Creating a landing page is easy. Creating a high converting landing page that persuades a one-time visitor to become a lifetime customer, on the other hand, takes some serious work. But good news: I’m about to provide you with a basic framework to help guide you through the process. So, if you’re ready to craft the best converting landing pages your industry has to offer, keep reading! What We’ll Cover:

• Gather All of Your Customer’s Pain Points
• Make Sure You Have the Best Offer
• Address Price and Value
• Make Sure Your Page is Visually Appealing and Creditable
• Optimize Your Page for Mobile and Desktop
• Run Targeted Ads at the Page and Test the Images, Copy, and Design
• Install Heat Maps and Content Analytics
• Match Ad Creative to the Landing Page Creative

Gather All of Your Customer’s Pain Points

Your customers likely have a wide range of pain points. Some may be obvious, with users voicing their frustrations loudly on social media, while others are dormant, and require a little more prompting in order to find out how they really feel. That’s why it’s a good idea to be direct and ask your customers exactly what they like and dislike about your products and/or services. This can be achieved by sending out an email, hosting an online survey, or making personal phone calls. Your support staff will also have some insights into what site visitors need to know before (and after) they become a client. Landing page best practices demand that you must clearly define what’s at stake and what your customers will gain by choosing your brand. Consider the landing page below from MuckRack. Their headline is a rotating question that not only spurs curiosity but also addresses their customer’s pain points. The subheader also provides more context, clarifying what the platform does.

Make Sure You Have the Best Offer

Did you know that most landing pages have a conversion rate of less than 10%? Yikes. In order to stand out from your competitors and maximize the potential for conversion, you really need to think about your offer. Are you selling a specific product? Are you providing a discount or coupon? Maybe you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? On that note, if you present an irresistible offer in the form of email capture, you can easily nurture a lead into a sale. By entering their email address, the prospect can convert without ever having to leave the page. And once you’ve successfully captured their email, you can set up an email automation sequence that is timely, personalized, and when done correctly, will drive revenue to your business. Exit-intent pop-ups are also a great way to get visitors to stick around. For one, they target users who have already shown interest in your brand. It also gives you the opportunity to come up with an offer that’s unique from everything else on your page.

Address Price and Value

The price and value of your products and/or services need to align and most importantly, make sense to the customer. While it may be tempting to use action-oriented words in your call to action like “Start,” “Click,” or “Discover,” value-focused copy will end up helping you more in the long run. It not only emphasizes what users will get from taking action, but will strengthen the promise of your landing page’s overall message. So instead of using something like “Read More” or “Subscribe Now,” opt for a call to action that reinforces the benefit of working with you, especially in regards to price and value. Here are some examples:

• Increase my Conversions by 200%
• Buy Now and Get 50% Off
• Limited Time Offer: Get Your Free Ebook
• Get 15% Off for Life
• Subscribe and Save 30% for 3 Months

DIVE DEEPER: What is a Call to Action? 18 Best Call to Action Examples

Make Sure Your Page is Visually Appealing and Creditable

Most likely, you will create high converting landing pages with the goal of attracting new traffic to your site. But keep in mind that new visitors may not be familiar with your brand and are still on the fence about engaging with you. This is your chance to include key information that will add credibility to your business. This includes customer testimonials, partnerships, expert quotes, and publication features. You also want to make sure the design elements on your page all work towards the conversion objective—from the text fonts to the color scheme. Eye-catching images can help convey your message more effectively, depending on what you’re offering. Companies like Slack have mastered the art of landing page design. In this example, the image is bright, engaging, and relevant to the corresponding copy. It also manages to utilize the company’s brand colors, reinforcing a strong visual connection to Slack.

Optimize Your Page for Mobile and Desktop

When it comes to how to create a landing page, building a mobile version is no longer just a useful addition, it’s a necessity. Although mobile web traffic accounts for 54.8% of global web traffic, only 50% of landing pages are actually optimized for mobile. And unfortunately, this translates to a smaller screen and limited interactivity. To prevent your visitors from having a negative experience with your site, it’s best to design a landing page that adapts to smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. You need to make it easy for layouts to be shifted, calls to action to be made more visible, and images to be resized or removed entirely. And since mobile screens don’t have room for several columns, a single-column layout is the best way to go.  This means that the copy should be short and concise, using bullet points to highlight key points, and only including images when it’s absolutely necessary as they take up a lot of space. Essentially, if you have anything that can contribute to a slower load time, remove it.

Run Targeted Ads at the Page and Test the Images, Copy, and Design

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again—if you want to create high converting landing pages, you have to test, test, and re-test. It’s the only way to truly find out what works for you and your target audience. Anything from minor updates to sweeping overhauls could have a major impact on your landing page conversion rates. Think a red call to action button might convert better than a green one? Test it. Looking to replace your hero image? Test it. Have a more compelling headline in mind? You get the picture. Before fully committing to an idea, you can run targeted ads for different landing pages.  When you run targeted ads in a silo, it allows you to control the traffic more and reach your audience based on location, demographics, psychographics, and various other factors. That way, you can further refine your landing pages over time and ensure that you’re getting the best performance out of both your traffic and your advertising dollars.

Install Heat Maps and Content Analytics

Instead of spending a ton of time figuring out why your landing page conversion rates are low, there are plenty of content analytics tools you can use to help you make sense of and consequently resolve any issues that arise. Heat maps, for instance, are a powerful way to understand how users are interacting with your landing page once they get there—where they’re clicking, how far down they scroll, what they’re looking at or ignoring, etc. Using a warm-to-cool color spectrum, heat maps show you which parts of your landing page are receiving the most attention. The color represents how many clicks they get with blue being the fewest and red being the most.

DIVE DEEPER:  How to Use Heatmapping to Increase Landing Page Conversions

In this example from HotJar, you can see most of the user action is concentrated towards the top of the page where the search bar is. This visualization of data makes it much easier to identify low-click areas and come up with new ways to optimize them.

Match Ad Creative to the Landing Page Creative

How many times have you downloaded a whitepaper or an eBook from a company website only to question why you’re still getting emails from them weeks later? Maybe it’s because each time you’re exposed to the brand, there’s no message consistency or visual continuity. It’s a well-established principle that digital ads are much more likely to drive conversions when paired with corresponding landing pages. This helps the consumer understand how the ad they came from relates to the landing page they’re on now. Remember—a high converting landing page should supplement the information that was in the ad to ensure a seamless customer journey.

Wrapping Up

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to building a high converting landing page. Each one has a different audience, a different product or service to showcase, and a different call to action to drive. You can get the most out of your efforts by keeping these tips top of mind and refreshing your landing pages as web trends and business needs change.   About the author:

John Lincoln (MBA) is CEO of Ignite Visibility (a 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 Inc. 5000 company) a highly sought-after digital marketing strategist, industry speaker and author of two books, \"The Forecaster Method\" and \"Digital Influencer.\" Over the course of his career, Lincoln has worked with over 1,000 online businesses ranging from small startups to amazing clients such as Office Depot, Tony Robbins, Morgan Stanley, Fox, USA Today, COX and The Knot World Wide. John Lincoln is the editor of the Ignite Visibility blog. While he is a contributor, he does not write all of the articles and in many cases he is supported to ensure timely content.