How to Design a Landing Page from Scratch
The task of how to design a landing page from scratch might seem like a daunting prospect, but the rewards are well worth the effort. You can skyrocket your sales figures by increasing the conversion rate and have a customer base that’s more engaged.
There are a few steps that can be used to get the job done and newcomers in particular can benefit from these well-practiced methods. Sticking to the recipe ensure you do not get lost along the way.
Define your offer
The first task in learning how to design a landing page is to decide what offer you are promoting. Are you trying to get bookings for a hotel room, acquire email addresses for a marketing campaign, sell physical products or generate new memberships for an exclusive forum?
Each of these scenarios would require a different type of landing page. For instance, when capturing an email address you should create a page that has the email capture from and little else. This removes the distractions and hence increases the conversion rate.
On the other hand, if you need to acquire bookings for a hotel room then a page with plenty of room pictures and a list of amenities is a must. By considering the type of offer the format of the page will choose itself.
Software
You need to select the software that will be used to create the landing page. How you do this depends on what skills you have and what your experience is. For instance, if you have a lot of experience with WordPress, then that might be the platform to use.
However, if you have coding abilities, then selecting a platform where you can code the page from scratch might be a better fit. Consider your strengths and choose a software platform accordingly.
Create the plan
Before you start on the landing page consider how it will look visually. Where will all the different elements be located? It would be counterproductive to create the page and then move things around because you feel something is not quite right.
By planning it all out you can design it and pretty much get it right as soon as you’re done with the building phase. The rule of thumb is to remove all distractions so that the audience will not leave the page via leaks. Links to related articles, polls, unrelated videos and random pictures should be left for your website. The landing page has only one function: to convert the audience on the offer.
Testing phase
One you have built the page there is typically a lot more to do before you can finally be “happy” with the outcome. You might get lucky and your first design yields a conversion rate that’s well above the industry average. However, chances are that you will not be satisfied with your landing page conversion rate and require tweaks to get it right.
A/B split testing should be implemented right away to test out different aspects of a landing page. For example, you can create two versions of a page and the only change the headline. An equal amount of the same traffic should be sent to both pages. Once there is enough data you can make a conclusion regarding which headline is more effective.
You can do this for an infinite number of landing page design elements in the pursuit of getting the best conversion rate possible. However, remember to only change one variable at a time and let the test run long enough to acquire a decent sample size. Otherwise there will be confusion and results not based on a large enough sample size.
Conclusion
We hope that by now the question of how to design a landing page is clearer, and you know what to do to get started. As long as you stick to this straightforward outline you’ll get there in the end. You’ll see that in practice unforeseen obstacles come up that you’ll need to tackle on your own.
For many new marketers learning from example makes things a lot easier. With that in mind, consider spying on your competition to see how they have implemented their landing page design. Don’t copy from competitors as that’s in bad taste, but instead use what you see for inspiration to create your own version.
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Originally published at https://landingpageschool.com on May 29, 2018.
