How to Increase Conversions and Leads on a Landing Page

To a certain extent, the success or failure of your business ventures online will depend largely on how well your landing pages perform. A great landing page is nearly a license to print money—you just supply it with a stream of traffic via digital advertising and the landing page does the rest (if it’s written and designed well). On the other end of the spectrum, a bad landing page will bring everything to a screeching halt. Even if you have plenty of other excellent marketing elements in place, a lousy landing page will severely limit what you can accomplish. 

So, with that background in mind, the goal of this article is simple: to help you create better landing pages. There are some simple steps you can take to optimize the way your pages perform, and those steps don’t need to be either time-consuming or expensive to implement. Take a few minutes to read through the ideas below and get to work right away on trying out those that seem to be the best fit for your business. 

The Value of Attention in Getting the Conversion

When a visitor arrives on one of your landing pages, they have already shown at least some degree of interest in what you have to offer. They might have clicked on an ad you displayed somewhere else on the web, clicked on a link in one of your social media profiles, or taken some other path to get to that page. But, just because they have shown that bit of interest, don’t assume they are captivated by your brand and will stick around for as long as it takes to learn more. 

Consider Visitors’ Attention Spans

One of the key concepts to keep in mind when building and testing landing pages is attention span. That is, it’s important to remember that the visitor’s attention span is likely to be quite short, and you’ll only have a brief moment to convince them that they should stick around. The “back” button is always just a quick click or tap away, so your page should get to work immediately on doing the job of grabbing the visitor’s attention as fast as possible. 

The Right Way to Get Attention

This is a good time to add a note about the right way to grab attention. When you first think about how you could capture someone’s attention, you might think about flashy colors, bold images, animations, etc. And while those might be able to play a role, they aren’t really what’s going to win the day in terms of landing page performance. 

Rather, the key here is to deliver value from the start and make it clear how your product or service is going to solve a problem. All businesses solve problems, and you need to communicate how what you are selling is going to solve the problem that the visitor is having. This is where the value of great marketing copy comes into play. That’s the name of the game at the end of the day. The faster your landing page can demonstrate how you’ll solve a problem, the more attention it will get and the more sales you will convert.

Quality Landing Page Copy Gets Results

In general terms, you can think about the task of creating a good landing page as having two main components: the copy and the design. By copy, we mean the written words that are on the page. Given the vital role that each of these two pieces plays in the overall process of building landing pages, we wanted to address them individually. This section will cover some key tips for writing good copy, and we’ll dig into the design aspect in the next section. 

Depending on your level of experience with writing copy, or the ability of the writers you have on your team, it might be necessary to reach out to a professional for help with this task. Whether you write the copy yourself or hire a pro, make sure the following points are considered:

• Focus on results. It’s easy to get bogged down in the features of what you are selling when that’s not really what your potential customer cares about. Instead, your visitor wants to know how they are going to benefit from making a purchase. In other words, it’s not the components of the toaster that are interesting, it’s the delicious breakfast that can be enjoyed after the toaster does its job. Make sure the copy you add to a landing page is focused first and foremost on what you are going to deliver, not how you are going to deliver it. 
• Include testimonials. There is nothing quite like a testimonial to put landing page visitors in the mood to buy. When you present a testimonial, what you do is give your potential customer the opportunity to see themselves in someone else’s shoes. They can relate to the person who provided the testimonial because they have the same problem that needs to be solved. You’ll need to include your own copy too, of course, but testimonials can make up a big part of what you put on the page. 
• Simple, simple, simple. Now is not the time to show off your extensive vocabulary or the way you can construct complex sentences. This isn’t a writing contest, it is a landing page that has the singular goal of making sales. In this context, you want to keep everything about your writing simple and to the point. Use short sentences, incorporate bullet points, and save the dictionary words for another time. Complex writing could turn off some leads and cause them to feel out of place, and you want to be welcoming as many people as possible with what you write. 
• Specifics sell. If you have any specifics related to the product or service you are selling, be sure to include those in the copy. And don’t make the mistake of rounding them off; They will sound more compelling if you leave the data in its raw form. So, if you can demonstrate that past customers were able to save 34.7% per month on IT expenses after working with your business, leave that number as it is. You don’t want a page full of statistics, but mixing them in with testimonials and other types of copy is a good strategy. 

Landing Page Design Considerations

With some important points made about writing copy for landing pages, let’s now turn our focus to the design of these pages. Even the best copy in the world isn’t going to perform well if it isn’t paired with an attractive, easy-to-use design. Just as was the case with your landing page copy, you might be able to handle the design yourself, or you might need to outsource the job to a professional designer. As you work on bringing a new page to life or you aim to breathe new life into an old landing page, remember these design fundamentals:

• Clutter is the enemy. You will likely be tempted to go overboard with your landing page design and toss too many elements onto the page all at once. The problem is that a cluttered, busy design is going to overwhelm and confuse your site visitors. Not to mention the page will load slowly, as well. When in doubt, lean in the direction of keeping your design clean and simple with plenty of white space. 
• Contrasting buttons. Ultimately, your landing page goal is probably to have visitors click on a button to fill out or submit a form. With that in mind, don’t make the button hard to find. Use a bright, contrasting color that is seen nowhere else on the page for your button design. If the background is white and you use some elements of green or blue throughout the design, consider a bright red or orange button as a dramatic contrast that won’t be missed.  
• Mobile friendly. This might go without saying at this point in time, but we just want to offer a quick reminder that all landing pages should feature a mobile-friendly design. You might get half of your traffic—or even more—from mobile devices, so make sure the design loads quickly on mobile and none of the elements go missing. 
• Clean fonts. A common mistake in landing page design is to get fancy with the fonts and wind up with something that can be hard to read. This is yet another place where you want to keep it simple and use something standard that will work on all browsers and will be easy for everyone to read. 
• Tidy forms. If you present your visitors with a form that has several fields to fill out before they can hit submit, you are going to lose out on a lot of conversions. Do your best to limit how much information you ask for when designing your form. If possible, ask for nothing more than a first name and an email address to get started. 

The Testing Should Never End

It is often said that there is no such thing as a “finished” ad campaign, as there is always something else to test out in an effort to achieve better results. Along those same lines, landing pages are really never finished, either. Sure, you can come up with copy and a design that you like, but that will always be subject to change based on testing and performance. 

A/B Testing

The gold standard for testing landing pages is the A/B test. With this system, you are going to test your standard landing page against a new version that has been altered in a very specific way. Ideally, you’ll only change a single element for A/B testing, so you can be sure that the element you changed is responsible for the difference in results. For example, you could test your standard landing page version – the “A” page, in the test – against an altered page that has a different headline. Everything other than the headline is exactly the same between these two pages. If you send some traffic to both pages and find that the new headline (the one on the “B” page) works better, you can make that your new headline and your landing page will have been improved for the effort. 

There are plenty of A/B testing tools on the market today to help you get the most from your landing pages. You don’t need to have any advanced technical knowledge or coding skills to execute these tests. Pick out one of the many tools available and run regular A/B tests to continue to tune up your landing pages as time passes.  

For a digital marketer, it’s hard to think of a better way to spend time than optimizing a landing page. These pages are absolutely vital to your success and the success of your business. We hope the pieces of advice above will help you make some quick upgrades to your current landing pages, and hopefully they will get you on the right track from the start when building new pages. Thanks for stopping by and good luck on this project!