What makes a great landing page?

It is becoming increasingly common for small businesses to create a residual income through online marketing. One way to do this is to create a landing page or lead page to sell a product or service. We see many business owners who have taken the initiative to create a landing page on their website. Some of them find visitors don’t convert to sales. Others struggle to get traffic to their site in the first place. So, what makes a great landing page, and how do you make money from it?

Set your business objective

Firstly, it’s important to identify what you want to gain from the landing page; leads, or sales? To help you decide, it’s worth looking at the product or service you’re marketing. Some businesses want to sell a low-cost, instant-access item like an ebook or a short online course. A landing page is perfect for these products, and with the right customer profiling and content to match, should generate sales (and leads for the future if you capture email addresses!).

However, if you are selling a high-cost product, then you’ll need to build trust before people part with their hard-earned money. In these cases, your landing page should be focused on generating leads in the form of email addresses. You’ll need to offer something in return (a lead magnet) for that valuable email address. Many businesses opt to offer a free video or cheat sheet, which we also recommend for a quick and low-cost lead magnet.

Understand your customers

Most online marketeers will tell you that psychology is key to winning over customers. We’re no different. Some of the most successful lead pages are incredibly simple – no fancy design, minimal text, and straight to the point. So, what’s the secret? Quite simply, understanding your audience’s pain points and desires, and speaking directly to them.

Getting into the psyche of your future-customers means you know what they want, why they want it, and their barriers to a potential purchase. You can use this knowledge to grab their attention, relieve their doubts, and make an offer they simply can’t refuse. We recommend using writing techniques such as:

• A ‘How to…’ headline followed by ‘without sacrificing/losing…’
• Using personal pronouns throughout
• Asking questions of the reader
• Bullet-pointed benefits
• A story-building approach for long-form landing pages

Or, if you prefer to have someone else do the hard work for you, get a copywriter to do it! DP Marketing Communications offer both copywriting and customer profiling services. Contact us to find out more or book a free consultation.

Follow-up with your new contacts

So, you’ve built up a good email list using a landing page that speaks to your clients inner desires. What now? You need to follow up with your new contacts and persuade them to buy. But subtlety is key; your future customers want to feel valued, not like a cash-cow ripe for milking! Why not get creative and develop a character to tell a story that will resonate with your ideal client? In the first few emails, think about providing some free industry-specific advice or tips, addressing your customers’ trepidation or concerns, and presenting your business as a trustworthy authority in your sector. Once you’ve built trust with your new subscribers from your landing page, it’s time for the big call to action (CTA). It’s useful to add a sense of urgency at this point; explain numbers are limited or that a discounted price will go up.

We recommend utilising automated emails to send a sequence of emails that captures the attention of your audience. There are free platforms such as Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign that do all the hard work for you. Simply create a template, pop in your content, and schedule to send to all new contacts on your list. DP Marketing Communications are experts in email marketing; contact us today to see how we can help you design an email sequence to maximise on the leads you generate!

Test, test, test!

Sometimes, it’s surprising what will make someone click a button. Once you’ve created a basic landing page and begin to gain new contacts or customers, we recommend A/B split testing to understand what works best to capture email addresses. Believe it or not, something as simple as changing the colour of the opt-in button can increase conversions. So… tweak, test, repeat. Run each test for roughly four weeks to get a good sample, and compare the conversion rate for each page. Keep tweaking and testing until you find what works best for your audience.

Call in the landing page experts

We understand it’s a minefield out there, and no blog could possibly teach you all you need to know about creating a successful landing page or lead page. If you’d like to hand this over to the professionals, you’re in the right place. Our affordable rates mean that you can cut out all the hassle without eating into your profits. Just contact us to find out how we can help!