Anyone can create a landing page; itโs easy.ย
But if youโve browsed the Internet for any amount of time, odds are youโve come across numerous landing pages that barely hold your attention for 10 seconds.
Now, you sure donโt want your page to be like that โ scaring people off once they land on it. You want to build a web page that holds your audienceโs attention longer than their average attention span of 15 seconds.
(By the way, we know that by now, youโve gone beyond asking questions like โWhat is a landing page?โ So weโll just use this guide to help you create one that converts.)
Here are seven steps to set up a landing page that holds visitorsโ attention and converts them.
Table Of Contents
- 1. Choose your landing page builder carefully
- 2. Decide what user experience should look like
- 3. Get your site speed right
- 4. Use descriptive visuals
- 5. Make your page responsive
- 6. Research your market and audience before writing copy
- 7. Use these two copywriting formulas to improve conversions
- Conclusion
1. Choose your landing page builder carefully
Creating effective landing pages used to require companies to hire professional UX and graphic designers capable of creating custom designs from scratch.
Today, however, there are numerous, cost-effective solutions readily accessible. Thereโs no shortage of landing page builders on the web today. But this also creates a problem: choosing the right landing page creator may be a bottleneck for you โ due to the plethora of brands competing for your attention.
Still, itโs not that difficult. If weโre being honest here, any landing page creator with the following core capabilities is good enough to create a well-designed landing page that converts:
Must-have functionalities:
- Drag-and-drop editor: Also referred to as โwhat you see is what you getโ or WYSIWYG capabilities. This means you can design your landing pages without touching the code.
- A/B testing capabilities: This allows you to display different versions of your landing page to different visitors (or the same visitors) enabling you to evaluate the most effective copy/design.
- Analytics dashboards: A few of the metrics youโll want to track include landing page views, sessions by source, average time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. You can also use Google Analytics to track these metrics โ it works, too.
- An extensive collection of fully-customizable templates: This is helpful, because landing page templates enable you to hit the ground running with your creative processes โ especially when theyโre fully customizable.
For instance, here are some of the landing page templates in GetResponse:
- WordPress landing page: If you plan to set up your landing page on WordPress, you need a tool that lets you do this easily.
- Customizable domain integration: Your landing page creation should support custom domain names (e.g., YourWebsiteName.com rather than YourCompany.LandingPageTool.com) as visitors arenโt as likely to trust a page with a random URL.ย (Although, if youโre using a free landing page builder, you might have to settle with YourCompany.LandingPageTool.com)
- Integrations: You need a landing page builder that plays nice with other tools youโll employ to streamline your conversion process.
- Responsive design: This ensures the landing page renders correctly regardless of screen size.
By the way, GetResponseโs landing software provides these functionalities. Get a free trial here.
2. Decide what user experience should look like
One of the biggest mistakes you can make when creating your landing page is ignoring user experience (UX) principles.
Aside from the fact that usability is a search engine ranking factor, a great UX will help you cement trust with visitors, which in turn will increase conversions.
We canโt address UX design in its entirety here as itโs a broad field, but these three tips below will help you design a page thatโll make visitors enjoy their time perusing the offer(s) โ and more importantly, improve your conversion rates:
- Be concise. Make the main benefit of your offer (product/service/anything) clear in your headline. This is important, because you only have 15 seconds to pique the interest of your visitor and keep their attention long enough for them to sign up for your offer.ย
- Provide an inside look at what you are offering. If youโre selling a product, name its specific functionalities with screenshots or item photos.
- Use trust symbols. Displaying client logos, testimonials, and press mentions are all effective ways to boost credibility and stand out from the competition.
Brand consistency is a huge part of UX
When designing a new landing page, especially if youโre doing it for the first time, you may be tempted to get overly creative and design it using all the colors, widgets, and fonts.
Donโt do it. Youโll likely end up making a squeeze page with inconsistent branding.
For example, imagine this scenario: you click an ad on Facebook and land on a page with a light-blue background. It has a pretty interesting offer so you scroll about 60% down the page, reading every word and nodding in agreement with everything in it.
Eventually, you reach a call to action (CTA) button to sign up for the offer. Still excited, you click-through the button.
But all of a sudden, youโre now on another page with a yellow background.ย
Everything looks different, confusing โ since the previous page had a light-blue background. Youโre not sure which brand youโre dealing with anymore. Doubts, questions, and scepticism start racing through your mind.ย
This is what brand inconsistency does. So you donโt want a landing page like this. Businesses say the biggest negative effect of inconsistent branding (off-brand content) like this is that it leads to customer confusion โ and rightly so.
On top of that, they listed Damage in reputation or credibility as the second biggest negative effect of inconsistent branding.
Itโs not wrong to use different colors (or fonts, etc) on a page, but you have to be consistent with them. That is, as visitors move from your landing page to another page/email/etc., your branding elements (colors, fonts, etc.) need to be consistently coordinated and recognizable as your brand.ย
For example, if your landing has a white background color and header font size of 35, these elements should remain as they are when visitors move from one page to the other. This will keep them from being confused about who you are โ as a person or business.
3. Get your site speed right
Earlier in this article, we touched on how website visitors have short attention spans. Imagine what happens when your landing page loads too slowly.
Folks browsing the Internet donโt have time for slow landing pages, so they wonโt stick around. Google reports that a 9-second increase in load times increases the probability of a visitor bouncing by 123%.
Here are a few steps to improve your landing page load times:
- Use a content distribution network (CDN): This helps to reduce page load times by disseminating content from servers that are closest to visitors based on their geographic location.
- Optimize your images: Before uploading images to your website, resize them to the dimensions required, and if possible, compress them in PNG or JPEG format.ย
- Implement accelerated mobile pages (AMP): Developed by Google, AMP is a web framework that lays the foundation for faster load times.
Note: This is mostly important if you’re hoping to get high traffic from organic search. With landing pages, however, it’s rarely the case your pages will rank high in Google or Bing.
For more information, you can check out this extensive list of strategies from Moz on improving your landing page load times. For speed benchmarking, you can use Googleโs PageSpeed Insights tool.
4. Use descriptive visuals
What are โdescriptive visualsโ?ย
Theyโre essentially images or videos that describe the benefits or problems youโre addressing on your page. Here are some examples from our free landing page templates:
A landing page for families looking for an apartment:
If you were looking for a nice apartment for your family, the image on this page already gives you a feeling of what that looks like:
Use this landing page template
Or letโs say youโre a fitness trainer; you need images on your page that give visitors a vibe that theyโll get the body shape they want if they subscribe to your gym membership:
Use this fitness landing page template
You can use videos, too โ especially now that consumers are 64-85% more likely to buy a product (or sign up for your offer) after viewing a product (or offer) video.
Use this video landing page template
As Iโve mentioned earlier, your conversions are closely tied to user experience (UX). So if images and videos on your page make visitors feel like you get them, theyโll sign up for your offer.
5. Make your page responsive
While building your landing page, make sure youโre optimizing the design for both desktop and mobile visitors โ because mobile currently accounts for half of all global web pages served.
So how do you build a responsive page?ย
It all depends on the landing page builder youโre working with; you have to make sure to use one that lets you create a page that adjusts to fit the size of your userโs screen size.ย
A responsive page looks something like this for different screens:
Source: GetResponse landing page design guide
Many (if not most) landing page builders have this functionality built-in, but you still need to check their features to be sure.
6. Research your market and audience before writing copy
So far, most of this article has focused on the aesthetics of landing pages โ which, of course, is important.ย
But whatโs even more important is your copy, the writing you have on your page. You need to make sure you research your audience well enough to be able to write copy that resonates with them.
And the best way to do audience research is to talk to them. Ask them questions. Find their pain-points. Essentially, do audience interviews or create a survey.ย
Here are a few tips you can follow to improve the effectiveness of your audience interviews:
- Limit the interview to 30 minutes: Setting a time limit helps to let interviewees know you wonโt be taking too much of their time. Itโll also help you to focus on the insights that matter the most when talking to them.
- Use resources efficiently: Interview at least five audience members, but no more than 12. Why? Itโs simple: because usually after five interviews, youโll see trends and themes in your findings.
- Be conversational: Customer interviews shouldnโt be like an interrogation. At a high level, you want to let the customer tell their own story.
But if youโre not planning on doing audience interviews, below are some tips to improve survey completion rates:
- Focus on close-ended questions: Unlike open-ended questions, these are often in multiple-choice format, so the participant can easily select their answers.
- Use neutral language in questions: Avoid leading questions and language that can influence answers. For example, phrases such as โMany customers enjoy feature X of Y, do you agree?โ often reduce the effectiveness of surveys.
- Only ask for one thing at a time: Limiting questions to one aspect or point reduces ambiguity and ensures that the insights you gather are actionable.
7. Use these two copywriting formulas to improve conversions
The final collection of strategies weโll discuss here are copywriting formulas.ย
Although thereโs an art to creating copy that drives conversions, you donโt need to become a wordsmith to write high-converting copy.ย
Below are a couple of handy formulas you can use to build out your copy:
Before โ After โ Bridge
This approach is like what you see in case studies. Describe the problem youโre addressing in your landing page and situation before the problem occurs. Then discuss what would happen after the problem is solved. Finally, introduce your offering and show how it will help get tangible results.
We wonโt be showing examples of these formulas here because thatโs not what this article is about. But you can read our post on copywriting.
Features โ Advantages โ Benefits
This formula is valuable because it goes beyond simply calling out the features or elements of your offering. Instead, youโre illustrating why each feature matters to visitors. In short, this formula goes something like: โYou get thisโฆ and the product does thisโฆ so that you get thisโฆโ
Conclusion
Thanks to improvements in technology, itโs never been easier to create high-converting landing pages.ย
With the right tool, you can build a landing page that looks amazing and converts well enough to make your business, project, or campaign successful.ย
Even more, you donโt need to spend months to build a โperfect landing pageโ in the hopes that it would perform well. Instead, you can easily create multiple versions of it and A/B your way to find winners. Learn more about landing page A/B testing here.