Landing pages are enormously important stages in the customer journey as they play a vital role in attracting potential customers and generating leads. They are often the last page that readers will see before they become leads – i.e. qualified prospects. This makes these pages highly valuable in the context of your overall marketing strategy.
But what does a good landing page look like? How should they be designed in order to encourage potential leads to give up valuable information?
Let us start by defining what a landing page is. Landing pages are webpages that usually require users to take some kind of action: subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing products or filling out registration forms to access downloadable content, to name a few options. Landing pages can be used very differently.
Forms
Very often, landing pages contain a form in order to create leads. The conceptual design of the form can pre-select the types of leads to be generated. For example, if you ask for information that many people willingly give (eg, name or age), you are likely to get many leads. As we all know, quantity oftentimes does not say much about quality. If you want to generate a smaller number of leads that have a real interest in whatever your have to offer, you might ask for more sensitive information such as the address or telephone number.
Usually, these forms are preceded by a teaser text briefly describing what users are supposed to do and what they get in return for sharing their data with you. These text are very important and have to be formulated the right way in order to incentivize users to complete the form.
Text and design
Additionally, the interplay of text and design is also enormously important. There are many templates for landing pages available online. It is crucial that the text fits the design and vice versa so that no important information is lost among too many visual gimmicks or the text has to be unnecessarily long because the design is overtly subtle. Once a concept has been chosen, brands should run a few tests to determine whether there is potential for optimization.
Often, publishers try to cram as much information as possible in the immediately visible part of the page because they are afraid people will lose interest if they have to scroll down. That does not have to be the case as long as the overall result is aesthetically pleasing and informative. People who are interested will also scroll down. In most cases, it is also a good idea to include call-to-action buttons. As Hubspot has found, red buttons draw more attention than green ones.
To sum it up: In order to generate leads through landing pages and online forms, text and design have to fit perfectly. However, even the most beautiful landing page is not going to generate a lot of quality leads if is has nothing of value to offer. Do not make false promises and actually create content people will enjoy and find useful.
Once the landing page is online, you can sit back and relax. Wrong! Check the page regularly and track the results. Depending on you analysis, you might have to do some fine-tuning. After all, you can always be a little more successful.
Read more: Content Marketing.