What makes a good landing page?

Every website needs a landing page, a place where users end up if they click on a link in Google search results, in an email, on another website, advertisement or simply by typing a URL into their browser. What makes your landing page, and the quality of it, even more important is the fact that it acts as your business card on the internet. Whatever your landing page has to offer will determine how visitors perceive your business and influence their decision on whether or not to do business with you.

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While the content of your landing page will highly depend on your industry and the kind of products or services that you offer, there are certain building blocks that are an absolute must-have, if you want to attract the right audience and turn visitors into paying customers. After all, increasing your conversion rate is the ultimate goal of your landing page.

Interesting eye catchers

The average attention span of humans is approximately 8 seconds. That is all the time you have to catch someone’s eye and convince them that delving deeper and gathering more information about you is exactly what they need. If you don’t manage to capture their interest with an inviting and enticing landing page, they will never find out that you may actually have the perfect solution to their problems.

Strong calls to action

The best way to get your audience to engage with you and open up the pathway for further communication and interaction is to get them to carry out a specific action. Whether you want them to participate in a survey, sign up for your newsletter or ultimately to make a purchase – calls of action are generally designed to guide your audience towards the point of sale. Have your contact details available such as a free phone number or email address, consider adding chatbots to your landing page or offer free trials and quotes.

Whatever call to action you choose, the message needs to be very clear and should align with your digital marketing campaigns, which should bring a lot of traffic your way.

Value proposition

Your landing page is your chance to make your business stand out from the crowd and convince visitors that they should come to you and make use of your products or services rather than going anywhere else. However, instead of focusing on making a sale on the spot, your landing page should tell visitors about your brand, your philosophy and why they can trust you. How (well) are you meeting their needs and why are you the one that has the right solution for their problems?

The more people can understand and identify with your brand, the more loyal they will become in the long run. Adding testimonials or feedback from previous clients on your landing page is a very effective way to help visitors build trust and become more comfortable in absorbing the information you are presenting.

Being mobile-friendly

This isn’t so much an actual building block, but having a landing page that is designed for smartphones and other devices is absolutely essential. The majority of Google searches nowadays are undertaken from a mobile device, and if a user has trouble accessing or navigating through your website while on the go, there is no chance they will ever conduct business with you.
Ensure that your landing page offers a design that is easy to read on any device and that all the important bits and pieces are clearly visible. Bear in mind the loading time as online users are very impatient, wanting information as fast and conveniently presented as possible. Consider clickable phone numbers to make contacting you even easier.

Trouble-shooting

Whether or not your landing page is good for your business will show in your bounce rate. This captures all those visitors that only make it as far as your landing page, but never follow through with your calls to action or dig deeper into what your business is all about.

There are several reasons why you may have a high bounce rate. Maybe your landing page wasn’t what they expected. Or maybe they didn’t fully believe or understand the content you were delivering. Or maybe your landing page was simply too good and gave them everything they needed to know without taking a further look at your other content or interacting with you.

There is a fine balance to achieve between catching your audience’s eye and satisfying their needs while at the same time making them feel like they have to take action in order to be fully satisfied.

Split-testing

Regularly testing your landing page for its success or bounce rate is a good way of identifying issues and fixing them as you go rather than waiting until it’s time for a massive overhaul. You can use a landing page tool or ask your web design company for help. They can look at your landing page and spot potential problems with the general design, headlines, content, your calls to action or any other building block.

Be aware that whenever you decide to undertake a split test, to only focus on one change at a time. Making too many alterations at once will make it impossible to determine which one has the biggest impact on the performance of your landing page.

If you would like to know more about landing pages and web design or are looking for expert advice on how to improve the performance of your website, contact the friendly team at Energise Web today.