How to Land the Perfect Landing Page

It seems like a lot of companies are missing the point of click through traffic. They think that once they direct prospects to their site that their work is done. This is just not true. The journey of turning those prospects into loyal customers has just begun.

Let’s start with the definition of a landing page according to the Hubspot Academy, a page to convert unknown site visitor’s into known leads. Hubspot stresses this definition because many companies tend to get distracted and forget the real goal of the landing page, to convert visitors into leads! Hubspot says that your landing pages are sales reps that work 24/7. This is your opportunity to gather information from your visitors in exchange for something that is of value to them. For example, a mountain gear site may offer you a free e-book on mountaineering if you enter your name and email or a yoga studio site may offer you a free class in exchange for your name, email and address. These are examples of exchanges that benefit both you and your site visitors. These exchanges will build your customer and lead base. Don’t waste earned clicks with a stale homepage. Use the clicks to learn more about your prospects and win them over.

The Headline

You want the headline of your landing page to be attention-grabbing, simple and bold. To emphasize your headline further you want to eliminate any extra clutter such as noisy ads, unnecessary copy and messy site design. In an e-book by Copyblogger, authors state the most important factor to an affective headline is to make sure it refers directly back to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click. Nobody likes to click on a link and then be redirected to a page that has nothing to do with the link. Tricking the customer is the last thing you want to do. You want to have different landing pages for different customers with different headlines. Your site traffic is full of unique individual visitors. Just like your unique visitors you want your landing pages and headlines to be unique to the visitor. You want to make sure that your headline relates back to your conversion goal. If your headline does not relate to your goal you may be missing out on leads. A lot of your traffic may not read more than the headline so you want to make sure that it is to the point and memorable. Lastly, make sure to assume nothing, and test everything. A/B testing your landing pages is a great way to make sure you are getting the most out of your headline.

The Content

Since impressions don’t pay the bills, what you put into your landing pages is very important to your company. You want to make sure that your content is working towards your goal, not against it. This means that any extra content that does not relate to your conversion processshould be cut from the page as not to distract or take away from the conversion. You should always insert the most important information at the beginning and end of the page and always have a call-to-action in place. You want to tailor your messages to the customer and make sure not to talk to everyone the same way because different things appeal to different people. Be sure that your exchange offer is strong enough to convert the unknown visitors into known visitors. Above, is an example of an affective landing page I found from this blog . The site offers healthy recipes, meal planning tools, and grocery deals near you. This site keeps the landing page simple with a clear call to action. There are visuals and an incentive to draw the consumer in.

Measuring Success

Referencing back to the e-book by Copyblogger, there are 3 key metrics that you need to know in order to measure the success of your landing pages. The first metric is a conversion rate. A conversion rate is the percentage of page visitors that results in a lead, sale, or another desired outcome. For a site focused on sales, a 1-2 percent conversion rate is around average and for a site focused on lead conversion, a 5-6 percent conversion rate is seen as average. So how do you go about tracking a conversion rate? That boils down to your analytics package. Your site provider may offer some analytics tools or you can use an outside analytics provider to assist you.

Next, you should track how many visitors actually stay on your site, or how many leave shortly after arrival. This is known as the home-page abandonment rate or the bounce rate. It is the rate of visitors that leave after entering  your site without clicking on anything. This rate may not be of any use to a blog page because a blog can be read without clicking on anything else but the link to get there in the first place.

The last key metric is the cost per sale. This is measured by dividing your advertising costs by the amount of sales generated by these costs. This is important because you want to make sure that your marketing efforts are effective.

Now that you have learned how to land the perfect landing page, you must remember that the process is never over! In order to keep your site fresh and competitive you must commit the time to constantly analyze and optimize your landing pages.