Designing high-converting landing pages
The difference between a website, or web page, and a high-converting landing page could be almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. However, they could be worlds apart when it comes to securing leads, enquiries and sales for your business.
Is a landing page a website?
In a word, yes. A landing page can be a website, and a website can be a landing page. The technology used to create them is the same, and your website can contain many landing pages. The main difference lies in their purpose.
Your website, for example, may have many functions. It could be to provide information on your services, list your products, contain your contact information, allow your customers to send you an email, offer some downloads, take direct sales or fulfil any one of a million different objectives. A landing page should have one focus. One purpose. One goal.
If you try to squeeze multiple goals into your landing page, it ceases to be a landing page and turns into a website.
*As of February 2024
So, what should a landing page have?
The following are all ingredients required within a high-converting landing page:
Social proof
Every landing page must feature social proof, with testimonials, case studies, stories and videos from people who have experienced success from doing the very thing you want someone else to do. Without social proof, there is nothing to convince your landing page visitors they’ll get the results they want, or that you can do what you claim you can do.
Where possible, social proof should come in the form of actual, measurable results as opposed to just people saying nice things about you, your product or service.
SINGLE call to action
The confused mind doesn’t buy. If you offer people multiple options, it doesn’t strengthen your hand – it weakens it and means people are less likely to convert. Give your landing page visitors one option, and one option alone. They either complete the single action you want them to take, or they close down the page.
Benefits, NOT features
Engineers like to talk about the specifics and features of what their product does, but customers don’t care. They only want to know what it will do for them. Nothing explains this better than Apple when they launched the iPod. They didn’t talk about the memory, the RAM, the speed of the processor or the battery life – because nobody cared. They simply said “10,000 songs in your pocket”. That’s the benefit, not the feature.
Added value
Sometimes referred to as ‘bonuses’. What extra could someone have for completing the action you want them to take? Remember, these aren’t options to be decided between. These are additional items, services or products someone will receive for completing the action.
Credibility
Why you? What makes you worth the time, instead of someone else in your industry. This could be you personally, or your company. What sets you apart from the others. Remember, though, don’t talk about yourself as nobody wants to hear it. They want to hear why you should be the one to help them, so by using stories of others who have been helped by you, you’re giving yourself credibility while also bigging up the successes of others… by working with you.
No escape route / navigation
Remember the difference between a landing page and a website? One of the main differences is that a website is many pages, whereas a landing page should be one. With a landing page you don’t want people to have options, and that includes the ability to escape. Therefore, you should have no navigation on your landing page. No options to visit your ‘about me’ page, your website’s homepage, your social media accounts. Nothing… only complete the action you want them to complete.
Load extremely quickly
Speed is very much of the essence, and your landing page needs to be lightning quick! You can’t have large images that take several seconds to download, as people won’t wait – especially if they’ve come from a social media platform or paid ad. As a landing page should be a single page, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be ultra fast.
Be perfectly optimised for a smartphone
The majority of your landing page views will likely come from a smartphone. This means your page needs to work on the small screen, and work well. Your buttons should be large enough to be easily used on a phone, with your form fields easily completed. Missing this vital step will lead to a very poor performance from your landing page.
Urgency
Why now? Why should someone complete your landing page’s objective now, instead of coming back later that day, next week or next month? If you don’t give some form of urgency, your page will underperform. This could be a time-limited offer, a bonus or addition that is only available that one time or a countdown clock on the landing page. Injecting urgency increases your landing page’s conversion rate.
Scarcity
Similar to urgency, there should also be a level of FOMO (fear of missing out) added to the landing page. Maybe there are only so many places available, so many units available at that price or only bonuses for the first few people to respond. When a landing page has genuine scarcity, it will perform better.
Objection handling
Just as in sales, your landing page needs to handle objections in advance. If you can handle the objections before they arise, your sale will be a seamless, frictionless process. Think about the reasons someone may not want to complete the objective of your landing page, and deal with that objection on the page with the copy, imagery, video and everything else.
FAQs
These provide another opportunity to handle objections, but also to prequalify the right target clients and to save yourself time fielding the same questions via phone or email.
Tracking
Always, always, ALWAYS track your landing pages. Your tracking should, as a bare minimum, include Google Analytics and a Facebook Pixel. Analytics allows you to track what happens when people visit your page, so you can make improvements where necessary. Facebook allows you to retarget people who visit but don’t complete the action, which is a cheap, highly effective form of advertising.
Congruity
Often missed out – but is your landing page congruent with the social media post, link or paid ad that sent someone to it in the first place? If it’s not using the same branding, imagery, colours and messaging then you’ll lose conversions. For example, if you’re promoting your landing page with Facebook Ads, and your ad, images and videos are for female business owners, your landing page should be too.
At Engage Web, we design high-converting landing pages for our own funnels, and for our clients for a variety of businesses and sectors, on a multitude of different platforms. The software used to design the landing page is largely irrelevant, as it’s the flow of the page itself that matters, and how the user is taken through the path towards completing the intended goal.
Book a call with us today and you can tell us about your business, and what you’re looking to achieve with your landing page. It doesn’t matter if you’ve already got a landing page and you’re just looking for some pointers, if you’ve not yet set something up and you’re looking for a place to start.
