The Anatomy of a High-Converting Landing Page

Does your landing page suffer from a low conversion rate? It’s disheartening when you invest your time, energy and resources into designing a landing page, only to discover that visitors aren’t actually purchasing your product or service. That’s why today we’re going to outline the key components to a high-converting landing page.

What Is a Landing Page?

Just in case you’re not entirely sure what we mean by a landing page, from a marketing standpoint, the term refers to a page that’s sole purpose is to capture visitors’ contact information, usually by providing a simple form such as name and email address. You site may have multiple pages and some may even have forms to capture visitor data, but may also include other information and a lot of navigation links. Visitors generally arrive on a landing page by clicking a link from another website or social media site. Landing pages usually provide some kind of offer to entice visitors to complete the contact form, a free download of something or a discount code, etc.

Call-to-Action Above the Fold

When it comes to landing pages, the placement of your call-to-action (CTA) can make a world of difference in your conversion rate. If visitors are forced to scroll to the bottom of a page just to see the CTA, few (if any) will be taking action. So, how do you rectify this problem? The golden rule of designing a landing page is to place the CTA above the fold. Whether it’s a red “CLICK HERE TO ORDER” button or a basic text link, make sure visitors can see it without having to scroll. This alone can boost your conversion rates by 50% or more.

Keep Navigation Links to a Minimum

Why should you keep the navigation links on your landing page to a minimum? Normally, the presence of navigation links adds value to a website, guiding visitors to the appropriate content for which they are searching. But with landing pages, it creates “exits,” allowing visitors to leave the site or page without taking action. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should avoid using navigation links on your landing page, but you should keep them to a minimum so it doesn’t have a negative impact on your conversion rates.

The Right Colors

Don’t underestimate the importance of using the right colors on your landing page. According to the online marketing experts at KISSMetrics, red denotes a sense of urgency to buy, which is probably why so many businesses — both local and online — use it in their marketing campaigns. You should take advantage of this psychological effect by using red in your landing page. A red CTA set against a white background, for instance, creates an eye-catching combination that’s almost certain to improve your conversions.

Split Testing

If you aren’t split testing two or more landing pages simultaneously, you are missing out on one of the easiest and most effective ways to increase your conversion rates. You can analyze every element within your landing page, optimizing them to boost sales, but sometimes it’s the smaller/lesser-known elements that hold the greatest influence over conversions. This is why it’s a good idea to split test at least two landing pages simultaneously, replacing the under-performing page with a new one after gathering adequate data.

Fast Load Times

Of course, you should also consider load times when designing your landing page. Conventional wisdom should lead you to believe that long load times will negatively affect your conversions. You can speed up your site by following some simple steps, such as consolidating CSS into a single file, reducing the number of plugins/add-ons, enabling browser caching, ensuring image file sizes are small, and using a reputable web hosting service.

Did we leave anything out? Let us know in the comments section below!