Landing Page Optimization: 10 best practices for high-converting landing pages

Knowing the ins and outs of landing pages can sometimes feel overwhelming, but we promise, that it doesn’t have to be rocket science. In this blog post, we have gathered our best tips on how to create an effective landing page that boosts conversions – so you can go and make one yourself.

• What is a landing page?
• When to use a Landing page?
• Types of Landing Pages
• What is landing page optimization?
• The process of optimizing a landing page
• What landing page metrics to track
• What is a good landing page conversion rate?
• Landing page optimization: 10 best practices
• What to do post optimization

But first…

What is a Landing page?

Let’s quickly recap what a landing page is and why it’s important. Simply put, a landing page is a web page that a person lands on after clicking through from a search engine results page, an ad, an email, etc. It is a standalone page on your website with the goal of capturing and converting leads. Why is it important? They lead your potential and existing customers to your specific service, offer, or product and encourage them to take action. This, in turn, provides opportunities to boost conversions and build a larger customer base.

You can also think of it this way. If the internet is your way of doing business you have a huge market at your disposal. The majority of the world’s population is connected to the internet. That’s 4 billion potential customers who could arrive at your website’s landing page (pretty neat right). So, your landing page is all about enhancing lead generation and converting visitors into customers. However, this is not always an easy thing to achieve, but, by optimizing your landing pages and following best practices, you will be well on your way.

When to use a Landing page?

As mentioned above, the main goal of a landing page is to capture and convert leads into paying customers. Whenever you are promoting a marketing campaign with links to other marketing assets, you need a landing page that visitors can land on after clicking those links. 

A marketing campaign always has a unique goal so it’s important to link the campaign assets to a corresponding landing page that supports that goal. The landing page should match the marketing assets it’s linked to. This means, the design, copy, CTA, etc needs to be consistent – you want to meet your visitors’ expectations.

Here are some examples of what you can use a landing page for:

– PPC ads

– Google Adwords ads

– Social media ads

– Podcast ads

– Email marketing campaigns 

– Promoting a product launch

Types of Landing Pages

Depending on your business goals or objectives, you will need different types of landing pages. Below you can find a variety of landing pages and what they can be used for.

Generating leads

1. Squeeze page

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The squeeze page is designed to acquire a visitor’s email address, typically through a newsletter, free trial, e-book, whitepaper, or other downloadable content. When you have access to the email address you can begin to nurture that contact with content that the user will find valuable and relevant. Email is one of the most effective marketing channels, which makes this type of landing page beneficial.

2. Lead capture-page

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The lead capture page is very similar to the squeeze page as it acquires information on the user. This type of landing page tends to acquire more extensive information on the user, but the information requested completely depends on the goal of the page and where the customer is in the sales funnel.

3. Paid advertising landing page

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These landing pages take the customer directly from a paid ad link to the right, corresponding landing page. They can generate leads by acquiring a user’s email address.

4. “About us” landing page

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Make the most out of your “about us” page. In addition to the history of the company or the brand’s mission, you can use this space to add links to the shop, social media handles, email sign-ups, and more.

5. Coming soon page

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The coming soon page is used when a company is working on a new landing page for a new product or offer that they are not ready to show yet. This type of page reveals some necessary information and creates anticipation. You can offer early access or notifications when the page goes live by asking people to sign up with their email addresses.

6. Thank you landing page

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A thank you page is exactly what it sounds like, a thank you note for purchasing, downloading a resource, signing up for a newsletter, etc. But, like the about us page, you can utilize this landing page by offering more value through additional offers, discounts, free trials, and gifts. Remember, these people have actively shown an interest in your company so use that opportunity to constantly nurture that contact and turn them into customers.

Conversions

7. Long-form sales landing page

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The main goal of the long-form sales page is to convert sales. This type of page is a comprehensive sales pitch that covers all questions or obstacles the customer could be wondering about or facing regarding your product or service. It contains information, benefits/features, testimonials, and action-led CTAs. 

8. Click-through landing page

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This type of landing page provides great value to the customer without any pushy sales messages. Its main focus is usually to convey the benefits and features of a product or service with an encouraging CTA that offers the customer to partake in a free trial or similar offer. The CTA will then take them to another landing page with more information that requires more details from the customer.

9. Get started landing page

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This type of page is a benefit-led landing page that promptly displays the offer above the fold, with a “Get Started” CTA button that takes the customer to a different landing page.

Promotions

10. Pricing page

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If you offer pricing packages or unveil new prices on your website, a pricing page will be useful. The copy needs to be simple and straightforward to minimize confusion. Use this page to convey offers that are competitive and easy to choose from – people are more likely to make a decision if they have fewer options in front of them.

11. Splash page

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A splash page is often used as a way to display an ad or announcement when someone clicks on a social media or content link. Instead of being sent directly to the intended destination of the link, the splash page appears. There is usually a countdown to the ad and the user can easily click their way to the article, content, or landing page once the ad countdown is finished.

Redirect trafic

12. 404 landing page

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Even when something goes wrong, you can still do your best to provide value to your customers. Use your creativity to make the 404 error pages a little more friendly or humorous, remember your tone of voice. But, most importantly, use it to redirect your customers to your homepage or another landing page to minimize the risk of opt-outs. You can use the 404 page to direct your customers to your other web pages like a blog, product page, or downloadable content offers.

13. Unsubscribe landing page

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The unsubscribe page is simple, it shows your customers they have been able to successfully unsubscribe or manage their emailing preferences. These are not used in any campaign, but they are still important to optimize. Make sure it does what it is supposed to do and include links to other parts of your website.

What is landing page optimization?

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Landing page optimization can be explained as a series of methods used to improve specific elements on a landing page to increase conversions. Why does landing page optimization matter? Since these pages are mainly focused on conversions and lead generation, effective landing pages can increase business results such as lower customer acquisition costs, more customers, increase ad cost value, and achieve higher conversion rates. This means, that landing pages are a vital part of your online marketing campaigns.

The process of optimizing a landing page

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Landing page optimization isn’t a matter of opinion. It’s the product of systematic research and analysis. You should start by identifying what problems you currently have with your landing page and fixing them using data and research. 

To help guide your efforts, you can try to use the 3-step CRO method when optimizing your landing pages. By asking yourself the questions below you can identify influencing factors as to why your landing page is not converting, patterns in your customer’s behavior, and much more.

1. What brings people to your landing page?

To optimize your landing pages, you need to understand who is visiting your page and why they are there. The most straightforward ways of shining some light on the situation are analytics and surveys. In google analytics you can track your visitors and see where your traffic is coming from. Surveys are another good tool, where you can ask your audience directly. 

2. What stops people from converting?

Your optimization efforts need to be backed up by data and real insights. That means you need to know why people aren’t converting or opting out. What is making them move on? Heatmaps are great tools for following your visitors’ on-site behavior. It allows you to pinpoint their actions, navigation, and where they decide to leave the page. If most clicks are on a relatively unimportant item on your landing page you may have discovered a distraction for visitors.

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You can also get data from confetti maps, scroll maps, list reports, and overlay reports to give you data on which to base your landing page analysis. Analyze how your landing page is performing. If it’s not doing what it’s intended to do, what could be wrong with it? It could be that the design is poor? Perhaps the headlines are unengaging? There may be an inconsistency between your advertising content and your landing page content? Maybe the message you want to express isn’t clear? Or perhaps, somewhere along the way you’ve forgotten what your landing page is for, it’s not meeting the primary purpose and confuses people on what action to take next.

3. What pushes people to convert?

The last step in this process is to find out what on your landing pages persuades your visitors to take action. Identifying what is already working for your landing pages will help you understand what methods, tactics, or elements you should keep using. You can find valuable information about this by using surveys or polls with people who have already converted. Ask them what convinced them to convert and analyze the results.

By spending some time with this process you will identify what exactly it is that drives people to your landing pages and what factors/elements persuades them to take action, or not take action.

What landing page metrics to track

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To make sure your optimizing efforts are leading to desirable results, you need to track and analyze your landing page´s performance and progress. You can do this through analytics. We have gathered 5 essential metrics that you should track to gain insightful data and develop a more effective landing page.

What is a good landing page conversion rate?

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A landing page´s purpose is to convert visitors into leads and customers, and if it’s generating traffic and converting leads it’s good right? Or how do you know if your conversion rate is enough?

A good conversion rate will often be different depending on what industry you’re in, what product or service you sell, and who your customers are. The best landing pages rate up to around 27,4 %, but, the average conversion rate of a good landing page is around 3-5,5%. 

You can calculate your conversion rate by taking the number of conversions and dividing it by the total number of leads. For example, if you have 10,000 leads and 2000 conversions you would have a 5% conversion rate.

Your conversion rate will vary depending on the factors mentioned above, but aiming for the average rate and beyond is a good way to start. Remember, there is always room for improvements, so keep analyzing and tracking your landing pages performance.

Landing page optimization: 10 best practices

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Sometimes it can be a little tricky to identify why your landing page isn’t converting, which is why it’s important to regularly analyze your landing pages and track metrics. A converting landing page needs certain elements to be effective, so if you need some help to get started follow our 10 best practices below.

1. Identify your landing page´s objective

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The first thing you need to do is determine what you want your landing page to do. As mentioned above, there are a few different types of landing pages that you can use, all of which work to assist certain objectives and marketing campaigns. So, identify your landing page´s purpose before doing anything else. The objective will guide you on the next steps such as design and copy. 

The same thing goes for your audience. Who is this landing page for? What audience is it targeting? You want to make sure you know this beforehand so that all the work that goes into creating the landing page is aligned with your objectives and your targeted audience.

2. Use simple design and navigation

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The design of your landing page plays an important role in driving conversions and the overall effectiveness of the page. Exploring and testing different design options should therefore be a priority. The goal of your landing page is to make it easy and straightforward for a visitor to convert. This means, your design elements need to work with the conversion objective and lead your customer down the sales funnel. This could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a free resource, etc. 

Nowadays you don’t have to be a skillful coder to build a website or landing page. There are thousands of website builders out there with great landing page templates to choose from. These templates have prebuilt designs that you can customize and edit to suit your business needs. Always remember to optimize your landing page design for both desktop and mobile. Many users prefer to shop via their smartphones, and if the website/landing page design doesn’t correspond with a mobile device, your customers are likely to go elsewhere. 

An effective landing page provides just the necessary information needed to inspire a customer to convert. When newspapers were masters of the media universe, “above the fold” referred to a physical fold in the paper. Anything printed above this point was visible on the newsstand and when the paper was first picked up. This is still the primary position for the top news headline that grabs attention and sells the paper.

When a potential customer arrives on your landing page, the visible part of the screen is “above the fold”. It’s the part of the landing page that can be seen without scrolling. For this reason, it’s the most valuable part of your landing page so make sure your key information is front and center.   

You want to consider keeping the layout minimalistic and simple, whitespace is your best friend. Avoid making the page look crowded. Too many popups, symbols, and other design elements will make it difficult and strenuous to read. But, it can also affect the load speed. People often demand fast solutions, not to mention the short attention span people have these days, so to keep your landing page visitors’ attention, make sure your page loads quickly. That means, not overcrowding it with big image files or videos, widgets, etc. A good landing page needs to be visually pleasing with eye-catching colors and relevant media such as images and videos but use them sparingly.

3. Copy

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Is your landing page confusing your customers? You might feel like you have lots to say but too much information can often have a negative effect. It leads to overload and defeats its own objective. Simple and concise copy goes a long way. 

The average person reads on an 8th-grade level, meaning your copy shouldn’t be overly complicated. The nature of peoples´ behavior online is to scan through information. So, to draw people in, you want to focus on the headlines, subheadlines, images, and CTA buttons. 

Make your headlines prominent, clear, and simple to grab people’s attention. Use your subheadline to convey your product or service’s benefits, with as few impactful words as possible. You can then utilize images to compel more of your offer to your customers. The CTA, also called call-to-action, should be to the point and obvious. The more you say the less impact it will have. Statements such as “Buy Now”, “Try for Free”, and “Join Here” are concise and effective. 

Because people tend to skim read, the trick is to boil down your messages to a few simple elements. But your major sections and paragraphs are also important. Use short paragraphs and bullet points to make it easy for your readers to digest the information, and clearly convey the benefits of your product or service. 

Your landing page visitors will be reassured by a consistent visual message. Keep your branding consistent between your social media and landing page. Different colors, fonts, and messaging in different parts of your customer communication can subtly confuse and disorientate them. Confusion undermines conversion.

4. Benefits vs features

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Like every business on the internet, you are competing with many brands and companies that offer the same or similar products/services as you. To make it clear to your customers what you offer, and more importantly, why they should choose you above your competitors, your landing page needs to include the benefits and features of your offer. 

A good place to start is by thinking about your USP, or unique selling point. What makes you special? What makes your offer/company better than your competitors?

To convey a lucrative offer that attracts customers, you need to understand and clearly demonstrate the difference between benefits and features. Features are attributes that are a part of your product or service. Benefits are the reasons your customers are buying the product/service – the impact it will have on their lives. It’s very important to know the difference between the two and includes both on your landing page. Benefits are used as a psychological sales tactic to impact a customer’s emotional needs. They are used to present the customer with a scenario, where your product or service will help improve some area of their lives. 

5. Testimonials and social proof

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Social proof and testimonials from happy and content customers are a vital part of an effective landing page. But why is that?

It’s pretty simple actually. People trust other people, who are not trying to make money off of them. By reading about other people’s experiences with a brand, customers can quickly make up their opinion and whether or not they would like to invest their money in the product/service too. People generally don’t like being sold to, but they love to buy. 

As customers, we want to be in control and make our own decisions, without being pushed or manipulated by some salesperson. We are naturally cautious, and with the vast majority of information online these days, people have become more commercially aware and are not always easy to convince. But, the fact is, the more closely a brand aligns with its customers’ needs and desires, the more likely they are to trust and feel emotionally engaged to purchase. 

So, how do we solve this predicament? There are multiple ways you can earn trust and convey value to your customers, but testimonials are a straightforward way of showing, or proving, to your prospects that your product or service is worth the money – because other people have deemed it so.

6. CTA

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To boost conversions and to make it clear what you expect your customers to do when they land on your page, you need a CTA. It usually takes the form of a button or hyperlink, with a concise message that conveys an action, for example: “Buy now”, “Read more”, “Download here”. 

You should place your CTAs in every section of your landing page, and change the message accordingly so that it aligns with the conversion objective. 

Make sure that your customers know how to contact you and have easy access to your contact information. A link to a call center, your email address, or a contact form makes it easy for the customer. It also provides you with an opportunity to engage with them.

7. Use scarcity

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Scarcity is a sales tactic that increases the value of a product or service by reducing the supply or limiting the time the offer is active. The psychology of scarcity builds on human nature and the belief that the more limited something is, the more value it has. 

Scarcity can make a product or service feel more desirable, by playing on our human need to feel special. But it also uses FOMO, or fear of missing out, as a tactic to encourage buyers not to miss out on a great deal or bargain. 

When using scarcity, there are typically four different types that marketers use:

Exclusivity

Exclusivity scarcity uses status and luxury to entice buyers. This tactic raises the price tag on items and services to make certain luxury products harder to get a hold of, and therefore more desirable. People love to feel special and privileged, so by limiting the number of people that can acquire these items, it raises the value. 

Rarity

Rarity scarcity is very similar to exclusivity scarcity as it uses peoples’ need to acquire status and feel unique to sell. This can be done by limiting the supply of certain products or services at the beginning of production. For example, a brand like Louis Vuitton or Gucci gets a famous tattoo artist to make an original design on one of their new bags, but there is only a limited supply of them. This bag becomes a rare, one-time-only purchase which raises the desire to acquire it before it sells out.  

Excess demand

Sometimes there are no tricks but rather a supply and demand issue. When there appears to be less of something, people assume it’s because it is of high value, since many other people have decided to purchase it. This particular scarcity tactic uses FOMO to drive purchase behaviour. The popularity factor also works as a sort of social proof, which makes other customers more motivated to buy. 

Urgency

Urgency scarcity uses Time to drive buying behavior. By adding a limited time or deadline to an offer you can convince people to act fast since otherwise, they will lose out on the great and valuable offer. Time-limited deals make people feel like it’s a “steal” or a “bargain” – they feel like they are making smart decisions and taking advantage of a good offer.

8. Provide contact information

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To make the most out of your landing pages you should include ways your customers and leads can contact you or inquire for more information. Contact information such as your company phone number, email address and other social media handles are crucial to create better communication between you and your customers. You want to minimize any kind of friction or obstacles that your visitors may encounter on your landing page, and so, if they don’t have any means of contacting you there is a high chance that they will go somewhere else. 

Depending on the landing page´s objective you should include a contact form. It makes you appear more reachable but can also help generate more leads through acquiring personal information such as email. A contact form is one of the best ways to build your email list. It also gives visitors the impression that you are there to help, with any questions or inquiries that they might have, which conveys value.

9. Be consistent

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Be on-brand. Always remember your core brand elements to include throughout the page, you don’t want one page to completely stand out from the rest. Integrate the same or similar colors, design elements, visuals, and fonts to create consistency. The same goes for the tone of voice in your copy. If your brand leans more towards a humorous and witty type of tone, you don’t want to suddenly change it into something that sounds like an academic textbook. 

Consistency also covers your other marketing assets and social handles, especially the links and ads your landing pages correspond with. You want to keep a consistent style and tone in your ads so that the text and other elements match your landing page. This goes for the actual content as well. Your ad copy and objectives need to correlate with your landing page so that it delivers visitors’ expectations as they click through the ad to the landing page. This is very important for conversions.

10. Optimize for SEO

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Your landing pages will be useless if no one can find them, but that is where SEO comes in. People usually find their way to landing pages through organic search or paid ads, by typing in specific keywords or phrases into search engines like Google. To optimize your landing pages, you will want to use industry-related keywords throughout your landing page so that your targeted audience can find you. 

Bear in mind, that people don’t tend to look past the first two pages in the search engine results pages. This means, that to get your landing pages to rank in the search results, and increase your visibility, you want to optimize them for SEO. As search engines algorithms determine the value and relevance of your page, you need to use specific keywords in your landing page so you can rank for those keywords. Through keyword tools like ubersuggest and SemRush magic tool you can find popular keywords with high search volume to add to your landing pages. 

What to do post optimization

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Like with many business or marketing efforts, optimization is rarely a one-time affair. Once you have optimized your landing pages it’s time to test, test, test. Your efforts will not get you far if you don’t analyze the performance of your landing pages after the optimization process is done. Make sure your hard work pays off and use Analytics to gain deep insights and data on how your pages are performing. 

Another post-optimization task includes A/B testing, which is the process of running two (or more) variants of a page, an email, an ad, etc to see which one performs best. Like analytics, A/B testing lets you make decisions based on data. It allows you to test and collect information before you commit to any changes in your landing pages. Your customers are the judges, which gives you a direct indication of what they prefer and find valuable. 

Start optimizing your landing pages today! If you need anymore guidance or assistance feel free to contact us and book a free audit – we will help you deliver great experiences to your customers and grow your business.

 

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