When a potential customer clicks on a link on the search engine result page or a pay per click advertisement, the landing page that appears can make or break your online business. If you are not careful in designing your landing page, you will lose potential buyers. How do you make your landing page relevant to what the searchers want and make it convincing for them to take an action?
By following the eight simple techniques discussed in this article, you will be able to create landing pages that produce results. So, next time before you start dipping into your pocket for a pay per click ad campaign, make sure that your landing pages are ready to make the conversion possible.
1. Create lots of landing pages and group them into two distinct groups. In fact create landing pages for each keyword you are targeting. Each landing page should be focused on one keyword only. Categorize your landing pages into two groups. One group is for people who are doing their research on a product before making a decision to buy the product and the other group is for people who are ready to buy the product.
The research related landing pages should be full of quality contents, reviews, comparison of different brands, etc. However, if the buyer is already made up her mind make it easy for her to go directly to the landing page that is ready to take orders.
2. Make your landing page simple. Simplicity rules in the web. Don't assume anything. Something that is obvious to you, is not so obvious to your visitors. Your visitors are busy. They don't have time to figure it out. If they can't find what they are looking for, they will leave instantly.
Every landing page should serve one and one purpose only. Determine the purpose of the landing page, design it accordingly. Make it simple to navigate. Use heading and subheadings to increase the effectiveness of your contents. Use bold texts, colors, and larger fonts to highlight the benefits of your products. Use bulleted items and white spaces to make your contents easy to read.
Hire a professional to design the page. Web page design has changed considerable over the years. Just because you know HTML tags, it does not mean you can design a good page. Get your copy proof read by others for spelling and grammatical mistakes. You can hire a professional by participating in various web masters' forums.
3. Only obtain the most relevant information from visitors. If you are collecting leads by offering free reports or product demo, get only the names and email addresses of your visitors. Don't ask for their grand ma's last name. Make it quick for the visitors before they decide to bail out and leave your site and never come back again.
Once you establish yourself as a trusted online business, you can collect more information for refining your marketing strategy. Even if you are a trusted name, for new users only collect information that you absolutely need for follow ups.
4. Have plenty of calls to action. A call to action is a must for every landing page. You want users to do some thing once they start scanning your content. Don't let users think "what next?" You want users to "Try it Now", "Try it Free", "Download Instantly", "Click Here For a Free Sample", etc.
Whatever is the call to action, you should have it in multiple places on the landing page because people don't read the entire page. They scan the page and read contents that are of particular interest to them. When they are reading the content, they should have the call to action in the vicinity.
5. Use multimedia strategically. Besides texts, pictures, videos and sounds are becoming popular in landing pages. Don't start playing music as soon as a visitor lands on you page. Let the users control their experience. Use relevant pictures only. A pictures that is not related to your landing page is a distraction.
If you are using videos for product demo, you can create separate YouTube channels for all your videos and embed those videos in your landing pages. Don't just drop video files in your web server and put links to the files.
6. Make your landing page trustworthy and secured. Every landing page should have links to contact information, terms of service and a privacy disclosure. Provide multiple ways to contact you. Use at least email, instant messages, and twitter for communication channels. If possible, also provide a phone number.
You privacy policy should clearly state what you are going to do and not going to do with the information you collect from your visitors and how you are using cookies that you place on the users computers. Use secured socket layers (SSL) for all credit card transactions and use an SSL logo as a reminder to visitors that your site is secured.
7. Provide feedback to your visitors after they respond to your call to action. After you have successfully converted a lead, take your visitors to a confirmation page. List every thing they expect to receive because of their action.
Provide links for downloading your products. Thank them for their action. At this stage you can ask for more information about them. You can ask them to participate in surveys, read your blog posts or subscribe to you newsletter for more information related to the product they just purchased.
8. Test different version of your landing page using Google Website Optimizer. The optimizer is a free tool you can use to test the effectiveness of different landing page designs and contents. You can try different combination of contents to find out a design that converts the most. As you increase the conversion rate, you also improve visitor satisfaction and convert your one time visitors to repeat visitors.
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