pages.
Google ranks websites based on many different factors, and here are a few quick tips to optimizing SEO:
- Have a clearly defined message
- Use keywords that your users will search but DON’T downgrade copy by just stuffing pages with as many keywords as possible
- Write punchy headlines that include keywords
- Have inbound links that direct traffic to your page
- Write an informative meta description (the short paragraph that appears on search result pages) that includes your chosen keywords
- Use a good URL – make sure your keywords are in the URL but keep the wordcount minimal
This constitutes a high-level SEO overview for landing pages but should you want to dig a bit deeper, check out Wishpond’s article on optimizing blogs for search..
Of course, making an engaging and creative landing page that is also search engine friendly is quite the balancing act, but mastering this will make sure your landing pages truly rock.
7. Track… and be Ready to Change Tactics
Metrics. Metrics. Metrics. Marketing efforts are nothing if you don’t have metrics to back it up. How many people came to your landing page? How many bounced? How many converted?
These are all questions you should be asking yourself to make sure your landing page is successful and you know what to improve for next time.
There are hundreds of different metrics you can track, but it is important to pick a few that matter most to you. The four most valuable are: unique traffic, bounce rate, social shares and ROI.
Unique traffic shows you how many individual users come to your website. It is good to watch these numbers so if you get more or less traffic during a period you can analyze what you did differently to better understand what is working and what needs a tweak.
Bounce rate lets you know how many people leave the site without actually registering. There are many reasons as to why a user leaves a website. This is important to track so you can understand how many users are not following through on your calls to action and how you can optimize them to increase your conversion rate.
Social shares is a great way to track a landing page and see how far your social reach is. The more shares you receive often reflects how valuable your users find the content.
Return on Investment (ROI) is one of the most crucial marketing metrics. You need to measure how much revenue your efforts return. This tells you if your overall campaign is successful.
Conclusion
Understanding your traffic, users’ behaviour, and your return are essential to any successful campaign and that applies equally to a landing page.
So, there you have it. Seven ways to make your landing page the best thing since sliced bread.
What are your fail-safe landing page tips and tricks? Post your tips in the comments below.
About the Author
Taylor Nelson is a marketing specialist at LoginRadius, a rapidly-expanding social login and sharing provider. She is a recent MacEwan University graduate and has written many articles on the LoginRadius blog. She loves snowboarding and red wine (not at the same time!). Connect with her on Linkedin or Twitter.
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