• Creating a Good Landing Page

  Filed under Uncategorized
  Jul 6

  Good landing pages don’t just happen. A lot of times, I find it does take a lot of work to make a really good one, and even more often, I find that it takes time, testing and tweaking to make a great one.

  A landing page is a page, for those of you who don’t know, is a page you create for a certain campaign, such as an adwords buy or a newsletter. It is a page where you want a visitor to actually do one particular thing.

  These are some things I’ve found that seem to work for me when I create a landing page.

  First, I ask myself what I ultimately want the visitor to do when they get to the page. Do I want them to add something to a cart? Put their email address into a box and subscribe to a newsletter? Or fill out a form to request more information? The entire page will be built around the answer to this question.

  Now, a bad answer to that question is “Find our web site and look around to see what we are about.” In my mind, if you are paying to bring someone in the door, they’d better ultmately buy something or become a lead to buy something in the future. Enough said.

  OK, so you know what action you want the visitor to take. Now, ask yourself what information needs to decide to execute the action you want them to take.

  Now — and this is hard for many people — only that information should be on the page. For example, site navigation should not be on the page. Why? You have to remember that landing pages are created to be specific to one goal. They are 50/50 propositions: either the visitor will do what you want them to do or they won’t. Most of the time people who have other options to do something else — such as browse the site — don’t convert into a lead or a sale. So don’t give ‘em the choice.

  Ok, so you know what you want the visitor to do and you know what information they need to do it. Now, you are into what the page is actually going to look like. The most important element on the page is the “action” part of the page, or what you want the visitor to actually do. This element should be the brightest, clearest, most visible element on the page.

  Let’s say you want the visitor to click an ‘add to cart’ button. That means the add to cart button needs to be extremely prominent…HUGE even. All other elements should be secondary to it.

  You also want to do all you can to keep the visitor from wanting to get more information about what they need to do when they get on the landing page. If you want them to buy something, you need a good sized picture of the item so the visitor knows exactly what they are buying. Short bulletized text should completely describe the item. Remove all marketing fluff. If there needs to be a lot of text to describe the product, it’s appearance on the page should not detract from the “action” on the page — in this case the add to cart button.

  If you want the visitor to fill out a form, make sure the submit button is the most visible element on the page. Keep the form short asking only the information you need to contact the visitor later. Do you really need a fax number? Do you need a postal address if you are only going to call them on the telephone? Keep it short.

  Your thank you pages, or the pages you present to the visitor after they perform whatever action you wanted them to take. If someone added an item to the cart, you can make other suggestions for their cart, such as compatible items, BUT, don’t detract them from completing the cart process. If the visitor filled out a form, the thank you page can have links to the site, or even an 800 number if they want to talk to you right away.

  And, when in doubt, sometimes the easiest thing to do is have someone else look at the finished product. Ask them if they are inclined to perform the action the page was built for. A second pair of eyes is sometimes the simplest way to find issues you never even realized.

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