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The landing page is the single most important part of your online marketing efforts. Without a good landing page, all of the time and effort you spent driving traffic to your website will be wasted since your site isn’t driving leads.
As an illustration, let’s say your website is attracting 5,000 visits a month with landing pages converting at 10%. That's 500 leads. If you wanted to double the number of leads you’re getting, you could spend lots of money over several months trying to double your website’s traffic, or you could take a few minutes right now and double the conversion rate of your landing pages. Here are ten tips to do just that!
1. Use a specific, valuable offer to entice visitors to fill out a form. Just using a “contact us” only attracts spammers, and people don't get excited over sales brochures. Create content offers that incentivize conversion. Maybe offer a free half-hour phone consultation or a basic How-To eBook. Your visitors are always thinking “what’s in it for me?”
2. Use a headline to lay out your offer. Your visitors want to know why they’re giving up their information. Make it very clear.
3. Have a bullet-pointed list with several specific benefits they’ll get from filling out the form. This allows you to elaborate on your offer, but you should still try to keep it short and sweet. Use these to build urgency and emphasize why the visitor needs your offer.
4. Use an image to reinforce the benefits of your offer. No matter how concise your bullet points are, some people might not stick around long enough to read them. Visual cues are important for encouraging visitors to linger.
5. Keep your form short. Only ask for essential information so that you don’t risk turning visitors off with too many questions. Specifically, avoid asking for age, address or telephone number, since those tend to turn people off the most. You can always follow up later to find out more information if necessary.
6. Keep your form high on the page, or “above the fold”. Your visitor should see the form on your landing page without having to scroll down. This makes it very clear what needs to be done to receive your offer.
7. Use engaging button text on your from. This is another opportunity to drive home the value of your offer. Data shows that you should avoid using generic words like “submit” or “send” and try using more specific words like “sign-up,” “register” or “download".
8. Hide your site’s navigation. You’ve got them on a page with a form, don’t let them get distracted and have them click away!
9. Use an effective “Thank You” page after the visitor has submitted the form. Give them something to do next that might encourage them to move further down your sales funnel. Also, be sure to add social media sharing buttons so that they can share your offer with their friends.
10. Always test your landing pages. Experiment with new landing page features by building two identical ones and switching a feature, like a shorter form or a different image. Does one version convert better than the other? If so, you’ve found an improvement. Stick with that new feature and then run another test on something else.
An Introductory Guide to Building Landing Pages