A landing page isn’t necessarily the same thing as your company’s homepage. A visitor coming to a landing page is usually arriving from a Google search or a banner ad. Who your company is and what it does might be completely foreign to that visitor.
You need to put your company’s best foot forward on that landing page. Otherwise, any visitors are just going to click away, unsure of what to do or why they were even on that page in the first place. To get new customers, your landing pages need a few key features. Check out what separates a great landing page from a ho-hum landing page.
Engaging and Effective Headlines
“And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?” David Byrne once sang with the Talking Heads. That isn’t a question you want visitors asking when they end up on your company’s landing page.
Visitors shouldn’t be left shaking their heads, trying to figure out what they are doing there. Instead, the page needs to provide them with the details they need up front. It then needs to convince them to stick around for a while.
It does that by having effective and engaging headlines. The headlines you use on your landing page aren’t the same as the headlines you’d see in an ad enticing people to click.
Instead, the goal is to remind people why they are on the page. Secondarily, your landing page’s headlines should explain what makes your company or product so great.
On a landing page, an effective headline is simple and to-the-point. Give your audience the “why” of the page right away.
A few examples of engaging and effective headlines include:
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Get Your Free Guide to the Wines of Europe
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Find the Love of Your Life
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Double Your Sales
The headlines above tell people exactly what they will get if they work with your company or continue to investigate your website. If someone lands on the page who has no interest in European wines, finding true love or doubling sales, they can back away quickly. Anyone who is interested in those things will know that they’ve come to the right place.
How the headline looks is as important as what it says. The size and location of the headline matter. If people can’t find the headline, they might scroll up and down the page, scratching their heads about what it is you do. More likely, they’ll just leave. If people can’t see the headline because the text is too small, odds are that they’ll leave too.
A Specific Focus
A landing page is not a pot of minestrone soup. You can’t just keep adding ingredients to it to improve the flavor. The more things that are on the landing page, the more cluttered it looks. The more cluttered the page, the more confused visitors will be.
Don’t give your landing page’s visitors every single detail about your company. Instead, focus on what brought them to the page. If someone is coming to your site to learn how to double their sales or more about European wines, they don’t necessarily need to know that your company was founded 20 years ago. You can put that information on a different page for people to find later.
A paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that the more choices people were presented with, the less likely they were to act. Limiting choices made people more happy with the decisions they made. The fewer choices you give people on your landing page, the more likely they’ll be to satisfied with what you offer.
It also helps to limit the amount of information you collect from people on your landing page. If you present people with a form that asks for their home address, email address and phone number, more people are likely to bounce. Only ask for the details you need, such as name and email address, and no more.
A Good Offer
As a general rule, you want something when people end up on your landing page. They want something from you. You’ve got to make sure that what you’re giving them is worth their while.
Make what you’re offering to people very clear. Using effective headlines helps with this, as it allows people to clearly see what’s on the table.
The offer should also be “worth it” for people. No one wants to give out their email address or phone number only to be told that someone will contact them.
Examples of good offers include a discount, a free trial period or some sort of bonus. Along with making a good offer, set a time limit for that offer to create a sense of urgency. How long do people have to get the discount, when does the trial period expire, when do they need to act to qualify for the bonus?
A Crystal Clear Call to Action
Once people get to your page, you need to tell them what to do. Otherwise, they will click away.
Think of what you want people to do. Then tell them to do it. You can try different tones and different tactics on different landing pages. But what matters is that you are giving people crystal clear directions regarding the next steps to take.
The call to action needs to be visually obvious on the page. You can make it part of a headline, you can put it in an image that catches the eye. Don’t be afraid to be obvious when it comes to your CTA. Arrows and phrases such as “click here” or “call now” are all good ways to tell people what they need to do.
Depending on how long your landing page is, it can be helpful to have the call to action repeated several times on the page. If you put it at the top and have people scroll down, put another call to action at the bottom. Make it as easy as possible for people to act.
A landing page is often a person’s first introduction to your company. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to see why working with you is worth their time and money.
Are you looking for a new landing page or website for your product, business or service? Then contact us today and lets discuss your project!
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