By Sana Ansari, GM, 3Q Accelerate
In our last post, we discussed how important it is for our overall website to be up to par. This post will get into details of using landing pages to make sure we are setting things up with direct response performance in mind.
First, let’s make a quick distinction between a website and landing pages.
A website is where you house all of the information about your products/services, your company, etc. It is basically a group of pages to help visitors in research mode learn more and navigate to their area of interest.
A landing page, on the other hand, is where you should drive traffic from marketing campaigns (SEM, social, email, etc.) to meet a specific marketing goal (leads, purchases, etc.). The whole focus of the LP is geared around converting that visitor; a best practice is to try to remove any potential distractions.
Your overall landing page goals should be to answer the same questions as you answer with your web page:
- What exactly is your product/service?
- How can I benefit from it?
- How can I trust that this is the right company for me to purchase this product or service?
- How much is it?
With those goals in mind, there are some important best practices we always recommend you follow. Let’s dive in.
- Stay above the fold! All important information MUST be kept above the fold. We want to make sure all of our site visitors have the above questions answered as soon as they land without the need to scroll down. The less work they have to do to get their questions answered, the more likely they will convert. Call to action, credibility logos, and informative bullets – put these all above the fold!
- Incorporate what the product or service is in your headline. That way, within the first 5 seconds of the user hitting your page, they are fully aware of what it is and there is no confusion.
- Avoid big blocks of text. Keep crucial information in bullet form or reduce it to 1-2 sentences. To help you determine what information to include, think about the following:
- State your key differentiators from other competitors.
- Briefly explain why your product or service is unique/special.
- Briefly explain what purpose it serves and why would it solve the user’s problem or make his/her life better.
- If you are selling a specific product, be sure to include it on the page trying to capture the essence of the product. You can often use animations to help show what the product does. For unique products that may need additional explanation, consider testing a short video which could help the user better understand the product.
- Make it as easy as possible to complete a conversion. For instance, if your goal is to get a lead, consider placing the form directly on the page vs. beginning with a CTA button that leads you to the form. For the form itself, reduce the number of fields to the bare essentials.
- In order to make sure our internal sales teams, etc., are not wasting time on fake leads/false information, we should add in checks to our form to ensure that users are actually submitting appropriate information – for example, if your form requests a telephone number, do a check on the number of digits entered; if the form requests an email, ensure there is an @ sign.
- Include value props. Our goal is to convince the user to convert. Include any value props in the page – for example, X% off, free shipping, free trial, etc., and make sure it is clearly written, noticeable, and somewhat close to the call to action.
- Just as in with our website, it is especially important to incorporate credibility logos here as well. We want to make sure our users feel as comfortable with our brand as possible to reduce any hesitations they may have submitting personal information or paying for the product,
Do you have any favorite tips to add? Drop ’em in the comments!
