Your landing page is your chance to make a great first impression. Whether you’re unveiling a new product, promoting a sale or starting a new marketing drive, the landing page will be at the centre of your campaign.
But how do you make sure your landing page is as effective as it could and should be?
Design & Layout
Today’s digital audience has an extremely short attention span. Make sure you keep their attention by making your page engaging.
Keep it Simple
Don’t overload your audience with too much information upfront. Think about the experience of viewing the page from your customers’ point of view. What do they want or need to know first? What information is essential to their engagement? If your product or service is unusual or complicated, try and explain things in layman’s terms so that they can understand and engage with the text. Keep it short and easy to read. If you need to, you can always provide more information in drop-down boxes or separate break-out pages.
Header Tags
Keep the text easy for users to engage with by separating into sections under various headlines. These headlines can then be used as header tags to help with your search engine optimisation so that people can find your page online.
Color Psychology
Your landing page design should also pay attention to colour psychology in order to maximise results. Colour psychology is the research into how different colours influence consumers in different ways. For example, red is known to create a sense of urgency and provoke hunger whilst blue is synonymous with trust, reliability and quality. Orange is synonymous with the word cheap so if you’re running a big discount sale, this is something to consider. Meanwhile, purple is often used to create a sense of luxury and authority. When designing your page, don’t just think about what looks pretty, really think about how the colours will affect the audience and use this to drive your conversion rate.
Calls To Action
For your landing page to convert users, you need to make your objective clear. Whether that’s “buy now”, “contact us”, “register for our newsletter” or “book an appointment”, your call to action buttons should be clear, easy to find and repeated several times throughout the landing page.
Make it as easy as possible for customers to take the next step. Put your call to action in easy to spot locations with a hyperlink to the relevant page.
Use Video
Video increases information retention by up to 55% and is a great way to grab your audience’s attention. It’s also a great way to increase your conversion rate. In fact, some research suggests that customers are up to 85% more likely to buy your products or services after watching video content.
Using video on your landing page is, therefore, a no-brainer. For example, if you’re a wedding band promoting your services, including a video of you performing a medley of popular wedding songs will be an added advantage as your visitors will be able to decide how well-suitable your services will be for their need.
Website Speed Optimization
Did you know that 53% of visitors will abandon a mobile page if it takes 3 seconds or more to load? And according to data analysed by Google, sites that loaded in 5 seconds or less recorded twice the revenue of sites that took 19 seconds to load. A slow loading page can therefore seriously affect your conversion rate, google ranking, reputation and overall sales revenue.
From testing and diagnostics to speed coding, choosing CDNs and minimising JavaScript files, website speed optimisation requires a certain level of expertise. And because it’s such a technical process, many companies tend to avoid it. But with so many competitors out there and available to your audience at the click of a button, you cannot afford to bury your head in the sand and lose customers over something as simple as a slow loading page.
Simple & Easy Checkout
Cart abandonment is a huge issue in the e-commerce industry but the principle is also relevant to companies across all industries. What this essentially means is that customers get to a certain point in the process, only to abandon it last minute. This could be for a number of reasons beyond your control but more often than not, it is for reasons that can and should be avoided.
Whether the purpose of your landing page is to make customers buy products, sign up to your mailing list or even just like your Facebook page, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to take the next step and complete this process. Making the ‘check-out’ process as simple and easy to use as possible is therefore essential.
To optimise your check-out process, keep the required fields for customers to fill into a minimum and only request the information you truly need. Make it possible for customers to complete the process in a few steps as possible.
You should also make sure that the technical side of the process is in peak condition. Make sure that pages load quickly and that the process is as quick as possible. Don’t lose customers at the last minute because your website is too slow.
Conclusion
Landing pages are a fantastic way to promote your new product or service. To get the best out of your landing page, think about the experience from your customer’s point of view at every point in the design process. Make it as easy as possible for them to get the information they need, to understand the product and to take the next step and commit at the check-out.
Craig Evans is Founder and Author of Curious Vision