Tip 2: Reduce obstacles
Identifying your goal was easy. The tricky part is making sure that your goal isn’t muddied behind a dozen other distractions.
Don’t use your homepage as a landing page
Your homepage has twenty calls to action, five forms, and a picture of your grandma on it. Use a dedicated landing page with one purpose, and one purpose only.
Don’t turn your landing page into a second homepage
Let’s say you run a sporting goods store, and your landing page’s goal is getting visitors to sign up for your recently launched newsletter. While it might be tempting to throw a banner for your 15% off sale on bicycles up there, it doesn’t help visitors achieve your goal. At best, they get distracted looking at bikes and you might get a sale there — at worst, they’ll be confused and leave without doing either of those things! Now you have no newsletter sign-up, and no sale to boot.
Am I filling out a tax return?
Long forms are daunting and — most of the time — entirely unnecessary. Think of each field as one extra hurdle for visitors to jump before reaching their goal. Your job is to remove as many hurdles as possible, so you should only have visitors fill out what you absolutely must get to move them along to the next part of your sales funnel. If there’s any part of the form that can be filled out at a later date, or never, what’s it doing there?
If visitors are signing up for a newsletter, you don’t need to know their annual income.
Reduce extra links
A lot of landing pages will do away with the main navigation, offering at most a footer navigation or a clickable logo back to the homepage. The idea is to reduce the amount of choice a visitor has and keep them from navigating elsewhere on your website.
Why is mobile-responsiveness still optional?
It’s almost 2020. If your landing page isn’t built with mobile in mind, you’re losing over half of your potential leads right there.
Tip 3: Less Is More
Having paragraphs of information on the page to convince users to just fill out your dang form already sounds helpful. But that means trusting that your visitors have a longer attention span than your pet guppy. If there’s too much reading involved — especially the dreaded blocks of pure text — your visitors are going to peace out rather than read through it all.
Your landing page shouldn’t be an instruction manual. Keep your supporting copy short and sweet, in brief paragraphs or bullet points where possible. Instead of writing an essay, make sure it’s easy for visitors to identity at a glance what value your newsletter/consultation/service will give them. Quality > quantity.
Tip 4: Messaging Matters
Consistency
Your visitors clicked on either an ad or a call-to-action to get to your landing page. Make sure whatever they clicked on matches with what they see when the page loads to avoid unnecessary confusion. I’m not even talking about the obvious “I clicked on an ad for a free dog training consultation and now I’m looking at promotions for puppy food” snafus; keeping similar terminology is just as important. If you call it a newsletter in your Google ad, don’t call it an e-bulletin in your page title.
Voice
Write for your audience, in words your audience will understand. This means avoiding both sales-y buzzwords and marketing terminology, and those highly technical 15-letter words your tech team might understand but your average customer just nods to with a hazy, detached look in their eyes. Instead, use persuasive and emotional power words that make people feel, and nudge your visitors to take action.
