Landing pages are one of the key elements of any website. They are the pages you should direct all your prospects to when they click on your ads. A great landing page is your top conversion tool: it gets you subscribers and sales. A badly designed one will render your advertising efforts purposeless.
Before we move on to the actual design elements and tips, let us first understand what a great landing page is supposed to do. Boiling down to the essence, it is supposed to do three critical things:
- Tell people what you offer them
- Tell them why they really need what you have to offer
- Tell them what they need to do in order to get what you offer
If your landing page does not cover even one of these three core purposes, then you will not get any conversions. Prospects will not feel enticed enough to complete the CTA and will leave your website for good.
Now that we have got this covered, let us move on to the actionable advice for designing a killer landing page.
- Coordinate the Graphics of the Page with the Ad
Most of the time, prospects reach your landing page from an ad they saw on social media. It is important to reassure them that they have reached the right place and are where they are supposed to be in order to take advantage of your offer. How do you give this reassurance? By replicating the graphics, colours and words used in your ad on the landing page.
This is very important, because people are wary of internet scams and if they feel that they have been taken to a fake offer page, they will leave the website immediately.
- Minimise Scrolling
A landing page is not an academic article. It is a marketing tool. Its purpose is to grab people’s attention quickly and create the interest to click on the CTA button. You must not waste their time with long and complex texts. They do not have the patience for it.
As you may know, people do not actually read online, they scan texts in a F shape. Your landing page copy should follow this shape and contain everything the prospect needs to know above the fold (in the first screen they see without scrolling down).
- Use Directional Clues
Directional clues in a landing page guide people towards the CTA button. These clues could be in the form of arrows, or even photos of people looking or pointing in the direction of the button.
These small guidance elements are important. At a subconscious level, the viewer will feel compelled to click on that button in a natural sequence after reading the copy on the landing page.
- Remove Navigation Tabs
A landing page should contain no distractions for the prospect. Keeping the standard menu of your website on this type of page will have two negative impacts: one, the page will look cluttered and the CTA button will lose pride of place and secondly, you give undecided prospects the chance to get away from the landing page and start looking at other pages in your website.
Once they have navigated away from your landing page, there are small chances for them to return to it.
- Design the CTA Button Carefully
A great landing page can be ruined by a CTA button which is too small, of the wrong colour, or contains the wrong words. CTA buttons must simply pop out from the page. Use strong, contrasting colours (red is the most frequently used colour) and make it large and easy to see from the moment the user has reached the landing page.
Our recommendation is to perform as many A/B tests as you need until you have found the perfect combination of placement, colour and copy for your CTA button. This is the ultimate element of your landing page, the one which justifies the existence of all the other elements. If you do not get it right, the rest of your hard work is in vain.