Landing pages are single web pages which are used as a destination for a marketing promotion or an online advertisement, with a custom designed UI to convert as many as possible visitors into leads. It could be seen as an extensions of the advertising campaign that helps to improve the effectiveness of the advertisement.
Enhancing an ad campaign with a landing page is a necessary and crucial step for generating lead contacts from your ads.
Here are 10 landing page design tips that I learnt from my 10+ years experience which could boost your conversion rates and increase your return on investment.
1. Defining the target audience
Most important thing comes first. You can build the best landing page in history, if it’s not specific for your target audience, it won’t work. So you have first to decide who is your target and define a persona, like age, interests, job or hobbies. This should determine which images and content you will use.
2. Clear and concise content
Use short titles and don’t forget to insert bullet points and short paragraphs to make your copy easy to read and digest.
3. Above the fold is crucial
You should use in the above the fold a unique and attractive design, like a good image or custom illustration that has not been seen around too much or a good animation of how your product is working. Keep in mind that this is a useful step in order to hook the user and to inspire him to scroll and read the next section.
4. Reduce friction with multi-step forms
Generally nobody likes being asked too many questions and that’s the same on a landing page form. So when you really have to ask the user to fill in many fields, do it with a multi-step form. Basically distribute the fields in multiple sections (I call them slides) in the form, with previous and next buttons and a progress bar. Remember to put the easiest fields in the first slide. Example here.
5. White and negative space
This is essential in design in general. Based on the “less is more” law, you have to let the user breathe and not overwhelm him with all the information at once. Give him space. Let him think. If he’s interested, he will scroll on the page to get more info.
6. Reduce manual entry
This goes for the form inputs. Instead of a text input, if possible, give your user the possibility to select values from a list or to check them from radio/check buttons so he could fill up easier your form.
7. Optimize for SEO
Keep in mind to use your most important keywords in the URL, header tag, H1/H2 headlines, image alt tag, image names and after publishing it make some backlinking work, like embedding the landing URL within blog posts, website pages or affiliate partners (other sites with good domain authority)
8. Fast and responsive design
People usually don’t have a lot of patience nor too much free time to wait for a website to load more than 2-3 seconds. Just make sure that the site is loading fast. Use cache plugins like WP Rocket for WordPress and test the results on Google Pagespeed.
Responsive design is already a must-have feature almost every site out there has. Make sure to optimize your landing if you want your user to have the best user experience possible also on mobile devices.
9. Thank your lead after signing up
After your lead has submitted the form, it’s a good thing thanking him with a popup message or simply forwarding him on a separate Thank you page. It’s useful first to let the lead know that the form was actually submitted, and second because doing so you could provide him links to relevant content on your main site or inform him about your cross-selling offers.
10. A/B Test your landing pages
It’s important when you have different content and you’re not sure of what’s gonna work better. Instead of showing all the content that could overwhelming your visitor, just create two versions of the landing page and enable an A/B Test using for example Google Optimize.