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Landing Page Best Practices: Up Your Lead Generation Game With These Tips

Landing pages are important.

Sure, your homepage is great at greeting your customers, but it’s your product landing pages that’s going to convert them from potential customer to customer.

That’s why to boost your conversion rate, you’ve got to make sure your following landing page best practices. From a killer CTAs to compelling landing page copy – every part has to be working toward making a conversion. Any distractions and you risk having your potential customers walk away.

Are you freaking out? Sorry – didn’t mean to scare you. We just take this stuff really seriously. But you can calm down – we’re going to tell you everything you need to know to lift your landing pages from good to great.

What Should an Effective Landing Page Have?

There are certain elements that every landing page has to have if it’s going to get your target audience to convert. Without these – well, it’s just not going to be effective. These best landing page must haves will help push your potential customers down the buying funnel with ease. Cut one – and you’re cutting yourself off from sales.

Call to Action (CTA)

If you want your potential customers to do something, you have to tell them to do it. Specifically, directly, and hopefully in a way that makes them excited about the action. Without a CTA, your target audience isn’t going to know clearly what you want of them.

So yeah, obviously a good landing page needs to have a CTA button. Really, it’s the most important element of a great landing page.

You’ll see a lot of these with copy reading “Learn More” and “Read More” or “Shop Now” and those can work just fine. But the more specific and exciting you make the desired action, the better. Consider the following instead:

“Book A Consultation With the Experts”

“Buy a Delicious Cookie Basket”

“Get Ready to Rock Out With Us!”

These are much more specific, and much more exciting, than just “Read More” or “Shop Now” which is going to make your target audience much more likely to convert. See – they’re building value – which brings us to…

Value Propositions and Pain Points

Tell your customers right away what makes your product or service great. A high-converting landing page keeps the value of the offer front and center at all times. Keep their eye on why they should buy and don’t let them get distracted by anything else.

Make sure you’re keeping your visitor’s attention by addressing how your product can solve their pain points. To get this started, of course, you’ve got to develop a buyer persona – which means figuring out what kind of demographics your marketing to, who they are, where they are, what problems they’re having. Build these personas’ pain points into compelling landing page copy to reach your conversion goal.

Social Proof and Testimonials

People, especially younger generations such as Millennials and Gen Z, don’t tend to trust advertisements. You know who they do trust? Their peers. Including social proofs such as icons of trusted brands you’ve used, or testimonials and reviews from happy customers can help increase your conversion rate by a hefty 270%.

Including testimonials on your web page helps build trust in your page visitors. Case studies can also be used to help build faith in your offer and boost conversions for marketing campaigns.

Effective Landing Page Design Tricks

When it comes to designing the best landing pages, there are a few tricks you can use to boost conversions. Where you place things, the kind of landing page copy you use, all of this needs to be designed with care to make a great landing page. If you want to make sure your landing page is landing you the conversions you need, make sure to use these best practices.

Catch Your Target Audience Above the Fold

People don’t like to scroll. And they lose interest in things pretty quickly. In fact, the average internet user only pays attention to the content of the link they’ve clicked on for about 15 seconds.

This is why it’s important to come out swinging. You want to make sure to get something on the page to hook your potential customer’s attention above the fold – meaning the area before they have to scroll. This area is known as above the fold. In landing page design it’s also known as the hero section because it does the most heavy lifting in terms of lead generation.

You want a header and a call to action button above the fold, as well as a compelling value proposition. An image above the fold is also a great way to boost conversions. In fact, a great way to increase user experience and landing page conversions is to include a video.

Benefits of Using Video on Landing Pages

Videos help catch your target audience’s attention fast and can help you get more information in front of them without them having to scroll. In fact, after a/b testing, landing pages with video on them were found to have an 86% increase in conversions over those with no video.

Contrasting Colors for CTA

You want to draw your target audience’s eye to the CTA button. This means setting it apart from the landing page copy, and also using a contrasting color from the background. This will help the CTA pop and make it more likely that it will catch your customer’s eye and increase your click through rate.

Keep Forms Short

You want to create the least amount of resistance for your customers to complete your desired action. So, if your landing page is trying to capture their information – keep it short and don’t ask for too much all at once. After all, who likes giving away personal info to strangers on the internet in the first place?

Keep Load Times Low

Again – you want the least amount of friction! If your potential customers have to wait too long for pages to load, then they’re going to leave without seeing your great landing page, let alone converting. In fact, bounce rate metrics show that after 5 seconds you’ve lost 90% of your visitors. 

Compelling and Concise Landing Page Copy

The way your landing page looks is important, but more important than that is the copy. What you say is really the key to getting your customers to convert. You want to keep it concise, because too much text can lose their attention, and you want to write it in a way your target audience will relate to.

Remember, your copy should stay on target in building value and addressing pain points. Making your copy easy to skim is also really helpful – the use of headlines and bullet points can help with this.

Make Sure its Optimized for Mobile Devices

More people browse the internet and do ecommerce shopping on their phone than their computers. If your landing pages aren’t designed to scale to mobile devices, you’re losing out on a bulk of conversions.

Search Engine Landing Page Optimization

SEO is an important part of digital marketing – and it’s an important element of landing pages. Sure, if a PPC ad leads to your landing page it will have a boost in appearing at the top of the SERPs or social media pages – but ranking high organically can yield a higher ROI. Remember to include relevant keywords in your copy, especially for headings and subheadings, to help sign post customers your way.

Lift: Masters of SEO and Landing Page Best Practices

There are plenty of landing page templates and automated landing page builders out there – but they can’t produce a unique, great landing page for your unique, great offer. But we get the temptation – copywriting, designing CTAs, mastering all the landing page best practices – it’s a lot to take on when you’re already running a business.

Lucky for you, we’ve got digital marketing masterminds for hire right here – drop us a line and we can help lift your landing pages from good to absolutely great.