With landing pages continuing to grow in popularity, it can be difficult to grab people’s attention quickly and effectively. Consumers spend between 10 and 20 seconds on a given page before deciding to leave the page. As a result, you need to communicate your value proposition within 10 seconds of a customer arriving on your page.
It can be challenging to accomplish this. For organizations that sell physical goods, they need to pare down messaging and imagery to the barebones value proposition without sacrificing branding. Service-based businesses need to convey their differentiating factors quickly to entice consumers to learn more about your service is different from your competitors.
Every landing page is built with factors like attention-grabbing headlines, but there are several other elements that highly successful landing pages posses that are often overlooked. The following are a sample of 5 such factors:
1. Compelling Images
Most landing pages have some kind of image, but only the best ones have images that make the page convert better. Choosing a good background image can be difficult. Your image needs to:
- Be eye-catching: You have very little time to communicate your message. Because of this, your chosen image needs to quickly grab the attention of viewers and get them to read your sales copy. You can use an image to get potential consumers to stay on your page and even get them to fill out forms.
- Match your brand: In order to help emphasize your CTA, your image needs to enhance the overall design of your landing page by matching its colour scheme. Correctly matching your brand draws the eyes to the CTA and improves brand recognition.
- Enhances your layout: The layout of your image on your page is often overlooked. Don’t make that mistake. It can be incredibly crucial for increasing conversion rates as it can be used to draw the eye where you want it to go.
- Tell a story: Your image should help explain your business or whatever product you’re trying to sell. It should be used to reinforce the overall message instead of trying to communicate everything by itself.
You should be very careful with your image selection process. While a good picture can add a lot of conversions, a bad or mediocre one can result in significantly reduced successful conversions.
2. Flow of the landing page
The way your landing page flows is just as critical as the messaging you’re trying to convey.
Customers who are potentially interested will be engaged with the content of the landing page. They will want to read it and follow the laid out thought process. As a result, you need to lead them from the start of your messaging through to its logical conclusion.
Let’s use the example of Pixelcarve’s landing page for web design Toronto. It begins with an explanation of what they do and follows with the benefits of working with them. Once you’ve explained the selling point you should follow up with testimonials from trusted individuals or organizations and finally end with your CTA. While this layout may seem obvious, it’s extremely effective at getting consumers to go through the sales funnel in a logical way.
How you place your CTA is vital to the overall flow of your landing page. Depending on your offering, you can use multiple distinct CTAs on a single landing page by positioning each after a portion of the landing page.
Your design should clearly outline different sections. You need not be subtle about how a page is laid out. In fact, by enhancing the flow of your landing page with relevant design flow features, you can improve the process.
Successful landing pages make productive use of persuasive elements throughout. Don’t limit your sales pitch to a single section. Sales copy should be in every part of the landing page.
Long-form landing pages are highly effective. In fact, they can generate up to 220% more leads than normal CTAs. Don’t shy away from making landing pages long.
3. Testimonials & Trust
Using testimonials on a landing page is an effective way to signal to potential consumers that this is a trustworthy product. They want to understand that the product or service in question is reliable. If they see a number of trustworthy testimonials it can go a long way towards getting them to trust you.
Make use of testimonials from ordinary people. Certain brands can benefit from the use of celebrities or subject matter experts, but your customers can’t relate to these people. You’d benefit more from relevant testimonials from your target market.
A photo of a real person should accompany each testimonial. The use of images is integral to establishing trust. It’s vital to the success of your landing page that every testimony you use be enhanced by a photo.
Your featured testimonials should be specific. General statements don’t have a significant positive impact. Powerful testimonies are backed up with real statistics, information, and specific uses.
4. Ease of Use
Designing your landing page to be simple and quick to navigate limits the amount of work a potential customer has to go through on your landing page, making it quick and easy for them to convert. Some common tricks that the best landing pages use to enhance the overall user experience include:
Reducing the overall page load time – With more and more people browsing websites on their phones and other mobile devices, page load speeds are more important than ever. Over 50% of people will simply leave a website that doesn’t load within 3 seconds, so by failing to have your page load quickly you can alienate a huge portion of your audience.
Shrinking form length – By reducing the number of fields in a form, you can increase your conversion rate by huge amounts. You’ll want to test and adjust what pieces of information you want to capture in your form and how that can impact your conversion rates later down the line.
5. Careful Colour Selection
Every colour has an impact on how customers view and react to your product. Ensure that you carefully consider the impact that the right or wrong colour choice can create.
Background colour – Poorly choosing your background colour can result in lost conversions. You need to choose a colour that conveys the desired emotion. Not only that, it needs to not interfere with your text.
CTA colour – The right colour for your CTA can convince potential customers to move forward, but careless selection can result in lost conversions. Contemplate what each colour means and how end users will view them.
Let us help you by designing beautiful, highly effective landing pages. We’re an award winning digital agency located in downtown Toronto specializing in Inbound Marketing, Creative Production, and Professional Services Branding.
