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6 Tips for Killer Landing Pages

25th July 2019

#Expertise

When used well, a landing page is an incredibly effective tool to be utilising on your website. Here's six top tips to increase your conversion rates on your landing pages.

When used well, a landing page is an incredibly effective tool to be utilising on your website. How your landing page is designed will have a huge impact on whether a visitor gets in touch or buys from you.

Keep reading to see our six top tips for creating killer, high-conversion landing pages.

But first, what is a landing page?

A landing page is technically a ‘destination page’. Google Analytics defines it as the first page viewed in a session, i.e. the first page that someone lands on when they visit your website.

Most digital marketers define a landing page as a standalone page that’s used to drive a specific action, or ‘conversion’. But, what’s a conversion? We hear you ask! Here are a few examples:

  • Capture contact information for a lead, in exchange for a useful resource
  • Sign-up a visitor to a free trial for a monthly subscription service
  • Promote a product and make a sale

Traffic is normally driven to a landing page by running a marketing campaign. For example, you could run an ad on Facebook and when a user clicks it they would LAND on your landing page and hopefully complete your desired action.

There are plenty of ways to push traffic to your landing pages, such as traditional print advertising, email campaigns, and organic social media posts to name a few.

6 top tips to increase conversions on your landing pages

1. Ensure your call to action is clear

OK, maybe it’s an obvious one, but it’s probably the most important tip. You need to make sure that your ‘conversion action’ is very clear for the visitor.

Make sure your landing page isn’t overly complex or cluttered so the main focus is on completing your desired action. It’s important not to oversell and talk about the benefits that a person will get by completing the action.

This example from Dropbox, clearly describes the value of their product. The white button contrasts with the dark background so the visitor can easily see how to sign-up to a trial.

2. Keep forms as short as possible

You want to create as little ‘friction’ as possible for your visitors. Each step a visitor has to overcome is a potential stumbling block which could lead to them leave a site without converting.

So question every field in your form, do you really need that information? Think about which fields are required and optional. If you have to collect a lot of information, think about breaking the form into a number of sections and showing the visitor their progress throughout.

In this example by Codecademy they make it incredibly easy for users to sign up. Simply provide an email, password and hit the compelling button ‘start coding now’. They make it even easier by giving you the option to sign-up using your existing LinkedIn, Google, Facebook or GitHub account.

3. Limit (or remove) your navigation

One effective way of increasing landing page conversion is to limit navigation away from the page. Why would you provide extra distractions for your visitors and make it easier for them to leave?

A popular technique is to reduce the links in the top navigation bar, or drop it completely.

This Shopify landing page has no navigation bar at all, and the only links on the page are to start a free trial.

4. Make sure it’s responsive

As with website design in general, you need to consider how your website looks and functions on various devices.

If your visitors are most likely to view your landing page on mobile (especially if you’re directing traffic through social media) then it’s critical for the page to be optimised for this purpose.

Harry’s free trial is super easy to sign-up for in just a few taps. The simple three step process looks great and works really well on mobile.

5. Tailor with dynamic content

Everyone likes to feel special! If possible, tailor the content on the page to make it more relevant to that particular visitor.

For example, take a business that sells to customers in multiple industries / sectors. If a visitor clicks one of your adverts related to healthcare, then the landing page could be dynamically tailored to show content relevant to that sector.

In this example, Airbnb use geographic targeting to tailor their landing page. They know we’re accessing the website from Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the landing page is tailored to show us how much rental income we could make in our location.

6. Utilise A/B Testing

Our final tip is to test, tweak and test again! You can make endless design tweaks based on assumptions, but with landing pages the proof is in the pudding – how are real visitors interacting with your landing page?

A/B testing (or split testing) is a method of comparing two or more versions of a web page to see which one performs better – in our case, which landing page has the best conversion rate. Each version is served to visitors at random and you can track which one has the most success.

The data you collect will enable you to make informed decisions on how to modify / optimise your landing page to improve conversions.

Heatmap tool by HotJar.

Want some expert advice?

We don’t like to blow our own trumpet, but we’re not shy in saying we’re user experience experts. Let’s have a chat today to see how we can transform your website and improve your conversion rates.