5 Best Practices for Effective Landing Pages
Your landing page is the first interaction many consumers will have with your brand. This can be from an ad they see online, a link in an email, or an organically linked post on their newsfeed. Once clicked, they can either stay on the site and explore, possibly leading to a sale, or not like what they see and click off. It can most times be linked to ineffective landing page design. But how do you make an effective landing page that leads to a higher conversion rate? Read on to find out!
If you are struggling with low conversion rates or think your website needs some sprucing up, Elemental Plans has got you covered! Web design services are just one of many great services that we offer our clientele. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the services page of our website, or contact us with any questions.
Back to the meat and potatoes of this article, how to create effective landing pages that will bring customers in and turn them into conversions!
1. Continuity
This is one of the most obvious practices for a landing page. If your advertisement is depicting a summer blow-out sale on women’s clothing and it takes consumers to just the home page of your website, that may be confusing or frustrating to them. With convenience being a top need for consumers, they don’t want to feel inconvenienced by having to navigate to the sale page and will immediately click off.
The subject of your ad needs to be the direct link you want consumers to go to. If they expect to find the sale items and the link they click on doesn’t take them to what the ad depicts, it may turn customers off. It’s best to pique the consumer's interest and provide them with what they are expecting to find.
Design and aesthetics are also huge between an ad and its landing page. If an ad has a completely different aesthetic than your website, it may also put customers off. Make sure colors always match and use wording you would normally use.
2. Use Clear Copy
Nothing turns a customer off more than bad grammar. It projects the idea that you are not professional. Making sure that the copy also makes sense and is relevant to the industry you are in is important. You want the words to resonate with your audience, creating a relationship with them. Don’t use words you wouldn’t normally use and know your audience and what they gravitate towards.
Many companies contract out to get copy for their landing pages. There are specific people out there that do copywriting for a living and can get you the copy that will result in higher conversions. This can also be dangerous if you don’t use the same copywriter. Be careful that all copy is similar and seems like it was written by the same person. Making sure you and your freelancer understand the overall brand is very important when contracting out for work.
3. Update Continuously
Another obvious practice is updating the page regularly. While this may seem obvious to some, there are countless websites that lack the proper updates to keep consumers in the loop. Maybe an employee no longer works there, or your return policy has changed. Either way, documenting that update is key in keeping consumers happy with not only your customer service, by the company as a whole. If consumers are on a site that hasn’t been updated since 2019, it may turn them off from purchasing from you.
This can also tie into blogs as well. If you have a blog landing page, are you regularly posting blogs? Creating engaging content for viewers is also a huge part of keeping consumers on your website longer, improving your chances of getting a conversion.
4. Design for the Device
With online shopping being made easy by smartphones, many companies have switched over to mobile user-friendly options. Whether that be designing your website to fit properly on a mobile device or even creating your own app to use, this is the wave of the future. Making sure to check what your website looks like on different devices is a good way to gauge how different consumers will view your brand. Is it well put together and thought out? Does it not work at all?
Many websites designing software give you the ability to check how the layout would look on a mobile device and some even let you customize both computer and mobile device layouts.
5. User Friendly
This can go hand in hand with designing for the devices. You want your landing page to be easy to navigate and use. There are a multitude of ways to make your landing page more user-friendly, such as:
Fewer words- some brands opt for the navigation bar that customers can click on to expand their options. Showing less wording ensures the customer isn’t overwhelmed at first glance.
Buttons in the right spot - Is your navigation bar on the right or the left? Is the call-to-action button where the consumer can easily click on?
Links are correct - Make sure that you pay attention to anything you are linking to. If they click on a link and it doesn’t work, frustration ensues.
These were just five small ways to create an effective landing page. There are plenty more and so much to learn about high-conversion landing pages. If you would like assistance, reach out to us! We are more than happy to help.
Sources
HubSpot Blog, “The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages”. Christina Perricone, June 6, 2021, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-best-practices, Accessed February 21, 2023
Unbounce, “Landing Page Best Practices”, Unbounce, https://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/landing-page-best-practices/, Accessed February 20, 2023