With a great marketing plan, you can get customers’ attention with a terrific email campaign or online ad. But what happens when they click through? Are you sending them to your home page? (gack!) Don’t waste the opportunity to convert. Use customized landing pages to guide your customer in the right direction.
What is a landing page? A landing page is a specially-designed webpage that complements your ad or email campaign and directs the user to finish the transaction. In any campaign, you have three choices where to send your viewers: your home page, an internal page (such as a product page, service page, blog post), or a landing page. A great landing page will be similar in style and message to the ad or email that the viewer clicked. The best part is that a landing page respects your customers’ valuable time by not making them work hard to finish the transaction.
Cutting down the number of clicks, and therefore length of time, it takes for a customer to close the deal is a critical component of your online success. Why send interested leads to your home page and make them dig through your site to find what they were interested in? Humans are a distractible group these days, and our attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to about 8 seconds (on a good day) in the last decade. Sadly, this makes us more ADD than goldfish. The sooner you design your landing pages for this reality, the quicker you will get more ROI from your email and ad campaigns!
Getting Started
Your first step is to know with complete clarity what you want your viewer to do. Is it purchase something? Share your blog? Download an e-book? Send you feedback? Nail this goal down before going any further.
Once you are clear about your goal for your landing page, design your call-to-action. No, this will not be the first thing your viewer sees on the landing page; in all likelihood it will be towards the bottom. But once you know exactly what you want the viewer to do, design your CTA for exactly that purpose. Give your CTA a mini-headline, such as “Sign Up Here” or “Download Now.” Keep required fields to a minimum. The less time it takes someone to complete this, the better (and the more likely they are to convert). Overall, make the CTA as clean and simple as possible.
Now it’s time to start thinking about what goes above the CTA – your content and design. Visual design is key. Aim for cohesion of both design and imagery between your ad or email and the landing page. Doing so builds trustworthiness and cuts down on confusion for the viewer. Font style should also be the same or similar.
Content is king, but only if it’s well organized. Every single word on your landing page must be in alignment with your goal. Don’t show your user extra stuff, like other services you provide or similar products, stick to the goal. Distracting your viewer with stuff they were not seeking will not increase your conversion rate.
We’re just getting started, so come back next week for part 2 of our series on designing great landing pages that earn conversions. Want to talk to a marketing professional in the Triangle area who specializes in maximizing ROI online for small businesses? Call Mike Morris at Morris Marketing at 919-424-8314 today.
