Landing Page Optimization-A guide

Landing pages are essential for every startup regardless of what value they are providing be it a service or product. It is essential to have landing pages that help a business achieve its goals.

For my 11th week at the CXL growth marketing scholarship, I detail thoughts on what landing page optimization is and how to go about it for startups.

This section was taught by Michael Aagaard

Landing page optimization: What it is

A landing page refers to the first page that users will see after clicking on your ad, email campaigns, SEO campaigns etc. A landing page could be a specific page on your brand’s website or a separate page focused on helping your target audience take the desired action such as a purchase, a registration, or subscribing to your email list. Basically, a landing page is an entrance page.

A landing page often determines the success of your campaigns. A good landing page makes all the difference between getting a good ROI or wasting money.

Understanding the landing page experience

Landing pages should shorten the journey from click to conversion.

For example, instead of sending people to the homepage of your website, so they have to go through eight layers of navigation to find what you were talking about in the ad they saw initially, providing a great landing experience entails you making what they want very apparent right away so it basically follows up on the promise or the promises made in the ad source.

Creating a great landing page experience, helps you speak to user motivation, and addresses barriers. So what you’re looking at here is building momentum, you know what the motivation is, that’s what we had in the ad, they clicked, there’s a motivation there and so the goal for the landing page is to build that up, try to address and remove barriers that people could have which could be objections, questions, and so on.

Characteristics of an effective landing page

• It should shorten the journey from click to conversion. eg instead of sending people to the homepage of your website so they have to go through eight layers of navigation and stuff to find what you were talking about in the ad you should make that very apparent right away.
• Your landing page should basically follow up on the promise or the promises made in the ad source. Your ad should not communicate one thing and the landing page another message. Whatever your ad promises should be what the landing page expands on.
• Never send traffic from an ad to your homepage. You should never drive traffic from your promotional campaigns whatever they are to your site’s homepage. Homepages are usually cluttered with information, offering users many possible actions. The most important one might be missed. Hence, you should drive traffic from promotional campaigns to a page that is aimed at only one thing — getting a user to take the one action that’s the goal of your campaign. It’s the only way to convert browsers into buyers.
• Clarity and relevance make or break your landing page. Visitors spend just seconds looking at a landing page before determining its usefulness and relevance. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, or if your site has functionality or usability problems, they will abandon the page.
• Good landing pages follow a proven structure such as having benefit-oriented headlines, write clear, relevant, and concise copy. Don’t put too much text on the page; the visitor has to be able to read it quickly — Use bullet points to drive home the main points. Make sure the language in the ad is also present in the copy of the landing page — Focus on getting visitors to take one specific action. Remove distracting navigational links — Remove all extra clutter links, menus, buttons, that have nothing to do with the particular ad or campaign. Make it impossible for the visitor to ignore your message or get distracted. Make the form or checkout option prominent — The one action you want the visitor to take has to be big and obvious. Put a large sign-up form on the right side of the landing page; use a high-contrast color to make it stand out. If the landing page is long enough for scrolling, duplicate the form or button at the bottom of the page. Maintain your brand- Don’t make your landing page look different from your overall website and brand. Keep the same colors, font, and overall look and feel of your main site. This reinforces brand awareness.

What I want to establish here is that landing page optimizationis not just about fixing a landing pageand making it look pretty,it can be much more profound than that.

Your most important step — research

Your most important landing page optimizing action is research. Getting to understand why users are not carrying out the desired actions requires research. Understanding the user experience, doing background research is incredibly important for everything else. It’s like you start out with what you know, you have some pieces of the puzzle, but there are a lot of them missing and you need to find those missing pieces and get them into place.

So in the research process, you would need to be involved in quantitative research and qualitative research. On the quantitative side, you are looking at data basically stuff from analytics, big data stuff. So it could be, for example, we might find out that the users are leaving the landing page, and they’re not filling out the form. We don’t have the why, we get the why through qualitative research. So for example, you could get the reason after you know, you’ve interviewed customers and you figure out we figure out that they are not filling out the form because they distrust our landing page, because it simply does not look legit. They don’t think it’s worth doing it. So you know what to optimize your landing page for.

Thank you for taking the time to read through. Leave me your thoughts and questions. Connect with me I love meeting new people, connect with me on Linkedin or Twitter