If you’ve been thinking of your landing page a just a holding area where your website visitors can launch browsing excursions to all the other areas around your website, I’d like to change your way of thinking. You do not want your visitors to leave your landing page to browse your website. Your landing page isn’t just a portal or a launch pad. It’s the first place you’re going to clinch a conversion and win a new customer.
If you haven’t been thinking of your landing page as a place where you land conversions, your strategy may need some revising. Here are five keys to creating a landing page that does what it’s supposed to do – win customers.
1. Know Your Target Market
Are you surprised that knowing your target market is the number one thing you can do to bump up your landing page conversions? Probably not. Because knowing your target market is the number one thing you have to do in business, in general.
But how can you apply your knowledge of your market to your landing page? Don’t just toss up a landing page and hope the right people see it and like what you have to say.
Instead, find out what your market wants and needs in a website, what problems of theirs your online resources can solve, and how your website can make their lives easier. Look at what your ideal client’s income is, where they live, what their hobbies are, what they dream about, what values they hold, and where they shop, etc.
Once you know the answers to these questions and you truly understand your ideal customer, you can tailor your landing page design and content to speak directly to them. By focusing in on your target market on your landing page, you have more power and impact on creating interest, evoking emotion, and compelling action.
2. Focus on a Single Conversion Type
The purpose of your landing page is to guide your visitors to take action. The action that you guide them toward has to be specific and clear. Your goal is to get them to do just one thing while on your landing page. Before you even start to write, design, and layout your landing page, you need to know what that action will be, and the tool they will use in taking that action.
Are they going to enter their email address and click submit? Do they need to call you? Will they be commenting on your blog? Do they need to email you? Should they click a link to purchase something?
Knowing the action your visitors need to take and the tool that will facilitate and encourage that action is an important step to designing a better landing page.
3. Brand Your Landing Page with a Simple, Professional Design
And what about the design of your page? Your landing page must have an immediate, positive aesthetic effect on your visitors. How do you capture them that quickly?
By creating a landing page that enhances your brand’s visual identity. The appearance of your landing page should be in harmony with the spirit of the product or service you are promoting. Working with an Internet-marketing-savvy, professional designer will help ensure your design is simple, clean, true to your brand, and professional.
One guideline will hold, regardless of your market — keep it simple. Stick to one or two type families. Use color and type to guide the eye through the page. Set wide margins, and keep all of your content in the center of the screen. Avoid distracting sidebars and information that could pull the reader’s attention away from the page objective–to get a conversion.
4. Eliminate All User Distractions
Imagine your landing page as it should appear: it expresses a clear brand identity in its visuals, and it appeals to your target market. On top of that, consider all the other marketing efforts you put forth to get your visitor to your landing page in the first place. After all of that work, the worst thing that could happen is to have them leave your website without taking action–without joining your list, subscribing to your blog, or purchasing an item, etc.
Think of your landing page as a funnel. It’s job is to guide visitors to take one action. But it can’t do that if there are distractions. Distractions pull the visitor’s attention away from the focus of the page, and from taking action. Distractions will cause your conversions to plummet.
When designing a landing page, you want to remove all unnecessary elements, links and navigation that don’t have anything to do with the focus of the landing page and that don’t help guide the visitor to take the desired action.
