Use This Checklist to Create the Perfect Landing Page

Think of the landing page as the glue that holds your online marketing machine together. Let’s say you commissioned a pay-per-click campaign on Google and Facebook. You paid $1,000 to generate 200 clicks for your keyboard business. Everything’s going fine and dandy until you notice that very few clicks actually convert. Users visit your website only to hit the back button after they realize this isn’t what they’re looking for.

What gives? You know you design your PPC campaign after doing lots of keyword and market research – so why aren’t users converting? The answer may have to do with your landing page. Most landing pages provide an experience that doesn’t align with user expectations.

While there is no specific blueprint for creating the ‘perfect landing page’, there are certain basic things that we can optimize to maximize our chances of conversion.

To save you the research, we’ve taken the liberty to round up the 6 most important things you can do to improve your landing page.

The Landing Page Should be Designed for the Offer

Research shows that landing pages are more likely to convert if they provide a clear narrative for your customers to follow. This means there must be a correlation between your advertisement campaign and the landing page linked to the ad. Users often fail to see the correlation between standardized landing pages and advertisements. This often happens if you link up your home page to your ad campaign.

For instance, if you are advertising a keyboard with Cherry MX blue switches, then your landing page should be specifically designed for that keyboard instead of a generic home page containing information about computer peripherals.

Bonus points if you can remove navigation to other parts of your website. The trick is to focus exclusively on your landing page so that it converts. You can link the landing page to the rest of your website by connecting it to the home page. That should allow users curious about your website to continue learning more about you.

It helps to think of your landing page as a checkout desk. There is no need to make it look showy and glamorous.

Optimize the Copy of Your Landing Page

Creating effective copy is an integral component of a great landing page.

The first step is to create an outline and decide what you want to focus on. List the offer you have on your landing page and make sure that it clearly communicates with your potential customer.

This requires knowledge of both your audience and your product to write a powerful copy. A landing page designer often consider all three stages of the buyer’s journey when designing and writing a copy. For instance, a user who is learning about your product from a Facebook ad is different than one who learns about it through a Google search.

We recommend creating separate landing pages for traffic from Google and for users coming in from Instagram. This allows you to tailor the copy using appropriate language for both events.

For instance, a good intro sentence for an ad on Facebook might be:

Take your productivity up a notch with our tactile mechanical keyboards, now 30% off when you bundle a Razer mouse.

Discuss the Benefits and the Solution

Users are more than happy to part with their money if you can convince them that your product or service will solve their pain point.

This is why your landing page should list out the advantages and solutions of your product or service.

Make sure to be as clear and concise as possible. Remember, you’re not writing a thesis paper, so try not to fill up your page with buzzwords and jargon. According to Unbounce, adding more words on a landing page reduces its conversion rate.

When writing the landing page, try to empathize with the target audience’s journey and think from their perspective. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is my audience’s pain point?
  • What is my product hoping to solve?
  • How will the product improve my customer’s work or life if they end up buying it?

Your landing page should contain an answer to these questions. Then you can follow up with your CTA.

Create a Convincing Call to Action for Your Landing Page

The words you use in your CTA and its button can have a massive impact on conversion rates. This is the culmination of your marketing efforts as the user submits information or proceeds to the payment page.

As a general rule of thumb, each landing page should only have one CTA indicated with a large button. This isn’t to say that two or the CTAs aren’t effective, they’re just more ‘wordy’ and can distract audiences.

However, you can cleverly integrate multiple CTAs into your landing page with great results.

For instance, you can set up a common problem that users may have. Discuss a list of pain points they may have, and then introduce your product or service with a CTA.

Explain how your product solves their pain point and then delve deeper into features. If possible, show social proof and testimonials about how your product has worked for other people. Testimonials are best reserved for the bottom of the page.  

Don’t Ask For Too Much Information on Your Form

Most users will be using a mobile phone to browse through your website. As such, they’re probably not in the mood to write down detailed information about their life. This is why your forms should only request information that is required. In some cases, it can be as simple as the customer’s email address, name, and other non-invasive details.

Don’t try to collect sensitive information because it will be too off-putting to users. Try to make the process as simple as possible.

Optimize the Design of the Landing Page

The design, framework, and imagery of your landing page will affect how users feel about your company, product, or service.

You can take cues from your competitors for design optimization as well as A/B testing if you have sufficient data. From our experience, you should test and optimize the imagery, value proposition, CTA, form, and header of your landing pages.

Once your ad campaigns are running, track the success and failure of each landing page through tags (learn about them here) and make appropriate changes.

Wrapping Up

That’s about it, 6 simple things you can do right now to create a more effective landing page. Our recommendation is to always keep things simple and focus on making the experience as fluid as possible for customers. You’ll need the right tools to create an optimized landing page and if you’re not sure how to proceed, you can get in touch with a landing page design service to help you out.