10 Tips for Building Successful Lead-Generating Landing Pages
A Landing Page is a page on your website where visitors arrive at after they click on a link. It could be your website’s homepage or any other page on your site.
An effective landing page design entices your page visitor to take the step you are promoting. I summarize below 10 quick tips to improve the effectiveness of your landing pages.
1. Make a Good First Impression
A prospect will come to your page and make very quick decisions on whether to stick around or click away. Watch your Web stats to see the average length of a visit to a landing page.
To encourage the visitor to stick around make sure the page is not too complicated. Use clean design and easy-to-read-fonts. If you use a form as your response mechanism for the page, ask only the questions necessary.
Relevancy is also important to getting visitors to stay on your page. Your landing page should get traffic from incoming links you control (ads, e-newsletter articles, news releases, etc.). If you control the landing page’s external links, match your landing page’s headline to the keyword in the incoming link. You may need multiple landing pages if you are running several search marketing campaigns.
2. Provide a Compelling Offer
An offer is something you give the landing page visitor in exchange for their contact information (for B2B) or to buy now (for some B2C) products.
If you are selling a complex product in the B2B realm, you will use your landing page to capture names that you can nurture. In this case, your landing page will not sell the product per se. It will just sell your offer. Your sales team will handle the selling duties.
3. Provide Social Proof
Face it; most folks landing on your page do not know you. This is especially true if you are a small company. To overcome the lack of an established reputation, display your stellar reputation with folks who know you. If you have client testimonials, use them. If you can cite the names of well-known customers, do so.
If you cannot list testimonials or customer names, think creatively about how you can show that others place their trust in you. Do you have long-term customers? Have you won awards? Do you have well-known partners?
4. Reduce anxiety
Many visitors will be reluctant to provide personal information, which you need to have to follow-up. You must make it clear that you will not be intrusive with your follow-up. You can relieve your visitors’ anxiety if you promise to use their information respectfully. You can have statements such as “we will only use your email address to deliver our white paper”. You should also include a privacy statement on your website. If you run remarketing ads with Google, the search engine requires that you stat that on your website. Your privacy statement is the best place to do that.
5. Use Relevant and Well-Placed Graphics
A graphic or photo on the page is the first element that captures the visitor’s eye. Make sure you place graphics in a spot where you want the visitor to look first. You could place a hero shot (a photo or illustration of your offer) right above a description of your offer, for example. If you do use graphics, make them clickable. Research shows that people will click on graphics. You can capitalize on this tendency by giving additional offer benefits when the visitor clicks on the graphic.
6. Make Your Content Suitable for Grazing People do not consume the content on a landing page from top to bottom. They will graze. Write your copy in an easy-to-consume format for grazing. Use bullets, lots of white space, and short bursts of copy. Write in bullets, if you can. Audio-visual elements can help engage the visitors. Just make sure they are in control. Do not have a video start immediately when someone lands on the page. Your visitor may not be in a spot where they do not want everyone around them hearing what they are viewing. They may well click-away the moment your video automatically starts.
7. Ask for Only Necessary Information on Your Response Form The more questions you ask on your response form, the more you decrease your responses. As you create your form, ask yourself “do I really need that information now” for each field on your form. Use your nurturing process to capture more information on prospects over time.
8. Create a Sense of Urgency
Create a reason for landing page visitors to convert now. You can talk about what they will miss if they delay. Or, have a limited time offer on the page. For example, you could say “this is the last time we will offer this free webinar”. Here is a great article on how to create a sense of urgency on your landing pages.
9. Continue Tracking Selling on Your Thank You Page
After a prospect completes the form on your landing page, you should send them to a thank you page. This thank you page has two useful functions. First, you can add additional selling information to the page. For example, if you are offering a white paper on your landing page, you can offer an e-newsletter sign-up on the thank you page.
Secondly, you can add some additional tracking code to the thank you page to track the source of your customer. You can add code that captures the keywords your prospect used to find your landing page and behind the scenes add that to your customer record. This extra tracking is a great tool for monitoring the results of your campaigns.
10. Always Be Testing.To constantly improve the results of a landing page, you should continuously test small improvements. Once you have a successful landing page, create another version with a slightly different headline for example, or shorten the questions on your response form. Run both the old and new forms in an A/B Split test. Send half of the traffic to each version. Watch the results. Keep the winner and test another change.
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