Key elements to ensure your landing page is successful

Landing pages supplement and can even replace personal interactions with your prospects. When done effectively, these pages plug directly into your marketing funnel to provide 24/7 prospect conversions. 

Each landing page is a key aspect of your funnel and should be targeted towards a specific campaign, directly focused on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and filtered through the lens of a targeted user persona. To be successful, these pages need to include certain elements that will excite your prospects and drive conversions. While there are popular recipes and common practices, we’ll focus here on the key elements that ensure success:

1. Compelling offer
2. Deliver value
3. Require investment
4. Social proof
5. One clear call to action

1. Compelling Offer

The landing page must deliver on the initial promise of your promotional content at the top of the funnel. If it was an ad, there may have been a “get this”, or if the prospect was drilling into longer-form content, they will want to know more or may be ready to make the purchase. The expression and delivery of that value must be first and foremost as most people are quite effective at sniffing out bait-and-switch tactics that promise and never deliver.

Your offer should be short, meaningful, and invoke emotion. It also gets the largest font on the page. To be compelling, your offer must solve a problem by leveraging these elements

• Urgent – the prospect feels compelled to take immediate action due to their level of discomfort
• Pervasive – the problem is widespread, persistent, and unavoidable
• Actionable – the prospect is so unsettled they are willing to pay for a solution today.

2. Deliver Value

Your offered value must be genuinely valuable, providing a solution for a real problem that is bothering your prospects. You will need to draw a line from their problem to the solution you’re providing. If you make your prospects work too hard to fill their needs, they will abandon you for someone else who seems easier. Additionally, the offer should feel exclusive, time-bound, or personalized in a way that promotes action and heightens the experience. Harnessing a sense of urgency allows you to drive your prospects through your funnel with improved confidence, higher conversion rates, and greater customer satisfaction.

Delivering value does not require you to start with your highest ticket item, discount your prices, or give away your secrets. While you may infer that some of that is happening, you only need to deliver value that matches the investment you’re asking from the prospect. See the section on Require Investment and carefully select an offer on a commensurate, but compelling offer. What you deliver is an excellent candidate for A|B testing.

Common examples of deliverable value include:

• Signing up for a free webinar
• Watching a free video
• Downloading an ebook
• Receiving a free gift
• Gaining access to free software

3. Require Investment

Requiring an action from your prospects introduces healthy friction into your funnel that saves time by filtering out low-quality prospects early on. Deep in their minds, every good prospect innately understands that nothing valuable is free.

Qualifies leads: Prospects who are willing to provide information or take action are generally more qualified and thus more likely to convert into paying customers. By asking for an investment on their part, you can allocate your limited time and resources to higher-quality prospects.

Builds trust: Prospects who are willing to invest their time have a higher expectation of the value you offer. Asking for something in return for value delivery allows you to position your business as a trusted and experienced service provider.

Examples of prospect investment include:

• Prompting for a prospect’s contact information
• Asking the prospect to schedule a call
• Requesting a time commitment (e.g. trial period, warranty, program length)
• Requiring payment for a product or service

4. Social Proof

Don’t require your prospects to take only your word for the success of your offered solutions. By leveraging the voices of partners and past customers, you can build confidence that leads to conversion. This is one of the easiest ways to provide compelling offers because it is based on real-world experiences that are easy for the prospect to project onto their situation. Here are some examples of social proof that you should include on your landing page:

• Google reviews
• Testimonials
• Use cases
• Joint statements

5. One Clear Call to Action

One common mistake in marketing content is to attempt to appeal to every type of customer and all of their objections, all at the same time in a vain attempt to “cover everything” needed for a sale. In a carefully designed marketing funnel, each landing page is targeted for a specific scenario, allowing you to focus on excelling at just one line of communication. Just one call to action (CTA) is the keystone of that communication and is very much the singular focus on the page. Although it can be accompanied by subtext and explanation, the call to action—typically a button—should always be an obvious, visible, active verb.

In planning your calls to action, consider how you’ll answer this question, “what one thing do I want them to do?” There is a direct-language line between the promotional content, the expression of the offer, and the CTA. It should be the single most productive thing you can ask of your prospect to deliver the solution to their problem.

Examples of clear calls to action are:

• Buy now
• Schedule an appointment
• Register today

A Practical Note on Jakob’s Law

Although you need to develop a customer journey that works for your market and your solution, the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” holds particular weight in landing page design. Rather than pursuing radical innovation, often the most effective approach is to leverage tried-and-true design solutions. Remember, striving for perfection can sometimes hinder progress. Overly complex or unique designs can alienate users who are accustomed to familiar patterns.

Jakob’s Law underscores the importance of adhering to established online conventions. Coined by renowned UX expert Jakob Nielsen, the law posits that users are creatures of habit. They spend most of their time on other websites and apps, developing expectations about how interfaces should function. Start by aligning your landing page with these familiar patterns to create a more intuitive and user-friendly experience, and then make testable improvements from there.

Conclusion

Developing your first landing page may feel overwhelming! But I hope that by understanding these key elements you can start with a draft that includes the most important aspects. With practice (yes, design several!) and by analyzing other landing pages you see, you will improve your ability to convert prospects with effective landing pages.

I will also recommend that you periodically take time to rethink your existing landing pages. There will always be opportunities to test, target, and improve. However, beware of the impulse to constantly change your messaging in a way that can’t be measured! When you have ideas for improvement, create an A|B test to measure your old design against your new design to ensure you don’t haphazardly lose effective messaging! You’ve got this! Now get out there and make it happen!