6 Essential Elements Every Winning Landing Page Needs
The question on everybody’s mind: How do I convert traffic into profit? The answer is: through a cleverly designed and optimized landing page.
First things first, let’s start with the basics, what is a landing page? For the purposes of this article, a landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt an action or result. You post a link to your website on your social media accounts, someone clicks that link and they land on a page. That page is a landing page. It can be a sales page, an email opt-in page, or even a video landing page. A more detailed description could be found here.
So you understand the theory behind a landing page, maybe you even have one set up, but now what. Well there are two key ingredients to landing pages and conversion optimization: content and call to action. And here is how to get those right:
#1 Know your Audience
Research your target audience, who are they, what would like to see, what do they need to see on the landing page. The more you know about them the more relevant and targeted your content will be and the more successful your landing page will be.
#2 Tell a Story
You may have heard this before but nowadays content is not about just information, it is about telling a story. Even if your landing page is very technical, make sure there is a natural flow to the content and some kind of a context. You cannot just throw some text together and hope for the best.
A good way to tell a story is with an explainer video. Have a look at this one for example:
#3 Test
When planning a landing page, you will have plenty of ideas, some of which may even be conflicting. So how do you weed out the good ideas from the not-so-good ideas? Split testing! Create two or even three version of the same page and send traffic to each one then let the results speak for themselves. Look at which version had the highest conversion rate and voila! You have a winner. You can do this with Google Analytics Experiments, or with a more advanced tool like Visual Website Optimizer (That’s what we use).
#4 Visuals
Image rich content tends to outperform text rich content. With this in mind, make sure you add a good quality image or a pop of colour to your landing page.
Asos for instance heavily relies on images. Notice how there are very few words on the page.
#5 Call to Action
Nobody wants to be sent to a page only to end up staring at the screen thinking ‘now what?’. After all your landing page needs to have a very narrow focus and some kind of a direction to an action such as:
Give clear instructions and don’t be afraid to tell people what you want them to do!
#6 Make your Product the Star of your Page
What are you selling? What is your USP? Why does it matter? After all this would be the backbone of your landing page. Think about what keywords and phrases you can use in your headline and subheading even throughout your video (if you have one).
Here is a great example from the Telegraph: Sign up to our newsletter – Call To Action; To receive the best of our money advice and tips – The product, the USP.
As you can see, optimizing your landing page and making it a winner is not that hard. Follow these simple steps and find out what works for you. Don’t limit yourself and test which pages work and which don’t. Before you know it, your pages will be converting prospects and feeding leads into your sales funnel.
So go ahead, give these a go and let us know how you get on!
