Doing Landing Pages right can be your best chance of optimizing conversions on your website. When I work with clients their main goal is often to get more leads. To get more leads from your website you need a way for your visitors to start engaging with you. Furthermore, attracting a qualified quality lead is business gold. If you have a quality businesses, then if can get on the phone with a qualified lead you can usually close a sale. Enter landing pages for attracting those leads.
What Is A Landing Page?
Let’s get on the same page (so to speak) about landing pages. A landing page is a page on your website that describes an offer and allows a visitor to fill in a form with their email (and sometimes other information) that gives them access to your offer. The offer is typically for a resource piece they can download, watch or listen to or a webinar they can attend. The offer is provided once they give their email (and other information) on what we call a “thank you page.”
How Landing Pages Help You Get More Leads To Close…
When you put together a landing page, you must think through what a highly qualified lead wants and is currently searching for answers to. Let’s take an example of a business who helps families find ways to afford college with financial products and they’ve had success with people who homeschool their children. Then, if it’s almost summer break and your ideal lead is a mom who homeschools her high school child, you need to identify what her most pressing challenges are that your business solves. Then you can design a “free” remedy or tool. In the case of the mom, perhaps she is concerned about her child’s ability to get into a certain level of school, or how many schools should her child apply to, or can the family afford college. Depending upon which is her most urgent and concerning issue, you would design a free gift to address and resolve the issue. That means you need to do your research and find out what the emotional hot buttons are for your market. Then and only then would you consider creating and offer and designing a corresponding landing page to go with it. In this case, if moms of students know that essays can make a college application stand out and they are concerned about being accepted at the school of their choice, then the offer you design could be for a tutorial ebook on “How To Write an Essay That Will Put Your Student At The Top of The College Admissions Acceptance List.” Remember your offer should only promise what you can deliver.
Plan Your Landing Page
Once you have your offer created, now it’s time to plan your landing pages. The copy on your landing page is key, but make sure it is not too wordy. You’ll want it to pass the five second test. If someone cannot understand what your offer is about in five seconds from glancing at the headline and an image and/or bullet point, then keep working on it. The following list describes the essential elements and best practices- including copywriting -to keep in mind.
Landing Page Best Practices
When designing a landing page consider these best practices and essential elements:
- A landing page should NOT have website navigation on it. It’s main function is to collect the visitor’s info on the form. So you don’t want to give people the option to click away.
- A compelling headline. Your headline should describe the type of gift (ebook, coupon, video, etc) and why it’s beneficial.
- A subheadline to offer context as to why it’s valuable
- Two to three sentences describing what they will receive
- Three to five bullet points describing the benefits of the info you have prepared for them
- Social SHARE buttons
- Lead capture form that collects the right amount of information that the visitor would feel comfortable exchanging for the gift.
- Form should be above the fold
- Ensure the page is mobile optimized
- An image of the offer or an irresistible background that conveys the quality and/or a benefit of the offer.