Whether you’re selling products or services, having landing pages that convert visitors into leads/customers at a high rate can make or break your digital marketing campaigns. It’s much easier and more cost effective to double the conversion rate of your landing page than it is to double your traffic to that page!
Good landing pages tend to follow this formula:
Let’s now look at each of those elements in turn, and how you can improve your landing pages to convert more of those hard-earned visitors into leads and sales…
The main headline is the first thing a visitor will see when they arrive at your page, so it needs to clearly state the key benefit they will get from your offer. A supporting sub-headline / statement can then give further context.
For Barfoot & Thompson, their property management landing page has a headline that clearly and succinctly states the key benefit to potential customers – peace of mind. The supporting statement then expands on this:
It’s tempting as marketers to come up with a sexy, clever slogan for your headline. But cleverness just draws attention to the cleverness itself, at the expense of communicating your actual value proposition. Clarity pushes the visitor towards converting, so always choose clarity over cleverness. Barfoots could have gone for something clever like “Your Property Is Our Home”. But instead, they chose clarity – simply stating the thing being offered (property management) and the main benefit of that thing (peace of mind).
The top fold of your landing page (the section you can see before scrolling) should also feature a large, compelling image or video – we call this the “Hero shot”. Hero shots should:
Here’s a good example from food delivery giant HelloFresh. The hero shot is colourful and appealing, and shows the service being used in context via “before cooking” and “after cooking” images:
Having grabbed the visitor’s attention with your headline and hero shot, it’s time to build that interest further by stating more key features and benefits. This should be presented in a format that’s immediately easy to grasp “at a glance”. Column-style chunks or bullet points are helpful for allowing the visitor to quickly scan the benefits. Make sure there’s plenty of white space around these elements so they’re easy to read.
Uber does a really nice job of this on their driver sign-up page. After their headline and hero shot, they present three more key benefits to potential drivers, in easy-to-read chunks:
The focus of these statements should be on the benefits of your product/service, before explaining the features. The visitor will want to know what the features are, but it’s the benefits – i.e. how your product/service will solve their problem – that will persuade them to take action. In the above example, Uber says “Make great money” (the benefit) rather than “competitive fee schedules” (the feature). And they say “Drive when you want” rather than “flexible drive time options”. t’s important to state the features too of course, so that the visitor understands how that benefit will be conferred. But you should lead with the benefit to the customer first.
One of the most important elements of marketing persuasion is “social proof”. If other people trust and like your product or service, the visitor will be reassured that they’ll like it too. Common forms of social proof you can use on your landing page are:
If customer testimonials are used, include the person’s full name, location and ideally a photo of them.
Here’s how HelloFresh present their testimonials:
The best testimonials describe how your product/service solved a specific pain point for them. So in the second Hello Fresh testimonial above, the person states how it made them cook healthy meals (solving their pain point of wanting to be healthy) and having all the ingredients waiting for them at home (solving their pain point of not having time to go to the shops).
Having persuaded the visitor with your headlines, hero shot, benefit statements and social proof, you then need to ask them to take action. Where should these calls to action (CTAs) be placed? In most cases, having your CTAs in the top fold AND at the bottom of the page will be best, unless the page is short enough that the entire page fits within the top fold and no scrolling is necessary.
The Barfoot’s page we referred to above does this, with a similar CTA block at the top and the bottom:
When deciding what action to ask the visitor to take, you’ll need to balance the value of what you’re giving away with the level of information you’re asking the visitor to provide – their contact details, money etc. It’s tempting to ask for more info or commitment from your visitors, but if you ask for too much in exchange for your offer, you’ll drop conversions.
Netflix has decided that it’s fair to ask people to pay for 1 month in exchange for 1 month free, and the only thing the person needs to provide to get started is an email address:
When designing your CTA (call to action) buttons, there are a few key things to note:
Les Mills have done these things well on the signup page for their home workout offering:
The yellow Start Your Free Trial button stands out from the background colours, it looks clickable, and when you roll over the button, it changes colour.
If your main call to action is to ask them to complete a signup form, it’s crucial that this is easy, fast and anxiety-free for the visitor. We see so many landing pages where these forms are an afterthought that creates friction. So try to do the following with your lead forms:
Your marketing efforts don’t need to stop on your landing page of course – there’s more available real estate on your confirmation / “thank you” page after they sign up! Consider doing one or more of the following things there:
For example, rather than just a simple “thank you” message, password manager Roboform have included a referral scheme offer on their signup thank you page:
A few further tips to consider when creating your landing pages:
If you’re running Google Search Ads, there are additional landing page requirements you’ll need to consider to achieve good Quality Scores (and in turn, pay less per click):
If you design your landing pages with all the above factors in mind, and you should see your conversion rates increase significantly. So jump in and start improving those landing pages today, and get more leads from your hard-won traffic! If you’d like any assistance with doing this, or you’d like to discuss anything else about your digital marketing, please do get in touch – we’d be happy to help.
Recovering ex-lawyer James heads up our Paid Media team. He handles advertising campaigns and paid media strategy across Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn and more, together with Google Analytics.
With over 15 years' experience in the digital marketing space, James has a rounded background that includes SEO, email marketing and conversion rate optimisation, in addition to his current paid media focus. He enjoys working side by side with marketing teams and business owners, to create long-term success for our clients.
When he's not in the office, James can be found running social basketball games, listening obsessively to music, and running around after a toddler.
