Your landing page has one job—turn visitors
into consumers.
Whether they’re becoming consumers of your
newsletter, membership, or products, it all starts with your landing page.
Convincing visitors to let you into their
inbox or pull out their wallets is hard.
In fact, the average landing page only has a 2.35% conversion rate.
So how do you set your landing page up for
success in this saturated advertising world?
Optimization.
Optimizing your landing page is the only way
that you are going to stand a chance at making the sale.
There are 4 parts of a landing page that are
going to increase your conversions: offer, form, trust, and visual hierarchy.
We cover this in-depth in our 15-Point Landing Page Audit, but here’s a brief look into how you can optimize these 4 areas of your landing page.
#1:
Offer
Your offer is the core part of your landing
page. Without a good offer, even the prettiest landing page can’t make a
visitor turn into a subscriber or buyer. When figuring out your offer, there
are 2 elements of your landing page to focus on:
HeadlineCall to action
Dollar Shave Club’s landing page has an offer for a free Starter Kit, but before introducing their offer, they have a tightly-written headline that answers a visitor’s biggest question: What does this product do for me?
Dollar Shave Club’s Starter Kit makes its
customers “look, feel and smell better,” as can be seen in their headline.
Their call to action is to get “Get Started” with a free Starter Kit.
With DSC being a well-known brand, they don’t
have to emphasize building brand awareness or social proof. What they need to
do is get brand-aware visitors to make their first purchase so that they can
increase their LTV (lifetime customer value).
Slack is just as on top of their landing page game. They know their prospects’ biggest objection to buying Slack is not having used the platform to see that it’s what they’re looking for. So, here’s what Slack did.
They created their above-the-fold content (all
content that appears before the visitor scrolls down the page) to do 2 things:
Headline: Prove to the customer that whatever work they do, their goal of seamless team communication can be done in SlackCall to action: Mitigate the risk of signing up for Slack by giving away a free trial week
#2:
Form
A form is either on the landing page, like
with Slack’s work email form, or found after clicking the call to action (this
is where Dollar Shave Club has their form).
The form is one of the most overlooked areas
of a landing page, but today, you’re going to figure out how to make your form
as user-friendly as possible, depending on your product.
Remember, asking somebody to fill out your
form is asking for their time, and if they’re about to buy a product, you’re
also asking for their money.
Forms need to be seamless and contingent upon
the offer’s perceived value.
For example, if we’re signing up Dollar Shave
Club’s free Starter Kit, we don’t want to fill out more than the bare necessities
of contact and payment information because this is a small product that is
worth under $20. Adding too many blocks for a low-tier product is asking for a
time commitment that isn’t contingent on the product’s value.
Dollar Shave Club’s first form looks like
this:
And their second looks like this:
Both forms are consistent with what consumers
are used to filling out for low-tier products.
On the other hand, for a higher-tier product adding more form blocks is actually a good thing. For example, DigitalMarketer’s Lab ELITE Membership form looks like this:
When you click on the Yes or No options for
the bottom questions, “Are you humble enough to ask for help when you need it?”
and “Are you willing to offer help to your fellow members when they ask?”, a
text block appears under each question.
These blocks are contingent upon the value of
DigitalMarketer Lab ELITE Membership. This membership isn’t for brand new
entrepreneurs; it’s for established entrepreneurs and marketing pros that are
ready to level up. There’s a lot of value in this membership, and because of
it, we need to vet who comes through the door.
Now, here’s a trick of the trade. Are you
wondering why the text blocks in DM’s Lab ELITE Membership form didn’t show up
on the initial form page?
It’s because we don’t want to overwhelm prospects. We want to ask them for more information after they’ve already put a small-time commitment in by entering contact information.
(NOTE: What grade would your landing page get? Download the FREE 15-Point Landing Page Audit to find out, and set your page up for more conversions now!)
#3:
Trust
Trust is critical to an online purchase. When
we have to count on a landing page to do the talking for us, we need to make
sure that it’s inviting, consistent, and intuitive.
Here’s
how to improve the trust factor of your landing page:
DesignRelevant Trust IconsAuthentic TestimonialsClear Privacy Policies
Design needs to be smooth and revolved around
a single idea. Don’t make the top of your landing page one color palette and
the following part another. You want visitors to feel like they are in your virtual store. Just like your entire
brick-and-mortar store would be branded for your business, your landing page needs
a consistent design flow. Make sure your fonts are consistent and your images
are authentic.
FabFitFun uses trust icons to improve their trust factor. They have trust icons for the publications that have featured their monthly subscription box in the above-the-fold content of their landing page.
Casper, a mattress company, uses a slider with happy customer testimonials. They also take it a step further by adding the customer’s name, a photo, AND their social media name. What does this do? It personalized the testimonial, making it more than a stranger’s recommendation, but a real person who you can actually connect with (if you want).
NomadList.com, a membership website for digital nomads that ranks cities by how remote-friendly they are, added a trust factor to their landing page by showing members who are “Near You” and “Traveling” on the right side widget.
How does this improve trust? It shows the
NomadList community near you and the
nomads who are doing what you do regularly as a digital nomad, traveling. What
do all of these nomads have in common? They’re members of NomadList.
These icons can be used as testimonials if
they are consistent with your landing pages content.
The last trust factor to add to your landing page is a privacy policy. With rising regulations, like GDPR, it’s crucial to make sure that you have policies displayed to your visitors. This includes a popup box explaining your website’s use of cookies and a Terms & Service document for visitors who buy a product or sign up for your newsletter.
Here’s MailChimp’s “Use of Cookies” disclosure:
#4:
Visuals
The final area of your landing page to
optimize are the visuals. We call this the Visual Hierarchy in our 15-Point
Landing Page Audit.
Did you know that visuals can guide the eye to
high priority sections of your landing page?
Sun Basket does. They designed their call to action button to land in the quiet space of the visual it overlays. See how the “Build Your Basket” button is in the middle of the 3 plates?
Their landing page guides the eye to the
highest priority section, their call to action button. Sun Basket then hits on
the second most important part of visual hierarchy: a singular theme. Notice
how the photo above and the photo below both have consistent tones?
If shown both photos, the average consumer
would likely be able to connect the two to Sun Basket. All fonts, colors,
imagery, and copy need to complement each other throughout the entire landing
page, and purchase process.
Remember: images should never compete with
your call to action, they should support it (like Sun Basket’s header photo
does).
Oatly, an oat milk company, also does a great job of creating consistency throughout their landing page. Regardless of where you are on the page, you know that you are on Oatly’s website.
Here’s Oatly’s above-the-fold content:
And here’s Oatly’s below-the-fold content:
If there’s anything you take away from this article, it should be this: your landing page’s only job is to turn visitors into consumers. If your conversion rate is under 2.35%, use these landing page optimization tips to upgrade your page and land more customers.
(NOTE: What grade would your landing page get? Download the FREE 15-Point Landing Page Audit to find out, and set your page up for more conversions now!)
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