‘You never get a second chance to make a first impression.’
It is worth bearing this little old nugget of wisdom in mind when you bring visitors and prospective customers to your website. We will talk more about the type of impression you want to make later, but first, we’ll look at rule 1 of website sales:
Always start off by sending your prospect to a specialised landing page.
Don’t just drop people on your organisation’s home page, unless it has been designed to sell and function as a landing page. If you’ve advertised a particular product or service to someone, don’t link them to your offerings page and expect them to find their way. Even specific sales pages can be wrong if they don’t have the sales talk and visuals to push the prospect over the line. The best way to begin a website sales process is with a dedicated landing page. If you’re wondering how to create one of those, simply read on to find out…
what is a landing page?
Landing pages are pages of your website that are specially designed to welcome a specific type of prospect or visitor to your site, often from a particular sales funnel or marketing campaign. They are designed solely to maximise the chances of your prospect making a purchase, starting a subscription or taking an action you define. They are especially useful in the lead-up to Christmas, as people make more impulsive purchases than at other times of the year.
how to design an effective landing page
To boost the chances of sales, subscriptions and other actions, it’s important to make your landing page:
- Make it attractive
- Keep it simple
- Grab attention…
- … Then gradually move on to the explanation
- Attention-grabbing
- Gradually increasing explanation
- Calls to one action and one offering
- Good reasons for taking that action
1. Make it attractive
These pages are your prospect’s first impression of your site and often their first impression of your company. Remember, you don’t get a second chance…
Include
- Bright colours, on your brand, but on the exciting side of it.
- Big, bright headers
2. Keep it simple
Keep it simple. That means every part of it.
Include
- Easy language links directly to high conversion rates in most cases.
- Short, obvious headers – This goes well with the big, obvious requirement.
- Short sentences and paragraphs
- Clear calls to action
3. Grab attention
You need to grab attention before you start pushing or selling.
To really grab your audience’s attention you need to know them and speak to their wants, needs and knowledge concisely.
Include
- Bold colours,
- attractive, easily processed images
- Short, sharp headers
We keep talking about headers because they are central to how our brains process and evaluate text. Our brains create pyramids of textual data, with big, simple obvious text at the top. If they can analyse it quickly and find it valuable, they move on to the smaller, longer text. If they get right down to the longest, most in-depth stuff, you may well have a conversion. This is why your landing page needs …
4. Then gradually move on to explanation
Once you have the audience’s attention, you can start pushing your offering. This is a gradual shift from grabbing their attention, via. engaging them using the text pyramids, to explaining why they want your offering.
Include (in order)
- What they can get from you, from their perspective – “Quench your thirst.” not “We make a lovely drink”
- Why they want it – Tell them how it benefits them or solves their problems. “Are you thirsty? Do you want something tasty, healthy and refreshing? Drink our orange juice.”
- Explain your offering and why they should opt for it, not a competitor. “Our juice is made from the finest Valencian oranges, imported fresh to the UK and used exclusively in our drink.”
- Descriptive images, infographics and videos – Everyone prefers different media, and you want to get through to everyone.
Again, you need to speak to your audience’s current desires and knowledge, this takes knowledge and continuation of your sales funnel, ads and marketing…
5. Sync the page with its feeder funnel or campaign
Landing pages are almost always a part of a sales funnel or a tool in a marketing campaign. To function well, they need to be synchronised seamlessly to the tools that lead to them.
Include
- An introduction that continues the message of the ads, social media or marketing campaign that brought your audience to your page.
- Tags, pixels, triggers etc. to send data to your ads provider, where relevant.
- The right information, targeted at the right audience – For this, you need to know your funnel – below.
Know your funnel
You need to know the audience you are bringing to your landing page. Who are you advertising to and who are you filtering out?
For example, if you’re using Google Ads to advertise to people who have been searching for good accountants a lot, you can assume your audience already has knowledge of and probably desire for accountancy services. That means you don’t have to convince them that they need accountants. Just focus on telling them why yours is the best. Alternatively, if your landing page is being fed from your social media, you know your audience probably likes and is familiar with your business. Then, you just need to get them to take the next step…
6. Calls to one action and one offering (and no other links)
You have got the prospects to the end of your sales funnel. Don’t invite them to click away now!
You’re focusing on your one preferred action, clicking a link or filling a form to get, one offer or one subscription. That means no social links, no menu bar at the top of the page and no standard website links, only essential legal links like the privacy policy. This way you maximise the chance of the user taking your preferred course of action.
Include
- Calls to action (CTAs) throughout the page, after each major selling point or just over one screen apart for scrollers.
- A variety of CTAs, including buttons, links, linked images, forms and live chat. More types have been shown to equal more conversions.
- A final CTA at the bottom – Make it big, obvious, final and unavoidable (unless they close the page).
7. Good reasons for taking that action
You should have already given your prospects some reasons to accept your offer if you have been following these tips, but you need to cram in as many as reasonably possible.
Include
- Reviews, testimonials and case studies.
- Offers and sales
- Good, old-fashioned persuasion.
types of landing page and how they’re unique
While all landing pages bear some similarity, there are many unique types with overlaps and grey areas between them. Here is a list of some of the most common and effective.
sales landing pages
The simplest landing page: A page that sells a service or product directly and immediately.
subscription pages
These are like sales pages, but with the obvious difference that they’re offering a subscription. Less obviously, subscriptions can be given away for free to create a group of potential customers. This changes the page strategy and follow-up.
click-through pages
A call-to-action page that forms a gateway to another where the action is performed. These use buttons or links. They convert best for most industries because the conversion is more gradual and therefore less taxing for the user.
squeeze page
A page designed to gain contact information in order to make an offer, or offers at a future date. Although click-through pages have higher conversion rates, squeeze page conversions can be worth more because they allow their owners to gain a warm prospect and market to them indefinitely.
lead generation page
Here, you’re looking to secure a lead to be converted in future via other methods. This goes well with the squeeze page.
home page – A popular mistake!
A home page is the most popular landing page, and the least effective. A 2018 study showed 76% of landing pages were homepages. This is not the way to go though: Home pages do not convert well unless they are designed as landing pages first and homepages second.
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