Your landing pages are the last mile of your digital funnel. 

Once your customer lands on these pages, “making or breaking” a sale often depends on a small detail. It could be the layout of the page, its color palette, its images, its testimonials. 

There’s a subtle art to designing landing pages with high conversion, but with so many details to look after, it can be hard to know what you can do, that can make a difference in your customer’s experience.

At the end of the day, there are 6 main ingredients that comprise a great landing page and in this post, we’re going to shortlist them, so that you can identify what you can do to create better landing pages or to understand which ones may require a little tweaking. 

With no further ado, let’s dive into the topic.

#1 A Clear Headline That Answers Your Customer Problem

The starting point of your optimization journey should be your headline. 

What we need to remember when creating a headline for a landing page, is that the communication approach is different from the headline of a top-of-the-funnel content piece. 

In a top-of-the-funnel article, the goal of a headline is to get the reader to read the first paragraph of your post, or watch the first few seconds of a video. This is because your readers have low purchase intent and as a result, what you want to do is build familiarity and awareness by providing helpful and informative content.

When creating a headline or for your landing page, your title needs to answer your customers’ problems. Customers have high purchase intent and are ready to buy.

However, we need to take into account that – as discussed by Jobs to Be Done Theory – customers don’t buy products, they buy solutions. 

Unless you are providing a solution to a specific problem your customer is facing it will be very hard to make a sale.

This is why we can quickly realize that different products and value propositions will require different landing pages, each focused on the unique benefits you are able to provide. 

As a result, to draft a great headline, you need to know what your customers will be using your products for, and that is not always simple to find out. 

Next, let’s think about images.

#2 A Powerful Image

A powerful image is better than 1,000 words. 

But what image to display? 

Well, again if you’re displaying too many pictures of the product, that’s what you’ll be selling: the product. That’s ok, but what if the product has some social or emotional value? 

In this case, the picture of the product is not enough. A concept to keep in mind to help you choose the right imagery is the concept of “customer success”. 

As we discussed a few paragraphs above, customers buy products to solve problems. If the products they buy are able to fix their issue, they are successful in their goal of overcoming a challenge. 

In the use of imagery, you can think of what pictures are able to embody this customer’s success and use them to help your users visualize themselves achieving their goals. 

Images are rich sources of information and one picture can connect to many elements of your value proposition. If you’re selling shoes for instance a picture can deliver status distinction, comfort, high-quality craftsmanship, and lifestyle all at once. 

#3 A Clear And Exhaustive Sub description

Now that with your headline and image you’ve been able to capture your user’s attention, it can be helpful to provide some additional information on the product. 

This is where you’ll create a sub-description that provides additional detail and specifications on the product so that the customer will not have to look for that information elsewhere and leave the page.  

It’s important to take into account that customers may be still uncertain about their decision to purchase, and that’s why in landing pages, copywriters often use sub-descriptions to address customers’ hesitations and overcome common objections that may impact the customer’s resolve to buy. 

A sub-description is a thought paragraph to write as it needs to provide a lot of information, while still embodying the voice of the product and the voice of the brand. 

#4 Testimonials and Social Media Links

Great! At this point, you have crafted a compelling headline and have put together a wonderful image and product description, you’re almost done. 

Now you need to insert social validation or proof that you are delivering the value you are promising. And here lies a challenge.

It could be argued that everything that is on the landing page until now is “owned media” or content that is directly managed by a company that has every interest to make a product look good. 

The thing is that customers today want to experience what is called a “Zero Moment of Truth” and can’t simply trust commercial communications. 

What this means is that a customer wants to access other customers’ experiences to test the brand’s promise before even deciding to buy. 

This is why you want to provide access to this third-party information by reporting customer reviews and by providing access to social media profiles. 

Social media is considered an “arena” where people provide very unfiltered and unbiased opinions about their shopping experiences, and because of this social media feedback has a strong influence over customers’ desire to buy.

This is yet another reason why looking after your social media profiles can bring unexpected benefits when it comes to the “last mile” of your marketing funnel.

#5 A Clear Call To Action, But Not Too Sales-Focused

Last but not least you want to check your call to action buttons. A “CTA” in short is the button that your customers click to progress in their shopping. 

It could be an “Add To Cart” button or a “Buy Now” button that allows your customer to proceed to checkout.

There are a couple of things to take into account when it comes to creating strong CTAs. 

The first thing is that you want to make sure that they are positioned in a part of the page which is easily noticeable from the customer’s view. 

Usually, CTAs are located in the lower right corner of the page. 

Moreover, you want to make sure the button color stands out in comparison with the colors of the rest of the page. 

Green is an example of a color that is highly noticeable and pops out of the page. 

Great, now that we’ve touched upon all 5 areas of advice, it’s time to move towards our conclusive remarks.

Conclusions

There you have it! In this post, we’ve looked at 5 different elements that can make a big difference in your landing page conversion rate. 

It’s important to know that landing page optimization requires a detail-oriented approach and every small change can contribute to increasing or decreasing your conversion rate. 

This is why it’s often a good idea to test your pages with A/B testing and heatmaps to make sure your users are responding to your changes. 

If you’d like to learn more about landing page optimization, here’s a book we recommend looking into Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.

Moreover, don’t hesitate to explore our blog, where we provide a wealth of material on digital marketing and sales.

If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!