Creating Effective Landing Pages

Landing pages are meant to convince your visitor to take a specific action. If the majority of your visitors are not taking the action that you wanted them to take, then your landing pages are not effective. Ideally, you should create several landing pages and determine which one is converting better. Once you know what is working, you can ditch the other pages – but in order to find out which one wins, you will have to run several test promotions, or one promotion with different links.
Start by thinking about your visitors. Who will be visiting your site? If you sell ladies shoes, you can reasonably assume that women between the ages of 18 and 70 are visiting your site. Therefore, your page and your sales copy would be targeted to women of basically all age groups over the age of eighteen. If you are selling toys for toddlers, you can reasonably assume that parents – mostly women – between the ages of 20 and 30 will be your target market.
Figuring out who your promotional material is meant for, and designing landing pages that work with that promotional material is the first step to success. You can even design promotional material and landing pages for different groups of people. For instance, even though most people who buy toys for toddlers are women, men also buy toys for toddlers. A landing page that appeals to a woman will not appeal to a man. The promotional ad that gets the visitor to the landing page in the first place must also be suited to the group of people that you are trying to attract.
Get rid of anything on the page that does not have to do with getting your visitor to take the action you want them to take. Graphics are nice, but keep the graphics low and to a minimum. Get rid of links to other websites. Get rid of navigation links if possible. Have everything the visitor needs on that one page.
Take away the visitors options. Focus on one thing – getting the visitor to take the action you want them to take. Do not allow them to navigate through your website. Do not confuse them by offering more than one product for sale or by having them perform more than one action on the page. If you stay focused, and you keep your page focused, the chances are very good that your visitor will remain focused as well.
The only outward bound links on your landing page should be a link to an order form. Anything else can and should go directly on the page. If you simply want your visitor to fill out a form, put the form on the landing page. If you want them to read information, put it on the landing page. If you want them to make a purchase, put the sales copy on the landing page, with a link to the secure order form on the bottom of the page – and throughout the sales copy.
Make your sales copy scannable by using bold colors and text that stand out – but don’t go overboard and blind or irritate your visitors. Use highlights to bring the visitors attention to important information. Put the important information above the fold. Don’t make them scroll for it – have it right where they can see it as soon as the page loads.
Designing effective landing pages take a little work, and when you are done, you will be surprised at how simple the page actually is – and how well it does what you want it to do!