How to Create Great Landing Pages that Convert Visitors to Prospects

Landing page optimisation, also called conversion rate optimisation, is about getting people who arrive on your website pages to take some kind of desired action.

You’ve already spent your valuable marketing budget on driving visitors to your landing pages from Google Adwords, email newsletters, social media marketing or SEO activities, so it’s important that your campaigns don’t fail at the last hurdle.

To maximise the conversion rate of your landing page visitors, those landing pages must engage them by:

• Instantly confirming that they’ve arrived in the right place
• Quickly grabbing their attention with an offer or other message
• Satisfying their expectation so that they stay on the page – rather than ‘bouncing’ off it
• Drawing the visitor through to the next step of your conversion process so they take the desired action

The process of preparing your landing pages to convert visitors into leads or sales is called conversion rate (or landing page) optimisation.

Here are the steps to follow:

01. Define your conversion goals

What’s your landing page for? What do you want it to deliver? If you have multiple landing pages on your site, what tasks have you set?

For most companies, the goal of landing pages is to deliver more of something, such as:

• More blog or newsletter sign-ups
• More white paper PDF downloads
• More free trial applications
• More online sales
• More seminar or webinar registrations

02. Profile the visitors you are targeting

How do you know you’re attracting the right kind of traffic to your website? Are your visitors actively looking to buy? Where are they in their buying cycle?

Your landing pages need to be prepared to engage and convert different types of visitors who may:

• Know the problem they need to solve, but not the solution
• Know the solution but not the specific product or service
• Know the product or service, but not the brand or expert
• Know the brand or expert, but not the specific package

03. Be clear about what you are offering

Once you’ve got a picture of the kind of visitors you want to attract, design a landing page that will grab the attention of your website visitor and lead them down the specific path to the goal that you defined in 02 (above).

Make it consistent with your existing website design, though make it clear and informative enough to communicate your marketing campaign offer quickly.

04. Do some A/B testing

Test is a key part of your landing page optimisation because it helps you discover what works best. A/B testing involves comparing the performance of two different versions of your landing page, incorporating slightly different positioning of your offer or other features.

Once you’ve worked out which landing page and features combine to provide the best conversion rate, you can roll it out on a wider basis.