development of a landing page

Important Elements of any Landing Page

A good landing page can boost your campaign sales or signups by up to 10 times. But what are landing pages and how do they differ from general web pages? A landing page is a special type of web page where the focus is on one action such as a signup or sale of a specific product, they are often paired with search and social media advertisements. While general web pages are more about encouraging exploration and offering diverse information.

So, what makes a good landing page? Let’s have a look at the top elements you need to have.

Headline

Your headline is the first thing a user is likely to read when going through your landing page. As such you need to make sure you have a compelling one. How does one craft a good headline? You are in luck, there are already some pre-established formulas that are known to work well. Have a look at the list of 5 proven conversion-boosting headline formulas:

  • TestimonialKhan Academy’s Testimonial Headline
  • Cliffhanger
  • Value Proposition
  • Listicle
  • How-To

The type of headline that works well for you depends on what you are trying to sell. Personal products, for example, can be more receptive to a testimonial headline. Each type of headline has its perks, try out different variations with A/B testing and optimize for conversion.

Make sure to keep your headlines short and simple, easy to comprehend, and remember. If need be, businesses can also use a sub-heading to elaborate a bit more about what is being offered.

Clear-cut Visual or Video

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, a video even more. The visuals are what will help grab attention and offer more context quickly. This is a major part of your landing page and has to work in sync with your heading. The heading and your primary visual need to go hand in hand to land an impactful first impression.

Google's landing page visual
Google’s landing page visual

If you decide to use a video, make sure it’s professional – it must have a good resolution & audio. If you don’t have the budget to invest in a good video you might be better off with an image. You can be creative and blend with the type of heading. For example, a photo of a person benefiting from your product goes well with a testimonial heading.

Good Content

Provide rich, useful content, so long as it is relevant. Good, confident content inspires trust. Don’t bore the visitor by talking too much about yourself. Tell them what you or your product does for them. Help them picture what makes you or your product something they need to get.

Features & Benefits

Adding to good content, a features & benefits list can be quite powerful. Tell your customers the things they get and their benefits in a sentence each. This also helps direct visualization of all the problems the visitor will overcome should they buy your product or service.

Social Proof

According to a report from Nielsen, 70% of people will trust a review from someone they’ve never even met. Social proof is your best friend when it comes to building credibility. Reviews, testimonials, badges, certificates, customer images, case studies, and company logos are all quite effective tools.

lyft cases
Lyft’s use of case studies as social proof

To make sure your social proof is effective, you must keep in mind that all not social proof is equal. It’s ideal if the social proof comes from the type of audience that you are marketing to and the source is credible.

Single Call to Action

A confused customer is less likely to take any action. If you present too many choices you might be losing quite a few sales. One of our jobs as a designer is to reduce the cognitive load. The more you “direct”, the easier things are and the more likely a user will be to do it. The best bet is to use a single call to action, the one goal of your landing page. You can further optimize your CTA buttons by offering a context-based label.

You can further optimize your CTAs by optimizing your forms. Ask for the bare minimum information you need, and minimize the number of clicks needed. The more fields you ask visitors to fill out in your form, the less chance you have of them completing your offer. People dread long tasks.

Page Speed

While not truly an “element”, page speed is one of the most important aspects of a landing page. Nothing on the page matters if your customers leave cause your page took too long to load. We recommend utilizing static assets where possible as those generally can be easily cached and served faster. Use lazy-loading and compressed images.

Tools like PageSpeed Insights can help you get an idea of what can be changed for faster load times on your existing pages. You should aim around the 90s.

Policies

Adding links to your policies can help clear additional doubts a user might have. It also helps establish the terms between both parties.

Here are some policy pages you can link to on your landing page:

  • Terms & Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Refund Policy
  • Warranty Policy
  • Disclosures

Conclusion

We hope the above has been insightful & will help you create landing pages that convert. If you’d like us to help you build one feel free to reach out.