5 Essential Landing Page Tactics 04.20.18

The landing page is often described as the “Holy Grail” of lead generation efforts - the secret sauce that converts people who visit your website into paying customers.

What exactly is a landing page?

While some people define a landing page as “a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective,” many others like to broaden that definition to include a website’s main page and even product/service pages. None of these definitions help, however, if you aren’t aware of the main objective of a landing page, which is to enable you to collect a visitor's information through a lead-capture form, or other acquisition and conversion tactics.

It’s not enough just to set up a good-looking landing page. If you want to get more qualified leads, boost your website’s conversion rates, and cut through the challenges of high bounce rates, you need to have landing pages that are more than just easy on the eyes - they need to generate more positive ROI.

Here are 5 tactics for creating landing pages that actually convert.

Be Specific About Your Target Personas

If your product/service caters to different sets of audiences and benefits them differently, it’s best to segment your value propositions and explain what benefits each target group will derive from taking the action you want them to take. For instance, a company that sells software solutions to individual customers as well as to enterprises can make a better case for their product by listing benefits specific to each buyer type.

Offer Quick Info

With a proclivity towards ‘scanning’ rather than reading and an attention span less than that of a goldfish, today’s online users look for quick bites of information. Your landing page should list the benefits and call-to-actions very clearly and succinctly, allowing the visitors to digest what you’re offering, what difference it can make to their lives, and ultimately, helping them make smart decisions, faster. It really pays to remember that anything that’s not covered in a few short paragraphs and crisp bullets is probably not even being read.

Place Your Calls-To-Action Strategically

We’ve seen many landing pages performing poorly due to ineffective call-to-action (CTA) buttons. While there are no rules set in stone when it comes to the right (or wrong) placement of CTA, there’s a fair chance of losing a customer’s interest if your CTA buttons appear at the wrong time, in the wrong place. For example, a CTA that arrives too late in your landing page content is at a risk of getting ignored because your visitors may only scan through the ‘meat’ of your content, not bothering to read right till the end. In contrast, if your CTA is too early, the visitor may not be ready to take action.

Because of this, it’s often safer to include multiple CTAs - at the beginning, middle, and the end of the page. Also, if at any point in your landing page, you redirect your visitors to some other page on your website, remember to place a CTA there as well.

Track Everything

It’s best to custom tag each CTA link as this will help you track which ones are the most used. Knowing what elicits the desired response from your visitors can help you make your next landing pages that much more effective. For a landing page that takes visitors through multiple stages such as a survey, shopping cart, or registration form, tracking user actions can reveal which factors hinder or bolster your conversion rates. You can work on those to improve the effectiveness of your landing page tactics.

Test Everything

A/B testing or split testing is an important (yet often overlooked) step in creating landing pages. From stagnated conversions to higher bounce rates, split testing can remedy any factor that may be pulling down your landing page’s performance. Plus, with testing, you can implement advanced landing page techniques and strategies in better ways. Will video work better than a regular sales pitch? Does adding an image with your form impact opt-ins? Can trust logos, such as transaction-safe or hacking-safe logos and social proof/guarantees convert or distract potential customers? Split testing can help take your landing page game to the next level.