If you want to be successful at selling online, you need a solid website, a strong social media presence and exceptional customer engagement. You also need a great landing page to drive sales, inform buyers and close the deal.
The quality of your landing page is critical to the success of your business, and building one in this day and age is not something you want to leave to chance. In one of our next articles, we’ll focus on the science behind landing page optimization so subscribe to our Digital Marketing Vitamins Newsletter if you want to make sure you don’t miss it. Creating a winning landing page involves more than analyzing other successful pages. If you want your landing page to be a success, you need to tailor it to the strengths of the products you sell and adapt it to the needs of your own online business. Here are five smart ways to optimize and enhance your landing page.
Create a Consistent Experience
It’s incredibly important to create a consistent experience across platforms. From your website and blog to your social media sites and landing pages, your brand and your company should be instantly recognizable.
Your customers want to know they can trust you, and creating a consistent user experience is one of the best ways to build that trust. One of the biggest mistakes online marketers make is using a different format for their landing pages, but failing to brand the page properly could send would-be buyers fleeing.
Be Clear, Concise and Engaging
Nothing is deadlier to an online business than boring the customer. Your landing page should be engaging, so visitors will want to stick around. The landing page should also be clear and concise, so visitors can see at a glance what the excitement is all about.
Your landing page should start with a compelling headline, one that will draw the casual viewer in and encourage them to read further. At the same time, the content should be concise and easily digestible, so visitors can take it all in and move on to the next part of the sales funnel.
Segment the Market
Over time, you will learn a lot about your customers, from where they live and what they buy to their hobbies and interests. That demographic information can be precious, especially when you are building and optimizing your pages.
Segmenting your landing pages experience is a great way to drive more sales, so take advantage of the information you have gathered over the years. You can create one page aimed at your female customers, another for the guys, a third for rural residents and a fourth for city dwellers. The possibilities are almost endless, so look at your data and start creating those targeted pages.
And in addition to segmenting the customer experience for demographics think about ways of segmenting your target audience by intent, by what they are trying to accomplish, the micro-moments that they are experiencing.
Remove Navigation Options
You need to have robust and easy navigation on your company homepage, but the landing page is another story altogether. Once you understand the purpose of the landing page, you will see that navigation is simply a distraction.
Your landing page is all about driving sales, and that means keeping distractions to a minimum; the ideal ones are clean, clear and concise, with plenty of information and a minimum of distractions.
Unbounce has a great 50 point checklist that can help review your online campaign landing pages.
Create a Strong Call to Action
The call to action, or CTA, should be the heart of any successful landing page. No matter how great the rest of your page is, without a strong CTA, it is unlikely to drive many sales.
The call to action should be concise, compelling and above all persuasive. It can take some time to get this vital element right, so extensive testing is definitely in order. Once you have a great CTA, you can watch your sales soar and bring in more cash for your small business.
It is not easy to build a great landing page, and optimizing it can be a real challenge. Even so, the value of the landing page is so high that getting it right will have enormous benefits. If you sell online, you need a great landing page, and once you have one, your efforts will have all been worth it.
Tools of the Trade (Bonus Tip)
There’s many good ways to create landing pages that work well for your marketing funnel. Most professional tools these days are remarkably usable and allow you to build pages by dragging elements on a canvas and seeing the results live.
If your team is fluent in WordPress, one such tool is Elementor; it one comes with a variety of templates or you can start from a blank canvas. Compared to the other tools, this one is less expensive, it doesn’t hold your hand too much and is very flexible but the trade-off is a steeper learning curve especially when it comes to integrating it within existing WordPress themes.
Other alternatives that carry more enterprise features are Unbounce and Leadpages both of which have been very successful at earning their space in the modern marketing stack with their robust implementations and flexibility. Funnily enough the 800 pound gorilla and the centerpiece of many digital campaigns, MailChimp, just came out a few days ago with their own landing page offering.
