How to Create a Landing Page that Converts

Our clients often ask “How do we improve conversions?”. Some might respond: add a button here, or change the text there, or shift this content around. While some of these changes might help, oftentimes, the real improvements come from being able to address your customers’ concerns before they voice them.

Quick note: landing pages can mean either the page where a visitor first lands on your website, or for marketing purposes, it can also mean a page that was created for a campaign and may be separate from the main website. The following is our approach to the latter, creating landing pages for marketing purposes.

It seems like an obvious thing to do, but before you can start designing the landing page, you must set a specific goal for this page, and ideally it should be limited to 1 goal (no more than 2!). This reduces distractions for your customers, who nowadays have very small attention spans and many reasons to leave your page.

Some questions you’ll want to figure out at this point are:

• Is this page primarily for lead generation? Is it for brand awareness? Is it to sell a specific product? Or to introduce a group of products?
• How long will this page be up?

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to determine your audience. This is important because you want to identify the context of where your audience is coming from so you can properly address their concerns in a relevant way. Some of the questions you’ll want answers to are:

• Are they new customers who have never seen your product or brand?
• Are they returning visitors who have purchased or not purchased?
• Where will they be coming from? What platform? What device?

This step is often overlooked earlier in the process. It’s important to decide what platform your landing page will live on because understanding the limitations and the options of each platform will give you the ability to design around each limitation, while still addressing customers’ needs. There are numerous options you can go with, but ultimately what you decide depends largely on your developer resources, how long the page will be up, whether you require the ability to sell products, how mobile-friendly this page needs to be, etc.

Once you have an understanding of what the purpose of your page is, start outlining the content like you would an essay. The general rule of thumb is: the lower the content is on the page, the less traffic it will receive. This is why it’s important to keep the most impactful information at the top of the page. The best way to go about it is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and understand their concerns in order of priority. Generally, you’d need to answer the following questions:

Once you have a rough idea of what your landing page content entails, then it’s finally time to start designing your page. How to design your page depends a lot on context, but here are some general guidelines to keep in mind:

This one goes without saying, but it’s good to remember that most of the traffic that goes to landing pages comes from mobile ads these days. This is why you want to make sure that your landing page is mobile friendly so you can make a good first impression.

There are a lot of services out there today that will let you create landing pages for marketing purposes without needing to learn how to code. These services do come with limitations, however for most purposes they work well enough. Here are a few key tips you’ll want to keep in mind when you build your page:

Once you launch your landing page, let it run for a good amount of time to gather performance data. You’ll then be able to review performance and see what learnings you can gain from your audience. Then it’s time to iterate on your current page to see how you can keep improving it! The truth is, a great performing landing page is the result of constant iterations and learnings.