The keys to building a successful landing page
Conversion Optimisation, Ziller Websites
As an eCommerce web development company, we produce a lot of large scale websites for bigger clients seeking a profitable and manageable long term solution. Occasionally, we also work with a number of smaller businesses who are looking to get the most out of their online experience. This work generally entails a lot of paid-per-click marketing and landing optimisation.
If you’re not familiar with landing page optimisation, it can be summarised as a the construction of a sales driven web page that utilises a number of research-backed techniques designed to engage and entice the user into a goal or a sale.
If you’re new to the practice, you might be wondering just what best practices and techniques should be deployed in a well-performing landing page. To give you a bit more insight, we thought we’d shed some light on a recent project we completed for one of our clients, Call a Cooler:
- Domain name selection– Of course, prior to commencing this project, our AdWords experts conducted tonnes of keyword research into what Call a Cooler’s target audience was searching for as well as into the volumes of traffic behind each keyword.From a combination of isolating the keywords of the highest value, as well as the level of competition for each keyword, we matched domain availability against the keyword of highest value. If you can secure a highly relevant keyword-based domain, immediately, your landing page will perform well in organic search results straight off the bat due to the relevancy of the URL to the target search term.
- Prominence of value propositions– This one is very straight forward, but you’d be surprised at how lost in translation a value proposition can get within the clutter of a landing page design. Think about it, all you have to work with is a single web page; there’s never going to be enough room to fit all of your content, so what do you include, and how do you prioritise it?Ideally, you will want your main value propositions to sit above the fold of your landing page (600px), have a strong, captivating message and also provide the potential customer with the immediate acknowledgment of their needs/wants.
When it comes to landing page optimization, copy writing is just as imperative as the surrounding design. Without good copy, you might just have a nice looking page with abysmal substance. This isn’t going to convert well, is it?
The Call a Cooler page does an outstanding job in addressing the immediate needs of the user above the fold, as soon as the page is loaded, with a clear, prominent value proposition.
- Ease of access to convert – Once you’ve got the value proposition nailed, you need to make sure that it is virtually effortless for the potential customer to commit to the sale or goal. The positioning of forms is critical. Make sure your call to action buttons are clear and bold, and that your form fields are unobtrusive. If you’re accustomed to prettying up your input fields with custom javascript – a landing page isn’t the right place for it. The last thing you want is a hidden form field.
- Clear points of contact – Make sure that all points of contact are lucid and easy to identify. If the objective of your landing page is to get the user to call you, then make sure that your phone number is strategically placed within the natural vector paths of the user’s eye. Reinforce every value proposition with a contact form or phone number within eye range. This will help eliminate any seeds of doubt that the user may have about contacting you as well as enforce the fact that your company is approachable and genuinely wants to help, which leads me to my next point…
- Personalisation of brand – People identify with people. It’s a proven fact that customers feel much more comfortable in making first contact with someone they’ve already seen/heard of because they can emotionally identify with them. Check out the Call a Cooler page for example, within 2 seconds of landing on the page it’s already made clear that Sean is the main point of contact, and genuinely wants to help.
Landing page optimisation may seem pretty straight forward on paper, but when you put it into practice; you’ll find it to be a lot more challenging when faced with the limitations of space!
I hope that you’ve taken value from some of these tips. If you want to see a good landing page in action, be sure to visit the Call a Cooler landing page!
