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"Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?"
Saint Jerome
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Here she comes! Your business is about to meet a new customer for the first time. Quick! Is the landing page ready?
Imagine walking into an acquaintance's home for the first time. Your mind goes into high gear, your senses flit in all directions categorizing, theorizing, sizing up the hundreds of clues about him. In about 5 seconds you've made your conclusions and begin to act and speak accordingly.
Your landing page is the front door to your "home" on the internet - make sure it's clean, purposeful, welcoming, and worth the clicker's time. It can be any page of your website where traffic is directed to complete a certain action, such as making a reservation, downloading a coupon, etc. The page you choose as your front door must have immaculate, thoughtful web design and content.
Let's take a quick audit of your landing pages.
Does Your Landing Page Content Match the Reason it Was Clicked On?
In other words, what was the clicker expecting, and is that what they found? Most home pages are a collection of different elements geared toward a curious researcher, and that's precisely why it should NOT be a landing page!
Effective landers are simple and focused on ONE thing. People who click on banners, sponsored links, emailed links, etc. know what they should see: simple access to what you offer. Don't try to make a landing page do more than it should!
Does your Landing Page Look Like the Link?
Your colors, design elements, tone, branding, and message should match. Why invite confusion by an experience that's inconsistent with the screen, button or page that led them to make the click? Could your bounces be partly because people think they have mis-clicked to someone else's landing page?
Have you said “No” to Anything Extra?
Get right to the point. This is the internet, by the way, a fast-paced realm where half a second is too long to wait. If you make me read ANYTHING before I can find the link to what I want, I'm annoyed.
On the other hand, there may be a tiny bit of instruction, or prompting needed, but please make it germane and helpful to the reason I clicked here.
Navigation elements like the normal header on your home page with its pull-down menus should go away. Same for the footer- no contact info or social media icons. Keep it super simple so there's no chance of distraction.
Did you Create Different Landing Pages for Different Visitors?
If you haven't done so already, it's time to differentiate between all the types of visits you get. Then ask "What's the best landing page for each type of traffic we get?" You have the option of multiple landing pages corresponding to each ad or link you have out there, or a single page that responds to unique features of visitor segments such as location.
One easy example of this is differentiation between gender, age, wealth or location. From smallbusiness.chron.com:
"Women are looking for an emotional, tactile experience when they shop, according to Juniper Park, an ad agency in Toronto. Men aren't looking for words like "touch" or "smile" in ad copy, but women find this approach thoughtful."
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/marketing-men-vs-women-1011.html
Have you Done a Final Clean-up?
Now that you've got a nice clean, non-distracting landing page, take it another step. A landing page visitor is already in a narrow segment of the buying process, and most likely already knows a lot about you. Now is not the time to introduce the staff, tour the factory, or get directions to headquarters. Take one more look to see if there's anything that may still distract or blur the one-thing focus.
Does your Page Tell Them What to Do?
A call to action is not a suggestion or a subtle hint. Your heading should be an unambiguous invitation, like these:
- Take the Next Step
- Contact an Agent Today
- We're Ready For You
- Get Noticed Now
- Find the Perfect Match
- Download your free guide
- Talk to an expert now
Use action verbs as much as possible. It says to the visitor, "I can't think of any reason why they would want to go elsewhere for this product or service!"
Watch for more landing page tips in a future blog. In the meantime, click on the e-book below to visit one of United Webworks’ landing pages and tell us what you think. You might as well find useful downloading it! It's FREE. Check us out for more information on web design Savannah GA.
