An effective landing page helps boost user engagement, leads and most importantly, sales. What makes an effective landing page? Personalisation, fast loading speeds, and an intuitive, smart design that hits all the right notes with your target audience.
Dynamic personalisation tailors your content for individual site visitors, which can help increase customer conversion rates to 25% compared to static pages.
Even a one-second delay in your landing page’s loading time can cause a 7% drop in conversions and 11% fewer page views, leading to customer dissatisfaction and frustration.
A professionally designed landing page enhances your lead generation through social proof, trust, smart navigation, and content that addresses your target audience’s needs and pain points.
Elements of An Effective Landing Page
The structure and content of your landing page highly influence your visitors’ actions in your site. A landing page is distinct from a standard website. This is where you can direct your customers from various organic and paid marketing channels: social media posts, blogs, adverts, or even a lead capture on your website.
Regardless of the entry point, all potential customers reach your landing page and you should maximise its potential for conversion.
To keep a high user engagement, reduce page abandonment, and maximise conversions, your landing page design must have these key elements:
Compelling Headline
A clear and catchy headline immediately communicates the main benefit of your offer. It is the first thing that visitors usually see on your website, so it should catch their attention and make them want to learn more about your brand.
A/B testing tools like Optimizely and Google Optimize test various headlines and find which one performs best.
You can test headlines for length, tone, and specific wording to know what resonates most with your audience.
Subheadline
Elaborate on your headline with additional information that shows the value proposition. Provide more context or highlighting secondary benefits to complement the subheadline to the headline. Tools like Unbounce and Instapage enable your business to easily edit and test subheadlines to ensure your messaging is clear and compelling from the beginning.
Visuals
Use high-quality images and videos. Aside from explaining your offers through imagery, they make your website page visually appealing as well. High-quality visuals can improve user engagement and make your visitors stay on your website page longer.
Visuals should support your message and help your visitors quickly understand what your business is offering. Platforms like Canva and Adobe can help you with designing images, while Wistia and Vimeo are perfect for embedding videos.
Value Proposition
Your landing page should clearly display the unique benefits that your product or service offers. The value proposition explains why your offer is better than the competition and why it is worth the visitor’s time and money.
Use tools like Hotjar and Typeform to collect user feedback and refine your value proposition. Knowing what your audience values the most helps you constantly improve your message.
Call to Action (CTA)
CTAs encourage further action from your visitors, so make sure they stand out with the right contrasting colours and compelling text. Effective CTAs are usually clear, direct, and create a sense of urgency.
HubSpot’s landing page builder enables you to make and test various Call-to Actions (CTAs). You can experiment with placement, wording, and design of your CTAs to know which drives the most customer conversions.
Social Proof
Include testimonials, reviews, and logos of clients to build trust. User-generated content (UGC) also improves brand credibility. Social proof can help reassure your visitors that your product or service is credible, reliable, and valued. Trustpilot and Clutch are some of the platforms that can help you collect and display customer reviews on your landing page.
Features and Benefits
List the key features of your product or service and explain how they benefit your audience. This section must show the practical advantages of your product. Use bullet points and icons so they’re easy to read. Clear and concise feature lists help your visitors quickly understand the pain points that your product or service is addressing.
Lead Capture Form
Make your form short and simple and ask only for the most essential data. Complex forms can discourage visitors from completing them. If you need more information, try using progressive profiling to collect additional data over time without overwhelming potential customers.
Trust Signals
Add trust badges, secure payment icons, and privacy policy links to reassure visitors. Trust signals can help alleviate concerns about security and privacy. Displaying these badges on your landing page can improve visitor confidence in your brand.
How to Create a Landing Page
While there are different types of landing pages, their main goal remains the same — to generate more leads. These pages usually feature lead forms that request visitor’s contact information in exchange for a product or service offer. Here are some techniques on how to create an effective landing page:
Define Your Goal and Audience
The first step in making a landing page is to clearly define your goal. Is it to collect email sign-ups, sell a product or service, or promote an event? Understanding your goal will guide the design and content of your landing page.
Next is to identify your target audience. Know who your visitors are because that will help you personalise your message to their needs and preferences.
Conduct market research to understand your audience. Then, create buyer personas to visualise your ideal customers. Set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time Bound) goals for your landing page.
Select a Platform
Choose a platform that provides the features you need to create and optimise your landing page. Many tools offer templates, drag-and-drop builders, and integration with other marketing platforms.
- Unbounce – This tool is easy to use and provides your business with customisation options.
- HighLevel – An all-in-one sales & marketing platform to get more customers.
- HubSpot – HubSpot integrates well with CRM and marketing automation tools.
Customise Your Landing Page Design
A well-designed landing page is both visually appealing and aligned with your brand identity. Customise the template to add your brand colours, fonts, and imagery.
Also, keep the layout clean and uncluttered, use high-quality images and videos to interact with visitors, and ensure your design is mobile-responsive.
Write Compelling Copy
The landing page should be clear, concise, and compelling. It should communicate the value of your product or service offer and persuade visitors to take further action.
Use a strong headline to grab customer attention, include a subheadline to offer more context, highlight the benefits of your offer, and use bullet points for readability.
Add a Persuasive Call-To-Action (CTA)
Your CTA is the focal point of your landing page. It must clearly guide visitors on what to do next.
Effective CTAs use action-oriented language, stand out with contrasting colours, are placed above the fold and appear more than once on longer pages.
Create a Form
You need a form to collect visitor data. Keep it simple and ask only for the necessary information. Limit the number of fields to reduce friction and drop-outs. Also, use clear, concise labels and instructions.
Test and Preview
Before publishing your landing page to the public, test it many times to ensure everything works perfectly. Check for any issues with the website design (on both desktop and mobile); copy, design, forms and functionality. Preview your landing page on various devices and browsers. Test all links and completed form delivery to make sure they are all functional. Once live use A/B testing to compare different versions of your landing page.
Monitor and Optimise
After publishing your landing page, continuously track its performance and make data-driven optimisations. Monitor key metrics like conversion rate, bounce rate, and time on page. Use platforms like Google Analytics and Hotjar to gain detailed insights. Use the performance data and user feedback to regularly update your landing page.
A/B Testing Your Landing Page
After publishing your landing page, you can make a variation where one element, such as the headline or CTA button, is different. Users will be shown one of the versions. You can find out which version performs better using A/B testing over a significant period.
Once you identify the better version, it is shown to all users. A/B testing is a continuous process where the landing page’s performance is improved through testing new versions.
What Should You Test?
A/B test can save you time if there are certain issues that you haven’t checked before publishing the landing page. You can pinpoint specific areas that need improvement after conducting thorough and ongoing A/B tests. This ensures that any performance or usability issues are addressed early, avoiding possible decreases in conversion rates and improving the overall UX.
Here are elements that you should test first:
Headline Copy
Since the headline is the first thing visitors usually see in your landing page, it impacts their decision to stay or leave. A compelling headline can catch their attention and invite them to further explore your page.
Experiment with various headline texts, lengths, and tones to check which version resonates most with your audience.
Images
Visuals are essential in engaging with visitors and conveying messages quickly. The right images can make your page more appealing and help explain your product or service better. Test different images, graphics, and placements to know which ones catch and hold the visitor’s attention best.
CTA Colour
The colour of your CTA button can influence its visibility and click-through rates. A well-designed CTA can boost customer conversions. Test various colours, contrasts, and button styles to know which combinations are most effective.
Click Triggers
These are elements that prompt users to take action like urgency messages or social proof. This creates a sense of urgency or trust. Check different triggers such as limited-time deals, testimonials, or scarcity messages to see which ones are most effective.
Copy on the Page
Both content and copy of your landing page affect how well users understand and engage with your brand offer. Clear and compelling copy can result in higher engagement and customer conversions. Explore different triggers such as limited-time offers, testimonials, or scarcity messages to see which ones are most effective.
Lead Form Length and Fields
The number of fields and the length of your lead form can influence completion rates and lead quality. Shorter, more straightforward forms usually have higher completion rates. Evaluate various numbers of fields, field labels, and form designs to find the optimal balance between gathering necessary data and keeping high completion rates.
Landing Page KPIs to Monitor
You can check which landing pages attract the most views and decide which ones to optimise. Improving these high-traffic pages is a good technique for enhancing the traffic quality generated from your ads. Pageviews serve as a solid starting point to analyse where your traffic originates and what actions visitors take after landing on your page.
Page Visits
Page visits show the number of people who land on your page, offering a baseline for measuring engagement and customer conversion. A high number of visits is important, but it’s equally crucial to ensure these visitors are all relevant and engaged. Regularly review your page visit data, analysing the time of day, week, or month when visits peak to adjust your content release schedule.
Google Analytics helps in monitoring your page visits, providing detailed reports on user sessions and traffic patterns.
Traffic Source
Knowing where your visitors come from — organic search, social media, paid ads, or somewhere else helps you allocate your marketing resources more effectively. Finding out what your traffic sources can also help you in deciding your content technique and highlight which channels give the best ROI.
Google Analytics offers insights into traffic sources that allow you to check which channels drive the most visitors on your website. UTM parameters in your URLs help you to monitor specific campaigns and analyse the performance of various different traffic sources.
Submission Rate
This measures the percentage of visitors who completed your lead capture form, showing how well your landing page converts traffic into leads. This KPI is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your form design and the attractiveness of your brand or service offer.
Tools like HubSpot and Marketo allow you to monitor form submissions and customer conversion rates.
Contacts
The number of new contacts or leads generated from your landing page is a direct measure of its success in resulting in high customer conversions. Monitoring this KPI helps you know the quality of your leads and the effectiveness of your landing page in generating interest to potential customers.
Integrate your landing page forms with your CRM to automatically catch and segment new leads, enabling for more personalised follow-up. Analyse the source of your leads to understand which channels and campaigns are most effective.
Heat Mapping
Heat maps show where users click, scroll, and spend the most time on your landing page, offering valuable insights into user behavior. Understanding these engagements helps you optimise the layout and design of your landing page to better attract visitor interest. Tools like Hotjar and Crazy Egg provide comprehensive heat mapping tools to visualise user engagements.
Bounce Rates
This shows the percentage of visitors who leave your page without taking any action, presenting potential issues with content or design. A high bounce rate means that visitors are not finding what they expected or that the page is not engaging enough.
Ensure your landing page is relevant to your ad or search query, enhancing load times, and offering clear, compelling content to reduce bounce rates. Try out different content formats and layouts to check what keeps visitors engaged longer.
Google Analytics helps you track bounce rates and know pages with high exit rates.
Form Abandonment
This measures how many visitors start filling out your form but don’t complete it, showing potential friction points. Understanding why visitors abandon forms can help you make necessary adjustments to enhance completion rates.
Simplify form fields, offering clear instructions, and monitoring different form designs to check what works best. Use progressive profiling to collect data over multiple interactions rather than in a single, lengthy form.
Benchmarks
Comparing your KPIs against other industry benchmarks helps you know how your landing page performs relative to other competitors and find out areas for enhancement. Benchmarks offer context and set realistic performance goals.
Regularly review industry benchmarks and set realistic goals for your landing page performance based on these standards. Use benchmark information to inform your optimisation techniques and monitor progress over time.
Landing Page Best Practices
Craft a Benefit-focused Headline
The first thing that visitors will read is your website’s headline. Create a clear, direct, and engaging headline to clearly and concisely communicate the value of your landing page and product or service offer. Focus on the benefits your product or service offers to the visitor, making it immediately apparent why they should be interested.
Choose an Image that Illustrates Your Offer
Always include images in your landing pages. This helps in conveying a feeling and show how visitors will feel once they receive your brand offer. Choose high-quality visuals that are all relevant to your product or service and resonate with your target audience.
Include the Lead Form Above the Fold
Make your lead form readily accessible to result in faster and higher customer conversion rates. Place the lead form above the fold so your visitors don’t need to scroll to get to the form. Design your layout to scroll with the visitor as they move down the landing page, keeping it always in view.
Give Away a Relevant Offer
Your product or service offer is the thing you give in exchange for your lead’s personal data. Make it compelling enough for your visitor to give their contact information. Ensure the offer is relevant to your business and valuable to the visitor like a free trial, an eBook, or a discount.
Remove All Navigation
Eliminate navigation links from your landing page to keep visitors focused on the customer conversion goal. Reducing distractions helps direct their attention to the offer and the CTA.
Make Your Page Responsive
Always ensure your landing page is fully responsive and appears great on all mobile devices. Mobile optimisation is essential as a significant portion of users will access your page from their mobile phones or tablets.
Optimise for Search
Optimise your landing page for search engines to increase organic traffic. Use relevant keywords in your headlines, subheadings, and throughout your copy. Ensure your meta tags and descriptions are all compelling and accurate.
Always Use a Thank You Page
After a user submits information, direct them to a thank you landing page. This page should acknowledge their submission, provide next steps, and give additional resources or content to keep them engaged and interested.
Build an Effective Landing Page Today
Building an effective landing page helps in gaining leads, increasing customer conversions, and driving business success. Key elements such as compelling headlines, engaging visuals, and clear CTAs contribute to a landing page that resonates with your potential customers and meets your business goals.
Creating an effective landing page can be complex and time-consuming, but it’s worth it when you see traffic and conversions. Consider outsourcing to experts who specialise in both web design and conversion optimisation. Start creating or optimising your landing page and boost your conversion rates today.