Increasing Conversion rates with Landing Pages

When you are building a marketing campaign, you are aiming to channel your followers or targeted users towards a specific outcome. Any sale involves a conversation with your user, whether through personal or digital interactions. If your ad functions as the initial greeting, you want to continue in a way that will determine the direction of the conversation. 

A considered landing page can be a great way for you to control the interactions you have and sculpt your user's journey by dictating what questions, answers and information are immediately available. 

What is a Landing Page? 

A landing page is a dedicated, stand-alone web page which will ideally sit apart from your website's normal navigation. The main purpose of this page is to give those clicking through an external source a place to ‘land’. They can be built for either use with paid advertising such as Google or social media ads, email marketing, or organic traffic from SEO.

If you consider your digital campaign in real-world terms, your landing page is almost like a direct marketing letter that your user has chosen to open and read. As such you want it to be targeted toward a specific audience and outcome.

Despite also being an entry point to your website, your landing page should differ from your home page. Whilst the home page acts as a portal to take users to other destinations on your site, a landing page is the destination and focuses on conversion.

What are the Features of a Landing Page? 

Given that the reason for your landing page is to create a specific conversion, your landing page’s design will vary depending on what it is trying to do. However, there will be common features you will want to consider when building your page, either with your developer or your web team:

• Your page should be specific. Make sure any content is focused on the objective that you are trying to achieve.

• You should have very limited navigation options available. This stops your users from getting sidetracked from the user journey you have planned for them and creates clarity for them as to what their next step should be.

It should have users with high commercial intent in mind and reflect that. If your user has clicked on an ad then chances are they are ripe for conversion. Try and minimise further steps to make sure that you keep that intent high.

Most landing pages will fall into two categories. Lead generation landing pages, or clickthrough landing pages. These can be distinguished very simply.

A lead generation landing page will have a direct form or sale to complete on that page. These are most commonly found when trying to encourage your users to give you their details through free downloads, giveaways or discounts. By using a tempting teaser you can capture email details to continue building trust between your target audience and your brand.

A clickthrough landing page will be focused around a button which will direct the user to navigate to the next action required. This button will likely take the user to a sales page, price plan or shopping cart. It may be accompanied by social proof from satisfied customers, information on the benefits of a service or product or even more in-depth technical specifications.

What are Dynamic Landing Pages?

A dynamic landing page can function in a similar way to a personalised email marketing campaign. This is where a page is coded to deliver personalised content to the user. This would look like specific images, headers or choices of words depending on the location of the user. For this reason, it can be particularly effective for travel sites or campaigns targeted locally.

A study by Jeffrey Vocell at Hubspot showed that personal calls to action (CTA) perform 202% better than standard, generic CTAs. This is a more complicated build than a standard content page and will need the support of a web developer, so it is worth considering if you want to opt for this more expensive option in order to optimise conversion rates. 

What Should I Include on my Landing Page?

As mentioned previously, the exact content of your landing page will vary depending on the specific conversion you are hoping to achieve. Digital marketing experts Semrush suggest four elements to include in the anatomy of your landing page. 

• A unique proposition
• Benefits of the offer
• A call to action (CTA) 
• Social proof

A Unique Proposition

Explain why your offer is the best and why the user should opt for you. Ideally, this proposition should be directly set out in the header. This immediately reassures your prospective customer of continuity between the ad or link they have just clicked and the landing page they have just opened. 

Benefits of the Offer

Focus on the benefits of your offer and appeal to your user emotionally. Try not to get bogged down in detail and product features. Focus on creating short persuasive copy that will tell your user how your product or service can make them feel.

Call to Action

Whether this manifests as a form or a button, this needs to be clear. The call to action is the main objective of this page and so you need to make sure that it is above the crease, (visible without scrolling) in any design. Never make your user have to work for it. They won’t and you will have wasted your money as well as created a negative impression of your brand. 

Social Proof

As social beings, we are hard-wired to believe the testimony of other people. This is just as true for making purchases as it is for other areas of life. By showing the great experience that past customers had with your brand you can instil confidence, build trust and reduce fear of risk.

Best Landing Page Practice for High Conversion Rates

Hopefully, we have given you quite a bit to think about and you are now a landing page convert when it comes to converting clicks. The main points to remember are: 

• Stick to one call to action based on one undiluted objective

• Make key directions or information clear and obvious

• Remove any unnecessary navigation

• Design for your target audience and include social proof

• The more landing pages your site has, the more leads it should generate

• Optimise your page's Core Web Vitals for better SEO

If you are excited to get started and want help in creating bespoke, branded landing pages for your website we are happy to help. Our experienced web developers and digital marketing team can work together to build a fully realised campaign to ensure continuity between your ad spend and lead conversion. Get in touch with us today!