In addition to the basic web pages every brand’s website needs, landing pages are an important part of your online sales funnel. These are individual web pages dedicated to a single call-to-action (CTA).
CTAs seek to accomplish a wide variety of things. Often, it’s getting the visitor to contact you or to buy one of your products or services. Or, sometimes the call-to-action is for subscribing to a newsletter or blog, providing an email address and/or other personal information, booking a consultation, requesting a quote, viewing your portfolio, or some other goal you’ve established for your website.
In many cases—especially for local businesses—search engine optimized landing pages bring targeted traffic to your site via search engines, right to a page that can convert people into a sale or other accomplished goal. Also, off-site ads can be used to bring traffic directly to a highly relevant landing page, rather than your homepage where consumers aren’t as far along your sales funnel.
How to Make Compelling Landing Pages
- One landing page, one call-to-action. That’s it. Decision paralysis is not your friend.
- Don’t include site navigation or links—AKA distractions—on a landing page.
- Do include your logo so visitors who go directly to a landing page know who you are.
- Have a big, beautiful, high-quality, relevant image at the top that conveys the emotion you want.
- Then don’t make the rest of the page busy with additional images; stick to none or just a few, well spaced apart.
- Use a simple, streamlined, uncluttered design with lots of white space.
- Keep it short and scannable; brief bolded headlines and bullet lists are good.
- Create a logical flow that sells quickly with visitor-centric, benefits-oriented language.
- Repeat after us: Benefits sell, not features. Benefits sell, not features.
- And remember: Hitting major pain points and offering a fix is a compelling benefit.
- Generate interest immediately with a headline capturing a benefit or pain point.
- Reinforce it and take it further with a sub-headline that elaborates on the headline.
- Never open by talking about you or how awesome you are.
- But some peripheral social proof like displaying membership logos, awards, or an impressive social media following never hurts.
- Use words that create a sense of urgency, that trigger desired emotions, that build a feeling of camaraderie or exclusivity, or that offer reassurance.
- Conclude with the CTA; nothing after.
- Leave no question as to what you want the visitor to do next.
- The call-to-action button must stand out; make it big, give it color, and place it prominently.
- Use a short phrase that captures a benefit on the CTA button (e.g., Say goodbye to wrinkles!), rather than something generic like “Buy now” or “Click here.”
- Make sure whatever happens when visitors click the CTA, it’s exactly what you led them to expect.
- If the landing page’s purpose is to get personal information about the visitor, keep the info fields short and simple, and don’t ask for anything more than you really need.
