Landing pages are a crucial part of converting your website visitors into customers. Without them, you’ll struggle to move people down the sales funnel until they make a purchase. Landing pages help you do this by prompting your visitors into taking your desired action:
Since landing pages are so important, you have to know exactly how to create and optimize them. In this article, we’ll look at best practices and some landing page examples to inspire you.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone web page that is created for a specific advertising or a marketing campaign. It is where visitors land when they click on a link in a marketing email, a pay-per-click ad, or a social media post.
Why not just direct them to the homepage? Because you want to avoid a psychological phenomenon known as “choice overload”. Simply put, when people are faced with too many options, they are more likely to end up not taking any action at all.
A landing page is designed with one goal in mind: to guide website visitors to take a desired action. That desired action might be signing up for your webinar, giving their contact details, registering for a free trial of your product, or even making an immediate purchase.
You can build your landing pages on your own with the use of landing page software, if you wish. Alternatively, you can always hire a web design agency to help you.
Woorise is the easiest way to create lead generation landing pages, forms, quizzes, surveys, viral giveaways and popups to help you grow your business from a single platform. Explore templates
Landing pages best practices
For your landing page to be effective, you need to be familiar with best practices and implement them. In this section, let’s discuss some of those best practices and look at some examples.
1. Create a Headline That Offers Value
The headline is the first thing your website visitors will see. If it doesn’t speak to them, they won’t even bother to read the rest of your landing page. That means you can say goodbye to them taking your desired action.
Therefore, your headline must be snappy and eye catching. It should also make the benefit to the reader clear. In other words, why should they care?
This one from Starry is a great example:
Starry’s goal with this landing page is to get visitors to make a purchase. The landing page easily catches people’s attention because the headline summarizes a very enticing benefit. Who doesn’t want “free internet until the end of time”, after all?
2. Include Visual or Video Content
Pictures are one way to catch the attention of your website visitors. Choose an image that is aligned with the offer and the page’s copy.
Here’s an example. When you click on Sendinblue’s paid ad on Google, you are directed to this landing page:
The goal of the landing page is to persuade visitors to try out Sendinblue’s suite of sales and marketing tools. The call to action reads, “Take a free test drive”. The image is actually animated and as you watch, the car transforms into a flying vehicle and takes off. This is aligned with the headline of the landing page, “Prepare for takeoff”.
Images are essential if you want to hold people’s attention, and video content is even better. Make sure you include compelling visual content on your landing page, no matter what its purpose.
3. Craft Compelling Copy
If the rest of your copy is dull, it wouldn’t matter if your headline catches your visitors’ eye – they still won’t stick around. Your copy needs to support your headline and align with your brand voice.
Keep it short and concise. If your copy is too long, the reader will get bored and leave. Check out this landing page from Mailchimp:
The copy is located directly underneath the headline, and it expands upon that headline. In one short paragraph, it makes a compelling case for why website visitors should give Mailchimp a try.
4. Make Your CTA Stand Out
Your call to action (CTA) is your final instruction to your website visitors, telling them what you’d like them to do. You need to make sure your CTA stands out on the landing page. You might locate it centrally, use a larger font size, or use a different color of text.
Make sure your CTA is clear, simple, and easily actionable. Instructions like “sign up now” or “check it out” make for great CTAs.
This landing page from Freshworks is a great example. The CTA, “Get started”, is presented as a blue button that stands out on the white background. When you look at the page, your eyes are automatically drawn to the CTA.
The CTA is clear and concise. Website visitors know that if they click on the CTA, they can get to know more about Freshworks. There is no room for ambiguity in your CTA.
5. Put Lead Form Above the Fold
Your lead form is one of the most important elements on your landing page. If visitors can’t find it, they might leave without taking any action.
Don’t make your visitors scroll down your landing page to find the lead form. Instead, always place it above the fold.
Here’s an example from Instapage:
Those who want to take up the offer of a demo don’t need to scroll all the way to the bottom to provide their details. The form is above the fold, and prominently placed in the center of the page.
Want a different way to capture leads without putting the form in the middle of your landing page? Why not use a live chat plugin to capture their details? These are becoming increasingly popular and can even reduce bounce rate.
6. Give Away Something Relevant
Your website visitors must understand what’s in it for them if they take your desired action. Therefore, you’re much more likely to get them to act if you give them something they want.
Try offering bonus content, a free trial, or another relevant freebie to encourage visitors to do what you want them to do. Make sure your offer is relevant to your product or service. Ultimately, you want your visitor to purchase what you’re selling.
Here’s a good example from Unbounce:
In exchange for website visitors’ contact details and other information, Unbounce offers a free ebook on a relevant topic.
7. Don’t Ask For Too Much
To start building a relationship with a website visitor, you need their email address and possibly name, but that’s all. Don’t commit the mistake of asking for too many personal details if your visitors are still at the top of the funnel. If you ask for too much information at this stage, they’ll likely leave and not come back.
Here’s a landing page from Active Campaign that asks for only an email address:
Active Campaign assumes that those who click on its paid ad on Google are just being introduced to the company for the first time. Therefore, it asks for nothing but their email address. Follow this example if you want to maximize the number of people who will give you that first, all-important bit of information.
8. Remove Competing Links
Since you want visitors to take a desired action on your landing page, you need to remove anything that may prevent them from doing so. That includes distractions such as competing links. If there are other links apart from your CTA on your landing page, there’s a chance your visitors will click on one of those links rather than on your CTA.
The above landing page from Teamwave only has one CTA and no other links. Those who get to this landing page have no other options but to click on the “Start my free trial” button or leave the page.
Remember: keep it simple. Don’t give your page visitors too many choices. One clear CTA and one link to click is the way to do it.
9. Make Your Landing Page Responsive
Fewer and fewer people are doing most of their internet browsing on desktop machines. According to the Hosting Tribunal, desktop web browsing has shrunk to 48.7% of total traffic, with mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones becoming more and more powerful. According to the World Advertising Research Center, 72.6% of Internet users will access the web using only their smartphones by 2025.
Therefore, you need to make sure your landing page provides a great user experience to all visitors, no matter what device they’re using. If the relevant elements on your landing page fall off when the page is viewed from these smaller devices, you will only end up losing many opportunities to convert. This is where responsive page design comes in.
Check out this landing page from Woorise:
Even if you access it using a smartphone, you can easily see all the content, including the CTA above the fold. All the essential elements such as the headline, supporting copy, and images also remain intact.
Run robust responsiveness tests on all the sites you build and check for proper formatting including text, imagery, and breakpoint widths, across a number of browsers and devices. This is because responsive page design is not a nice-to-have; it is an essential.
10. Optimize For Search Results
Imagine you have created an amazing landing page with all the important elements: great copy, compelling images, the perfect CTA, and so on. All of this is no good at all if people can’t find it.
The top 3 results take 75.1% of total clicks in an average Google search. Therefore, you need to ensure your page ranks highly for the relevant keywords so people can find it through organic Google searches.
Take the time to undertake some keyword research to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords. Ideally, you want to aim for those that see a high search volume but have minimal competition. For example, when I type in “b2b website builder”, I can see that the term has a modest search volume and is highly competitive (0.86 on a 0-1 scale). I might use the suggested alternatives to find a higher-volume and less competitive term instead:
Once you’ve chosen your keywords, make sure they appear on your landing page. Here’s an example: I searched the term “affiliate tracker software” and one of the top results let me to Post Affiliate Pro’s landing page:
This landing page is clearly optimized for those keywords.
Don’t forget to optimize any images using alt tags, too. Alt tags are short snippets of text that describe the purpose of the image. If your alt tag contains your target keyword, Google uses this as a ranking metric.
11. Ensure Your Landing Page Loads Quickly
Many people forget or underestimate the importance of page speed, or how fast a page loads. But it is a metric you cannot afford to ignore.
Page speed is measured in time to first byte (TTFB), which refers to how long it takes between the browser receiving a request (such as a user clicking a link) and receiving the first byte of data. TTFB is measured in milliseconds and a tiny improvement can make a big difference. According to Just Add Content, slow page speeds can lose a small business up to $125,000 per year! That’s because 40% of users will leave if a site takes more than three seconds to load.
Here are five quick ways to boost your landing page loading speed:
- Use the right format for images. In general, complex images such as photographs should be in JPEG format, while simpler images with only a few colors (e.g. logos) should be in PNG format.
- Compress your images by using a plugin such as WP-smush.
- Remove extra plugins, themes, and widgets. Everything you download is taking up space and slowing your site down. If you’re not using it, get rid of it. Streamline your site and only use the plugins you really need.
- Upgrade your hosting plan. If you’ve done everything you can to improve your page speed but your landing page is still slow, your hosting package may no longer be adequate for your needs. SEO-friendly hosting might seem more expensive, but it’ll pay off in the long run.
If everything else on your landing page is optimized but you’re still not seeing the conversion rates you’d like, page speed might be the problem. Test your page speed using Google PageSpeed Insights and take steps to improve it. Aim for a loading time of under 200ms.
12. Include Social Proof
If someone has only just heard of you, your company, or your product, why should they trust you? If you want your website visitors to try out your product or service, you need to know them you’re trustworthy. That’s where social proof comes in. Social proof is most commonly found in the form of reviews and testimonials.
Social Proof theory states that a person will look to others and imitate their behavior in a given situation. Applied to marketing, using reviews and testimonials shows the new site visitor that others have purchased your product or used your service and loved it. This makes it more likely they will do the same.
The testimonials are from senior team members at well-known and respected businesses. This proves to our website visitors that we can deliver on the service and expertise we promise.
Position your testimonials strategically so they support the goal of your landing page. Ideally, they should be located near the CTA. Additionally, use the photograph and full name of the person giving the testimonial if possible. This lends additional credibility and shows that the testimonial is genuine.
How to apply brand marketing principles to your landing pages
It’s no secret that good landing pages can be a major asset to your company. They provide a chance for customers to interact with your brand and are a simple way to turn leads into returning customers, thereby driving brand engagement. A great landing page will also help to support the branding strategy your company is employing.
The question, then, isn’t whether to perfect your landing pages, but how to go about doing that.
One of the most important things you’ll want to work on to make those landing pages as attractive as possible is content. That’s why we’ll be looking into exactly how to optimize them to draw out their full potential.
The Importance of Branding
So why exactly is it necessary to double and triple-check that your branding comes across clearly on any landing pages? The short answer is consistency.
The long answer is that strong and consistent branding is the very lifeblood of a brand. For example, consider how the following image immediately brings to mind the name of an iconic brand in the coffee industry.
With nothing more than a white lidded coffee cup and its famous green-and-white logo, Starbucks has created an image that instantly brings its brand to mind. Your mind might even jump to the kind of order you’d place if you were at a Starbucks right now, just from seeing their iconic logo. This cup serves as both a drink container and, more importantly, an advert that immediately makes onlookers think of the brand.
This is exactly what branding should do. Truly great branding is a marketing strategy in and of itself, which is why a company should incorporate its unique branding into all of its content. Landing page content is no exception.
In general, there are two major factors to keep in mind when considering the branding of the content on your landing page. These are as follows.
Consistency
Consider the above image. Each of these products is fundamentally different from the others, and yet all three are recognizably made by Apple. Every aspect of their design has been considered carefully to make sure it’s part of the overall brand aesthetic, rather than just existing on its own.
That’s a perfect example of consistency done well. The more consistent your overall branding is, the more recognizable your brand becomes – and the more memorable it will be to any potential customers.
In terms of landing pages, the branding found on them should be consistent and congruent with the rest of your marketing strategy. The branding should, in other words, gel. The more smoothly you can make the landing page content’s branding align with all your other branding, the more your landing pages will feel like organic extensions of your brand.
We’ll come back to this point later to consider it in greater detail. More specifically, we’ll be looking into how to create that sense of consistency; for now, what counts is that consistency as a concept is crucial.
Message
Your branding should be focused on sending a singular, clear, and concise message. This message should be incorporated into, and align perfectly with, your mission statement. However, unlike your more detailed mission statement, it should be short and simple enough to fit into a single screenshot if it’s written out.
Here’s a helpful example of an article that conveys a clear message.
The title and first heading immediately let you know what you’re in for once you click onto the website. This page’s mission is to help you take screenshots, and their message is that they’re going to show users of the most common devices how to do that. The page tells any onlooker this within seconds of landing on it.
That’s the same thing your landing page content should be achieving: the clearer your overall message is, the less time customers will have to spend trying to figure out what they’re signing up for. That frees up time for them to spend browsing your products once they’ve provided you with their information on the landing page they were directed to.
Branding and Landing Pages
Now we’ve seen how branding is all about sending a clear message that your company should direct to consumers and/or clients. The next step is taking that knowledge and applying it very directly to the creation of your landing pages.
Branding should shape everything about your landing pages, from their content to their URL. To that end, we’re going to return to a previous topic.
Crafting a consistent image
Consistency is key when you’re in the process of creating a landing page, as we’ve discussed in this article. That consistency should be present throughout all aspects of your company’s branding, including but not limited to the following.
Fonts
Fonts are a significant – yet often overlooked – aspect of brand identity. Just look at the image above. Would those cans be as instantly recognizable if a simple font like Arial had been used to write “Coca-Cola” on them? Of course not, because the brand’s specific font choice is iconic enough to be known no matter what context it’s placed in.
If your landing page uses fonts that don’t appear throughout the rest of your branding, then that landing page will seem incongruent with your company. Just by making sure all your headings and body texts consistently use the same fonts across your products, outlets, and other forms of content, you can strengthen your brand identity and help your company stand out. That’s why it’s important to strive for consistency.
Colour schemes
Though Google’s font has changed over the years, its color scheme has always remained perfectly consistent. When you see those six letters in that specific color sequence, your brain makes the immediate connection and tells you this is Google’s homepage that you’re looking at.
Of course, color schemes should be consistent across more than just your brand’s logo design. All websites, apps, and any web app associated with your company should use the same color scheme. Your landing pages should be doubly careful about following that pattern.
A landing page that deliberately uses the same colors in the same way as the rest of your branding (for example, a specific shade of dark blue as an accent color) will look like it belongs with the rest of your content. That’s why your landing page content must be rendered in the right color scheme to make it fit with your brand identity.
Logos and images
Few logos are as iconic as McDonald’s’ golden arches. Your brand’s logo should strive for a similar effect, providing an instant reminder of exactly what your brand represents.
The kinds of photos that can be found on your digital platforms should be consistent throughout, including but not limited to your logo iconography. That way, whenever they have a good experience, they’ll associate that positive feeling with your brand.
Landing pages are no exception to this rule. It’s important to ensure that your landing pages contain at least one tactically placed logo, as well as photographs. These photographs should match the color scheme, layout type, and overall style your brand employs. That way, customers who end up on one of those pages will instantly recognize your brand based on your landing page content.
Cross-platform consistency
A separate but equally important aspect of creating a strong brand identity lies in your brand’s consistency across different platforms.
Digital apps and social media are becoming increasingly popular ways to connect with customers. With this rise in multi-platform marketing, there’s been an increase in the importance of ensuring those platforms link together to create a bigger picture – so much so that around 63% of people list brand consistency as a factor in choosing where they’re going to spend their money.
Any given landing page doesn’t exist in isolation. It necessarily interacts and engages with your other platforms, especially your social media outlets, which will often be the medium through which your consumers land on those pages. This is what makes it crucial to ensure your consistency extends across platforms.
Once your brand image is consistent throughout those platforms, and once your landing page is consistent with that branding, you will be able to project a stronger sense of identity to your customers.
This makes your brand more memorable. That’s especially important because landing pages should be one part of your brand journey, and they’ll only become more effective as the rest of that journey increases in quality.
Connecting with customers
Now we’ve established the importance of creating and pushing a consistent brand image across platforms, including landing pages, it’s time to look at another aspect of crafting the ideal landing page content. This is the page’s ability to connect directly with customers.
Landing pages are designed to create conversions, or in other words, to transform potential leads into repeat customers. They’re supposed to encourage customers to take action and trade their details for special deals, promotions, or other types of offers.
One way they can do this is by creating an opportunity for the brand to connect directly with its consumers. Fortunately, there is marketing automation available that allows landing page visitors to fill in forms that will automatically get routed to your CRM software.
Using Landing Pages the Right Way
A great landing page can help you achieve your marketing and business goals. Whether it’s getting someone to sign up for your free trial, give you their email address, or hit that “buy now” button, landing pages can help nudge your site visitors into action.
But you need to be strategic in order to create a landing page that helps you meet your goals. Determine your goal, understand your audience, and then follow these tips to create better landing pages. You’ll soon start to see the benefits in the form of reduced bounce rates, higher conversions, and more quality leads for your business.
