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Have you ever wondered what makes a great landing page? Do you want to know how to create one? This article will teach you what you need to know to do that. Learn the best tips and practices used by experts and start building perfect landing pages that will help you convert visitors to customers!
How to Create a High-Converting Landing Page Part 1.
Tips for creating a high-converting landing page pt.2
In the previous part, you’ve learned about the first four tips to Create a High-Converting Landing Page. More specifically, you’ve learned about how to optimize headlines and subheadlines and how to use visuals. Now, let’s take a look at other tips that will help you create high-converting landing page.
Perfect the copy
Headlines, and subheadlines, are parts of the copy, the text, of your landing page, very small parts. Focusing only on headlines and subheadlines, and ignoring the rest of the text, will not work. At least not as well as it could. Meaning, you have to pay just as much attention to the rest of the text of the landing page.
It is true that people often read only the headlines and skip the text. However, this is not true when people want to learn about something before they take action. Then, people will take the time and read the text. If the copy is not compelling perfect headlines will not save you. People will not take action you want them to take.
This means that your copy must be compelling and convincing just as your headline. Actually, you might have to make it even more convincing if you make very big claims. The rule of thumb is that the bigger and stronger your claims the more convincing copy you need. So, how to make your copy compelling, and convert visitors into customers and clients?
Understand that the main role of the copy of landing page is to explain what your offer is about. It must clarify why the visitor should care about it. It must make it clear how what you offer can help them solve their problems. Your copy must convey your unique value proposition for the offer. There are rules for a great copy.
Be clear, not clever
Always prefer clarity above cleverness. Don’t try to show how clever you are, by using industry jargon. The more jargon you use the less likely it is visitors will understand it. The less they understand it the less likely it is they will take the action you want them to take. Remember, don’t make the reader feel like they need a dictionary.
Avoid jokes
Second, avoid jokes and quibbles or puns. Copy is not the best place to show your sense of humor. Although you don’t have to be dead serious, you should avoid trying to make your copy funny and engaging at all costs. Instead, focus on providing clear descriptions that are easy to understand and use language that gets to the point.
Focus on your visitors
Third, focus on your visitors. Remember that visitors of your landing page are people, not robots. Imagine that you speak with those people directly, face-to-face. In that scenario, you would probably use conversational tone. You would also probably focus on that person, rather than on trying to pitch what you are trying to offer.
Do the same with the copy of your landing page. Make your visitors the center of attention, not your offer itself. Use the copy to show empathy. Show that you understand the problem, the pain points, your visitors have. Yes, you want them to accept your offer. However, the best way to do that is by showing that what you offer will help them.
Use visitors’ imagination
An image is worth a thousand words. However, that doesn’t mean you need a real image. You can achieve similar effect using the imagination of your visitors. How? Use action words that will help your visitor imagine using your product, or service. Create a perfect and vivid picture of the future in which they accepted your offer.
Create a picture that will show how better their lives will be if they take the action. That being said, don’t overdo it. You don’t want to create some fantasy that will never happen. Stay within the boundaries of what is real, what the thing you are offering really can do. Remember, no fairy tales, no false promises and no lies.
Focus on benefits, not features
The copy of your landing page should always focus primarily on the benefits, not the features. This one of the biggest mistakes you can see on many landing pages. They often put emphasis on the features, on what the thing they promote can do. This doesn’t work. People don’t buy products, or services, because of their features. People buy benefits.
People buy things because of what these things can do for them, i.e., how these things will benefit them. Think about it. Do you want to buy a notebook because it has high-end CPU and GPU? No. You buy it because it can help you work faster, get done more things and also enjoy the latest games in without any compromises.
Do you want to buy a new set of dumbbells, or kettlebells, because they are heavier? No. You want them because the will help you build more muscle and get in shape. See? CPU, GPU, weight, these are features. Increased productivity, entertainment, more muscle, better health, these are benefits, i.e., what will you gain.
Learn from these examples. Make sure the copy of your landing page puts emphasis on benefits. Remember that your visitors are more interested in how the thing you offer can make their life better or easier, or both. This doesn’t mean you should leave out features completely. No, that would be also a mistake. Use both.
First, focus on clearly addressing the benefits. Think about your visitors and try to answer the “What’s in it for me?” question. When you have that, describe the main features of the thing you offer. This can help make your offering stand out as a more powerful alternative. It can also help visitors imagine what other benefits they may gain.
Proofread and format
Proofreading and formatting are probably the easiest best practices to follow to improve the copy of your landing page. These two task often require only very little effort. However, they can have a significant impact on how will visitors respond. Take the time and carefully lay out the headlines, images, pieces of text and other elements.
This can help you highlight the most important parts of your offering. It can make the value, the benefits, more visible. Proper formatting will also help you create better, pleasant and user-friendly experience. This, in turn, will you guide visitors from the start to the final CTA, and complete the conversion.
Lastly, copy without mistakes and with proper formatting just looks better. It gives a better impression and creates more trust. Would you buy a Rolex watch in some pawnshop on the corner? Probably not. You would at least not expect that watch to be original. Put simply, first impression matters. Your copy plays a significant role in it.
Use spellcheckers and proofreaders to check the grammar, punctuation, and also the structure of the text. Some good tools I like to use are hemingwayapp, grammarly and spellcheckplus. Choose whatever tool you like, or hire someone. Just make sure your copy is flawless before you ship your landing page.
Address customer’s pain points
One thing your landing page must do is show visitors that you understand the pain points they have. This is necessary if you want to convince the visitors to take action. Visitors will buy your product if they don’t believe it can help them solve their problems. The first thing you must do is convince them you know what their problem is.
Have you ever tried to find a solution to a problem you didn’t even know exists? Probably not. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know it exists. That would be quite a feat. In order to solve a problem, you must first find and understand the problem. Only then you can start looking for a solution. Your visitors know this.
As we discussed in, show that you understand the pain points your visitors have. Describe what you think are their problems and how these problems affect them. Be specific and go to details. Show that you really know how they feel. Convincing your visitors that you understand their problem is one of the keys to convert them to customers or clients.
Introduce the cure
Next, when you demonstrate your knowledge of their problem, explain how your offering can solve it. Just like with pain points, explain how and why the thing your landing page offers is the best solution. If convincing your visitors that you understand their problem is the first step to convert them, this is the second.
Your visitors will not take action, accept your offer, if they don’t believe it will help them. This is why you must be, again, specific and go to details. Avoid any vagueness. Don’t be afraid of being overly specific and talking/writing too much. At this point, saying more rather than less can be beneficial.
How can you distinguish expert from a layman? First, real expert can explain the subject in a simple language and so well anyone can understand it. Second, real expert can talk about the details without getting into a dead end, and didn’t know what to say. Do the same. Prove your expertise by showing the depth of your knowledge.
One thing you must remember. There is a difference between demonstrating your expertise and showing your cleverness. Communicate like a real expert. Keep the language you use simple. Avoid jargon. Use simple language anyone can understand without the need to use a dictionary. Remember, you speak to human beings so talk like one.
Add great Call to Action (CTA)
If there is one element that is crucial for landing page it is the CTA. There is no element that is as important as your call to action. In the end, the CTA is the element the rest of the content of your landing page is designed to drive attention of your visitors to. It is also CTA what has the last word, what converts visitors into customers.
So, with that in mind, it is necessary to make it perfect. This means, a couple of things. First, make it big. CTA is an element designed to be an attention magnet. So, size matters. In case of CTA, bigger is usually better. Second, use compelling label, or text. The words you often see, such as “Submit”, don’t work well.
These words are bland, emotionless, robotic. It is better to avoid them. Look for action words, words that are exciting, persuasive, with a touch of emotions, words that suggest what will be the result of the action. Third, use a button. People expect the CTA to be a button. Don’t try to change this expectation. Instead, embrace it. Stick with the button so people will know what to do when they see it.
Fourth, use a contrasting color. The truth is that no right color you should use for CTA. You can use almost any color you want and it will work … It will work as long as it is a contrasting color. Remember that CTA must stand out. So, whatever color you use on your CTA, it must be different from the color you regularly use on your landing page.
This doesn’t mean that the color of CTA should collide with the rest of your colors. No. Color palette of your landing page has to remain balanced. So, no wild guesses and crazy, LSD trip-like, combinations. Find contrasting color based on your color palette. Always consider the color of the background of the location where you put the CTA.
Since the CTA must stand out, the color of the background matters, a lot. If the CTA color is too similar to the color of the background, something needs to change. You either need to change the color of CTA, the color of the background, or the position of CTA. Otherwise, the CTA will blend with background and it will not be as effective as it could.
Bonus tip. Use visuals that will help you draw eyes of your visitors to your CTA. For example, use photos or illustrations with people looking at, or pointing to, the CTA. People are naturally drawn to human faces. If the person on the picture is looking somewhere, people tend to automatically look in the same direction. So, position your CTA where the person is looking.
Try adding some social proof to your landing page. This will help you add credibility to your offers and build more trust. The best examples of social proof are case studies and testimonials. If you have some, don’t hesitate to use them. Another way to get some social proof is tapping into the content from social media.
Look for tweets and posts from people who used your product and shared their (positive) experience. Ask these people if you can use their posts on your landing page. You may also embed it. Lastly, if you have data about how many people have already used your product, use that as well. These data are social proof as well.
Test, test, test
When you ship your landing page, don’t think about it as finished business. It is not. There is always something you can improve to increase make it work better, to increase conversions. So, think about your landing page as living experiment. Run experiments. Try different ideas, make small changes, and test their impact.
The best way to do this is by running these experiments on weekly basis, always making only one change at the time. This will help you better analyze impact of the change you made. Otherwise, one change could influence the other, either positively or negatively. As a result, it would distort the test results and you would learn nothing.
So, take one idea you want to test. Next, decide what will be the key metric you will measure to test the impact, and how will measure it. Then, decide how will you determine if the test is success or failure, what data you will need to see for both scenarios. Lastly, you should also set the minimum number of visitors for the test to be valid.
This is a must especially if you test variants of one change (A/B tests). Otherwise, you might evaluate one test as a failure and the second as success, even though the impact of both would be actually the same. What made the difference was in the number visitors, i.e., you ran one test on 200 people and the second on 800.
This A/B test would be useless, due to a big difference in number of visitors. The results of testing these variants would be incomparable. They would basically tell you nothing. So, if you want to test variants of one change (A/B tests), always set a minimum number of visitors on which you will run the test. And, that’s it.
Epilogue: Creating a high-converting landing page Pt2
Congratulations! You’ve finished the second, and last, part of this mini series. By now, you have the knowledge you need to build a great landing page. You know what practices to follow and what to avoid in order to create landing pages that work. Now, it is up to you to apply this knowledge. So, go and start building landing pages that convert!
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