Best Practices of Landing Page

A landing page is a website page that is created for one purpose - to persuade the site visitor to convert into a customer by making a sale, completing a form (thereby becoming a qualified lead), signing up for a newsletter, etc. Also known as a lead capture page, it is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link.

There are two types of landing pages reference and transactional. A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. Its main purpose is to “capture the lead” and the prospect to a mailing list.

• A landing page has to convince people to
• Fill out a form (but people hate filling out forms)
• Provide personal details (but people hate getting spammed)
• Buy something (but people hate being scammed)
• Read a lot of information (but people really hate reading)

These are all the things users hate to do. But being a marketer you have to persuade visitors to take an action. A user ideally looks for the following things in a website….

• Is this the right place?
• Is this how I imagined it would be?
• Should I click the back button?
• Does this look trustworthy?
• How much time is this going to take?

A good landing page should ideally address all these things. The layout of the landing page, design, content, and call to action are all the things that lead to a successful conversion. On average, only about 3% of paid clicks convert. Indeed that’s a lot of conversions for any marketer.

Landing page starts converting only after it has built a cycle of trust with its customers, only after the marketers start thinking out of the box and create a conversion-focused experience rather than “pages” that capture leads. This paradigm shift can be the first step towards creating landing pages that convert.

Landing pages are often related to the ads especially in PPC campaigns. In order to get the user to click, ads mostly imply a promise: CLICK HERE. GET THIS. A good landing page needs to immediately directly and simply pay off that promise. Whatever the ad says your landing experience must fulfill that message and promise. The simple rule is: Make a promise, pay it off on the next page. Continue doing this until you ask for, and receive, conversion.

The click is mostly a split second impulse. Either the user saw something that caught her eye, or she was searching for something and your ad seemed relevant. The key is to create an experience that keeps them in the “split second” flow that they are in when they click on the ad. Presenting them a simple, relevant choices and letting them flow through a conversion path without any distractions lead them to the point of actually converting. When you simplify your experience, your conversions automatically increase.

Too many choices are equal to too much distraction for the users. Creating a simple page with a couple of choices lets them have a more relevant experience. Once the user makes a choice, the next page pays off that choice with relevancy. More relevant experience means more conversions.

Finally testing brings the momentum all marketers hope to achieve. Testing the landing page to optimize it (headline color, image, call to action), mostly increases conversions. Yet rather than focusing on optimizing elements on a page to increase conversions, one must think about testing widely differing experiences in order to see what really moves more people through your leads funnel.

Landing pages are not wandering generalities. They are specific, measurable offers. You can tell if they're working or not. Try, test and review your landing pages to make them work better. Take a heretical approach to your testing and see changes in your conversion rate.