Without a doubt, a good first impression is critical for a business. Whether they’re walking through the door or entering a site through an advertisement, you want customers to feel welcome and they want to get straight to what they came for.
All too often, people click on an ad about a specific product or service only to be sent to a home page with too much information and no guide to get them where they want. This is bad. What you really want to do is show leads exactly what they clicked on the ad for. Since we can see how leads enter the site, we can then direct them towards their interests. Make it as easy as possible to get more information about your product and then make the purchase. So how are we going to do that?
A Landing Page, of course
Simply said, the landing page is the first page potential customers land on after clicking on an advertisement, social media post, or email. A successful landing page has several core elements:
- Have a catchy headline
- Include an attractive photo or video clip that supports your product
- Write a simple, informative description of what you’re selling
- Your logo, color scheme, and badges without cluttering the page
- Include a form to collect email addresses or create accounts
- Testimonials and reviews can be useful to show that real people like your product
- Focus on a call to action and button with keywords that your customers will be interested in
It’s extremely important to keep your landing page directly tied to the ad that brought the lead to your site. For example, if the ad says, “Apply to our bachelor’s program,” your landing page to include information about the program and a call to action with a button directing your visitors to begin the application process. This means that most ads should have their own catered landing page in order to be most effective.
What not to do
This is a landing page, not an index. Don’t collect links for people to fumble through. Overloading the page with detailed or unwanted information will cause visitors to leave out of confusion or disinterest.
Avoid placing important information where people need to scroll to see it. As long as you keep them interested, they’ll keep scrolling to learn more or, even better, make a purchase through your call to action button.
The focus of the landing page is how you can help your customer, not about your business itself. Instead of describing your business, tell people what they get out of becoming your customer. Why choose what you have to sell?
Less is more
Get rid of any content that takes up space and doesn’t add anything to your site. If the page is meant to inform, do so without pesky, redundant text that just fills up space. When people enter your site looking for information, it should be there for them or extremely easy to get to, not inside a wall of text.
A way to avoid overwhelming new visitors can be to limit navigation options further. You can remove most of the buttons from the navigation bar and choose instead to only include a way to continue through the conversion process of navigating to the home page, where more options should be available.
Testing
Try new things. Move buttons around, change wording, test new images. A/B testing will help you find the most effective landing pages and analyze which techniques are most effective with your target audiences. Sometimes adding a badge works on one type of landing page, but not another. Just because it doesn’t seem obvious at first, doesn’t mean it won’t work. You might be surprised what interests people enough to click. so be creative!
Having trouble with your landing page? Need help getting people to get to the landing page? Contact us at Racer!
This post was originally published as a Racer blogpost.
This post was originally published as a Racer blogpost.