When it comes to driving business online, you have three key elements.
- Getting people to your website
- A landing page that converts
- A customer journey that encourages repeat business
In our experience working with B2C and B2B clients alike is that a great deal of attention is spent at point one, focusing on bringing people to your website. Businesses are often pretty good at point three, which concentrates on the delivery of their product or service. But there’s often not as much understanding on point two – what happens when people actually land on your web page.
In this blog post, we focus on the landing page and assume you have points one and three nailed down.
When looking at your landing pages you need to make sure you have 12 key things covered off. 12!, yes 12, let’s dive in.
1. Does It Load Quickly?
Speed kills. Online, a lack of speed kills. It does this in two ways.
Firstly, if your page takes ages to load, customers aren’t going to bother. We could prove this with a load of stats and data on attention spans, but we don’t need to, because as a web user yourself, you know how much patience you have with slow websites.
Secondly, Google understands that its users hate slow websites so it has placed page speed and performance at the heart of its latest SEO updates, also known as Core Web Vitals.
The test is whether your website loads within two seconds. If so, give yourself a pat on the back and move to point two, otherwise, you need to get it fixed.
To test your website speed, and figure out how to fix it, head over to Google page speed insights where it will give you a score for your web page and tell you what you (or your developer) need to do to get your page running faster.
2. Is It Mobile Responsive?
Your website needs to work as well on a mobile as it does on a desktop. On average 59.4% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and once again our good friends at Google have placed significant emphasis on mobile responsiveness. This means that if your web page isn’t, then;
- You’re going to be annoying (and losing) 50% of your potential customers and;
- You’ll be suffering when it comes to SEO.
To test this, load your website on your phone ( we appreciated this isn’t hugely insightful!), and check if everything is readable, clickable and easy to interact with. You can also test how it reacts to a change of screen size on your desktop.
3. Is Your Call to Action above the Fold?
If you want your customer to do something, and there’s an obvious action you’re asking them to take, then make it obvious! Place it high up on the page, nice and clear.
How high do I mean? We want it in the most appropriate place before the user has to start scrolling down the page. This could well be in the main banner area of the landing page, and if not just below that.
Make sure the wording is obvious and helpful as well. If it’s buying, make it clear it’s buying, if it’s trialling something, make that clear.
4. Do You Have a Hook That Actually Connects?
Customers don’t use logic to make purchases, they use logic to justify making purchases.
What that means is that we need to connect with our customers’ emotions. In short, what is the emotional desire and/or frustration they have which our product or service can help with.
To help identify this we like to use a formula.
When you’re thinking about the customers you would like to target, you need to really dig into what they are dissatisfied about on an emotional level. You need to help them visualise what they will have when they purchase their product and you will need to create a sense of urgency to encourage the user to take action now.
Dissatisfaction and vision are not considered the features and benefits of your product, they are problems that your customer has that you and your product address.
5. Do You Have Social Proof?
We live in a reviews economy. The reality is that as customers, we trust peers and third parties much more than we trust companies. Personally, you’re more likely to buy a new website from Digital Glue, if a peer of yours told you we did a good job for them, than from us serving you an advert in the right space and time.
What you really need to be asking yourself is: Does your product or service deliver? Does your company do what it says you do?
And the best way to showcase that is through social proof on your landing pages. That could be customer testimonials and reviews. Evidence and confirmations that other people and businesses like your target audience have purchased this product or service. Highlighting that you have helped a certain volume of customers and even press reviews of your product or service can help to illustrate this.
Third-party endorsement (social proof) significantly increases conversion rate on landing pages, with testimonials increasing conversion rates on sales pages by up to 34%.
6. Do You Have Authority or Credibility?
Building on social proof you have to make sure that your brand comes across as authoritative and/or credible. Here are a few questions to ask to determine this:
- How many years have you been in business?
- What awards have you won?
- What certifications do we have?
- What trade bodies do you belong to?
- Have you been featured in the press?
All these elements can build authority and credibility and contribute to reassuring customers that you’re a legitimate, trustworthy business.
7. Do You Know What the Customers’ Pain Is?
As mentioned in point four, understanding the customer pain or dissatisfaction that our product fixes is crucial.
Your hook, used as the main heading on our page, does this but in a positive way, also focussing on the visions.
For example: You run a website development business and you know that your customers are fed up with their website performance. They are dissatisfied because the website is slow to load, costing them SEO rankings and business. In this case, your hook might focus on: ‘super fast loading websites, propelling you up the google rankings and improving sales’.
The pain however, isn’t the slow website, it’s the poor SEO rankings, and you need to agitate that pain on your landing page. This can be done using the hook and messaging on your landing page.
For example:
“Are you suffering from keyword rankings sliding vs. your competition?”
By doing this we demonstrate understanding of our customers’ pain and can then offer solutions to help fix it.
8. Do You Have a Great Hero Image?
First impressions count. You need to make sure that the main banner of your website is a powerful and compelling hero image. It needs to grab attention, be relevant and support the messaging in your hook.
You might even like to use video, as the aim of our hero section is to grab and keep attention. Make sure that it’s full width and that the background allows for whatever text you use (your hook) to be legible.
9. Is Your Enquiry Form or Checkout as Simple as Possible?
The simple rule on enquiry forms is to ask for as little information as possible. Your business will require different things from others, but the more information you ask for, the more barriers you are placing in front of customers and the less likely they are to engage.
If you’re running an eCommerce business, there are basic levels of information you need to collect in order to execute a sale, but keeping that process as clean and simple as possible will remove friction.
When it comes to an enquiry form; requesting their name and email address, or name and phone number, is usually enough. Ask yourself, do I really need this information?
10. Do You Have External Links on Your Landing Page?
If you do, take them off.
When it comes to landing pages, they have one aim – to convert the customer. If you have external links you increase the risk of the customer leaving the page and not returning which could render your hard work on acquisition wasted.
11. Does It Look Good?
We appreciate that this is subjective, but genuinely, does it look good? If a landing page is badly designed – it will turn people off. Consider the following:
- Is it easy to read and understand?
- Is it easy to understand what to do?
- Is the design attractive?
- Are the images professional and clean?
- Is the font nicely spaced?
- Have you allowed enough space between items so they can breathe?
If you’re not sure – ask a critical friend to review it for you.
12. Have You Got a Great Thank You Page?
Finally, you’ve encouraged the customer to complete your enquiry form, or purchase your product. Success!
Make sure you don’t allow opportunity for any buyer’s remorse… create a great thank you page. What does a great thank you page look like?
It needs to include:
- A Thank You to the customer. (Duuhhh!)
- Remind the customer of what they will be getting (that benefit they are searching for)
- Let them know what’s happening next – process is reassuring
- Ask for social interactions – you can put some social links up
- Show some more testimonials
- Bring in some personality – who will be in touch, or who will be packing their product
For practical purposes, a thank you page is an easy web page for Google Analytics to track so you can see how many people reach this page.
So that’s it! 12 steps to building a landing page which converts visitors into customers.
