How To Create High Converting Landing Pages

We assume you’ve found yourself on this page to discover the ideal conditions to get someone to convert. This article will help familiarize you with those conditions so you can get started implementing them on your own website now.

Landing pages themselves are those “ideal conditions.” They allow you to generate leads with ease, and as such, are intrinsically linked to your profit. But a landing page that promotes little to no conversion can be crippling to any business, new or old.

Contrary to what some may think, a landing page is not just any regular webpage that you “land on.” As you will see, it is much more than that.

A landing page is a web page that has a form on it, designed to obtain a visitor’s information, such as their email address, phone number and so on. That’s its only purpose. Unlike a home page, which may have a form on it, that web page serves a variety of other purposes.

A landing page does only one thing. For all intents and purposes, in order to qualify as a landing page, it must have a form on it, but its sole purpose must also be to capture a visitor’s contact details.

A landing page can be used to achieve any sort of conversion event you want, whether you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter, sign up for your webinar or make a purchase.

Sure, you could slap a sign-up button for your newsletter on any page of your website, but landing pages are specifically designed to optimize conversions, making them much more effective than regular web pages.

The more things there are on the page, the more likely those things are to draw your visitors’ attention away from the form, resulting in less conversions.

Landing pages are effective for a variety of reasons. For one, landing pages entice readers to stay on the page longer; well-designed landing pages incorporate the psychology of colour and emotions in order to get people to convert.

When it comes to landing pages, there is an entire psychology on the best ways to optimize landing pages in order to maximize landing page conversions. Without further ado…

Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

While there is certainly not a “one size fits all” model when it comes to the most effective, most highly converting landing pages, there are certainly some common threads that lead to the highest conversions, which we will cover now (you may want to grab yourself a cup of coffee).

1. An Award-Winning Headline (And a “Convincing Subheadline)

With typical headlines being not much more than ten words, they can be easy to overlook. That, however, would be your biggest mistake as headlines create a disproportionate amount of draw with viewers compared to their low word counts.

Whether you want to get people to read your latest blog post or you want them to sign up for your newsletter, those ideal actions are stopped in their tracks with a bad headline.

This is such an important topic that there are entire articles dedicated to the topic of crafting an effective headline alone. In fact,  we’ve covered how to write an effective headline in the past ourselves.

Great landing page headlines all have the following in common:

• Communicate benefit/value in a very clear way

• The headline should be bold. Make it stand out (even more than your logo)

• It should be short (ideally only ten words and certainly never more than 20)

Once you’ve got the headline down, you are also going to want to consider the subheadline, which is generally placed directly underneath the headline, although some companies have experienced success by switching them around.

The subheadline is your opportunity to expand on your headline in a few more words; there’s certainly a chance that you want to keep the 10 words or less catchiness but have a bit more to say, so do that here! For the subheadline, first and foremost, it must be persuasive.

You will find a list of some examples of great landing page headlines in this article.

2. Proper Use of Images & Colour

Images serve to make your product or service much more enticing, while colour, on the other hand, is used to influence consumer action. There is an entire psychology of colour out there, which we will touch on at several different points in this article.

• Images should be relevant to your product or service. If you are selling a physical product, always have a picture of it; if you offer a service, images should focus on grabbing attention.

• Images should be large in size and high-quality (no stock photos).

• If you choose a solid background colours, ensure that the text is not difficult to read (you can also choose a plain white background).

3. Powerful Copy

A high-converting landing page will have optimized the text in a certain way. With that in mind, here is a list of landing page copy best practices.

• Emphasize the Benefits. The most high converting landing pages all have a value proposition in them. That is, they emphasise what the product or service can do for the user.

There are several different ways to include a value proposition, but one of the most effective ways is to include a simple bullet point list of all of the benefits. Remember: the benefits need to actually benefit the user in their actual lives in some way.

• Keywords. To optimize your landing page for search engines, it is important to include keywords in your text, whether in the page title or elsewhere on the landing page. Here are some great SEO landing page tips.

• Referencing Pain. Here is where we really get to the psychology of the landing page. Use the typical human’s need to avoid pain to your advantage.

You want to make your viewer think about pain in some way by drawing attention to something that they will lose if they don’t invest in your product, service, etc. For example, if you don’t buy product or service a, bad outcome will almost certainly occur.

Use pain throughout your copy, but don’t forget to offer the medicine to that very pain: your product or service.

• Referencing Pleasure. Not only are humans motivated to avoid pain, but, conversely, they are also motivated to seek out pleasure. For example, if you’re selling a hair care product, you’re also selling, confidence, beauty, etc. In doing so, you offer psychological pleasure.

Ask yourself, what emotional need does my product or service offer? Once you’ve determined that, be clear in how your company will provide that to them.

• Clean Fonts. Be sure to use clean, easy-to-read fonts to account for the increasing number of people using their mobile phones. Little screens require clearness if you want to get your message across!

4. A Logical Structure

A well-designed landing page means structuring the elements of your landing page in a way that makes sense – that is, in a way that allows you to make a case for yourself so that they do what you want them to do: convert.

In general, you can conceptualize it like this:

Benefits —-> Testimonials —-> Call to Action

Landing pages can be in both long-form and short-form. Both are effective, but it just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Conversion Verve found that short-form landing pages are most effective when the landing page doesn’t ask a lot of the visitor – that is, when there is little risk involved. Perhaps you are only asking for their email address.

Long-form landing pages, however, were more effective when the risk was a lot larger, like if the landing page asked them to make a big purchase. Keep in mind that long-form landing pages can also have multiple calls-to-action throughout.

5. Trustworthy Testimonials

Before you buy anything, you can probably attest to want to know if the product is actually something you can trust. That’s why testimonials are very important when it comes to conversions. Here are some ways to optimize the testimonial aspect of your landing page.

• Use testimonials from real people – that is, the very people you are trying to target.

• Include pictures with each testimonial. These enhance the level of trust even further. Plus pictures add a visual level of appeal that text simply cannot replicate.

• Include specific data. By this, we mean avoid generalizations and be sure to always back up claims with specific data, numbers, etc.

Apart from testimonials, you can also increase trust by including trust signals or including trust badges by displaying the logos of prominent companies who have used or recommended your product or service. You could also include a list of any awards you have received.

Alternatively, you could include the number of likes you have received from various social media sites. All of these methods serve as social proof.

6. A Guarantee

Using the word “guaranteed” alone can also increase conversions. Whether you can offer an explicit guarantee such as money back or something that resembles a guarantee such as badges and awards, the point is that it’s there. Both methods increase trust.

• Place it close to the call to action.

7. An Effective Call To Action

This article would be incomplete without a discussion of arguably the most important conversion rate optimization tip: an effective call to action. Here is a list of absolute necessities.

• Make it clear and simple.

• Make sure it is large in size – as big as possible.

• Persuasive copy – avoid the words “submit;” instead, choose words that are persuasive. For example, offer a discount, give them a deadline, give them a bonus package, etc.

• Use a button – avoid throwing people off and risking losing potential conversions by using links.

• Use contrasting colours – ensure that the colour on the call to action stands out from the rest of the colours on the landing page in order to attract attention. Remember, the call to action itself must also be in colour.

• Also consider the position of the call-to-action button; you want to draw attention to it. You can use arrows or images to draw attention to the button for an added effect.

• Call-to-action buttons should be optimized for mobile users. Take a look at Yocale’s own mobile features as an example.

9. An Effective Lead Generation Form

Next to the call-to-action, one of the most important elements of your landing page is the lead generation form.

• Minimum Fields. Many studies have been conducted on this topic, but the more fields you ask visitors to fill in, the more conversions decrease. In short, only ask for the information that you actually need.

Of course, there are certainly exceptions to this, but when considering how much information to have visitors fill out, consider how much of a reward there is. For newsletters, only ask for their email address.

It is a good idea to conduct A/B testing to determine the ideal number of fields for conversions.

• Protect their Privacy. Part of the reason why people are so hesitant about giving out their contact information is due to privacy concerns. Add a privacy message to reduce their fears and make them more likely to provide what you’re asking for.

There are entire articles dedicated to how to create an effective lead generation form.

10. Proper Design

Design is also an important element of a high-converting landing page. We’ve touched on a lot of landing page design best practices above, such as the use of colour, but here are some additional points to consider. Effective landing page design boils down to simplicity.

You want to remove all possible distractions to increase conversions. Here are some tips.

• Clean, Simple Design. In order for you encourage people to click the call-to-action button, you need to limit any and all possible distractions. Minimalism across all aspects of design is always the most effective approach.

• No External Navigation. Hiding any navigation bars at the top of your page will minimize distractions. Get rid of any links while you’re at it as well.

• Make sure it loads quickly so you don’t give anyone a reason to click away.

How To Create a Landing Page

Now that you know all of the ways in which you can optimize your landing page for conversions, how do you actually go about creating a landing page?

The first step is to conduct market research.

Conducting market research provides a strong foundation for developing your landing page, giving you insight into your target audience in order to provide something that is valuable to them.

You can type your topic into Google Trends to determine if there is a lot of interest in your particular topic. You can also use social networks as a means to conduct valuable research.

But you will also want to examine keyword intent by using Google Keyword Planner and then by examining all of the related keywords.

The point in all of this is that you want to develop a tool potential customers actually want to use as a means to entice them to fill out their contact information.

Tools

We’ve covered a lot of ground, but there are some tools out there to help you optimize your landing page in order to get the most conversions with a bit of help. Here is one of many tools that can help get you started:

• Unbounce. This allows you to custom build a landing page, optimize it and conduct A/B tests to figure out what elements of your landing page are most successful and which ones aren’t.

A Few Last Considerations

You can do a text-based landing page with a few images, the benefit being that there aren’t a lot of distractions and you can be sure the page won’t load slowly, meaning that the user will have a more positive experience.

You could also opt for a video landing page. A study by eyeviewdigital.com found that videos increased conversions by as much as 80%.

In short, video landing pages also result in increased retention, meaning that people will linger for longer, giving you more time for your message to penetrate. They also result in increased trust and, lastly, many people prefer to watch videos on the whole.

However, you should keep them short and make sure your page is still loading quickly.

Now, to bring all of this together, you can take a look at the following landing pages that convert examples.

Conversions are essential to the initial growth, and certainly continued growth, of your business. While there is certainly not a one size fits all approach, the most effective landing pages all have the above elements in common, therein maximizing landing page conversions.

And, as always, continually test your results with A/B testing.