How to build an effective landing page that converts?
I will explain the concept of a landing page and what conversion means in the first section. You can skip this and move on directly to the solutions part.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is any webpage where your user might land through any source, be it marketing ads, searching through Google, discovering through brand campaigns etc.
It means the landing page for a user can be a home page, a particular product page or a page specifically created for a marketing campaign.
P.S. The best landing pages are the ones that are short, simple and do the job.
What is the objective of a landing page?
The objective of a landing page is closely related to the goals of the company or institution. It can be to promote a product, sell a product, or capture the visitor information by giving any valuable service or product in return, like in the case of Great Learning.
For a user, a landing page is a space where they register their interest in a product or service by clicking on an ad or search result and want to know more about the product or service.
A landing page, in a concise manner, provides the required information to the user.
What do you mean by conversion on a landing page?
A landing page is built with a purpose in mind. Conversion happens when the user performs an action the business wants and moves ahead in the journey.
For example, suppose a landing page requires an email address so that it can send promotional material and increase its user base. A successful conversion is one when the user lands on the page (visitor) and gives his email address on the page showing his interest (lead).
How to build an effective landing page that converts?
The effectiveness of a landing page is measured by the conversion it has. For example, If the page has 1,000 visitors in a day and converts 50 of those visitors into leads, then the conversion rate on the page is 5%.
The conversion on a landing page varies from industry to industry and depends on what value the user gets on the page. But, following some proven steps in building a landing page will help achieve maximum conversions.
1. Understand your target audience & business goals
“ In user experience, design solutions should revolve around your user needs, stakeholder priorities and production realities.”
As the first step of the process, know who your target audience is and what they are looking for. This can be gathered through marketing surveys, persona studies, or by conducting interviews. The marketing team has an understanding of who the target audience is, as they run ad campaigns based on this.
The next step is to understand what actions you want the visitors to take on the landing page. A landing page doesn’t exist in isolation, it exists within a context. The context is what happened before he landed on the page and what’s gonna happen after.
Based on this journey, it is important to retain the context and provide users with what they came for. For eg: If a user sees an ad which promised him “A Career Toolkit” but upon landing on the page he sees “Signup”, this would reduce the likelihood of a conversion.
2. Building a Storyline
On average, visitors’ time on a landing page is less than a minute. So within a glance, the visitor should understand what the page is about and what it is offering.
The first thing that the visitor reads is the headline. Having a compelling headline that addresses the user’s concern and engages him in the conversation is a must.
To design an effective headline that catches the attention of the user, I follow “Donald Miller’s Storybrand” framework.
The story brand framework is a popular messaging tool designed to improve your business’ marketing strategy by clarifying your message.
In short, the story of the page should be clear and concise, should address the user’s problem and guide them to the right path with your value proposition and call to action.
3. Building a visual story
Building a landing page that is simple, engaging and that helps users navigate through the page, results in better conversions. It is important to have a well-designed page because the first impression of the visitor will decide whether they stay on the page or bounce.
Here are some tips that can help build a well-designed landing page:
- Images paired with your title are more effective and it is easier for the visitor to relate to your value proposition. It is a good practice to continue with the creatives from the ads so that the context is retained for visitors coming from marketing channels.
- Design for consistency, the landing page should follow the brand guidelines of your company and have a predictable grid structure. This helps in building trust and gaining the “Aesthetic-Usability Effect”, where the visitors perceive visually pleasing sites as more usable.
- Use high contrast with the Call to Action (CTA) button and the background, so that it stands out as much as possible. Also, make sure the CTA is visible in the first fold.
- Always design for easier scanning and reduce the amount of text on the landing pages.
- Design first for devices which have maximum traffic, usually, this would be mobile in most cases. Analyse the traffic split in device and marketing sources to make better decisions.
- Introducing social proofing elements like user testimonials, famous brand mentions, reviews and ratings etc. can have a positive outcome towards conversion
- Have clear, dominant and persuasive CTA with a microcopy above or below it. This microcopy can be such it reduces the perceived risk of clicking, increases urgency or builds excitement.
- Designing an effective lead form is also a part of the experience and should not be missed out on.
4. Looking out for page load time and page speed score
Even if you have followed all the processes till now, it is bad if your page doesn’t load quickly. The visitors will bounce off your page without even looking at the title. So, the page load time and the page speed score are the most important factors to decide the conversion.
It is essential for optimising conversions to have a page that loads quickly and has a good page speed score.
Design can help in these parameters by making sure the images and other assets are optimised for speed and all the developer handoff best practices are followed.
5. Running an A/B Experiment
At Great Learning, we believe that data is the absolute truth and therefore no change on a landing page goes without an A/B.
An A/B experiment is a setup where you test 2 variations of a design or a current design with a new proposed design on a fair sample to find out the winner.
We have done multiple A/B experiments and have optimized our landing pages that convert better each time with the changes. We have seen our fair share of failures but the important fact is you learn from failures too.
While setting up the A/B you can split the traffic into 50/50 or 80/20 based on the situation and arrive at an initial level of conclusion about the winner. But it is advised to keep an eye out on the down-the-funnel conversions too to get the exact idea of the impact.
6. Analyse and iterate
While the experiment is running, you can use certain tools to view recordings and heat maps of how the visitor interacts with the page. This can be a good way to know if the user behaves on the page in a way we had intended it to.
The use of Google Analytics or similar tools to study the anonymous visitor data can help to make improvements to better the conversions further. For example, if you notice that more visitors are spending time on a particular section that talks about a webinar, you can bump that up on the page and also include a CTA to push them to sign up for it.
Key Takeaway: A landing page should be convincing but straight to the point. Include calls to action to make it easy for your visitor to do what you want them to do, and employ UX best practices to make the page easy to read and navigate. To ensure your landing page is doing what it needs to accomplish, test it against other variations and review your analytics to monitor its ongoing performance.
