Insights
Best Practices for Creating a Landing Page
From a small startup to a large company. It doesn’t matter who you are or the sector you belong to. If you use landing pages as part of your digital marketing campaigns, you’re surely obsessed with one thing: improving conversion rates. Landing pages are undoubtedly the best way to turn your visitors into customers for your business, but it can sometimes be very frustrating to spend days watching those who reach your landing page leave without making any conversions and, what’s worse, watching your campaign budget slowly run out without achieving the desired objectives.
As you well know, achieving many conversions is not an easy task at all: the product, the competition, the budget, the market, the timing… there are many factors that can influence. But regardless of that, on many other occasions, landing pages have some flaws, mistakes, or simply obstacles that make it difficult for visitors to take the step we expect from them. That’s why we wanted to compile in this article what are —from our experience designing landing pages for all types of clients— the best practices for creating a landing page that have helped us throughout this time to improve conversions.
Your landing page is too scattered
Focusing your landing page on a single goal is undoubtedly the best practice to increase your conversions. It doesn’t matter if you want someone to subscribe to your newsletter, sign up for an event, request information about your product, or directly buy something from you… The important thing for your landing page to work well is to be very clear about what you want to achieve and thus put all your efforts only into that. Expecting the user who lands on a landing page to perform several different actions is a mistake, because in most cases this will generate confusion and lead them to directly not do any of them.
But the goal you set, in addition to being clear to you, must also be clear to your visitors. Those who arrive at your landing page need to understand what you offer and why they are there in the so-called above the fold —that is, the top part of the page that users will see as soon as they land on it, before doing any scrolling—. . Therefore, leave ambiguities or mysteries for another time and place.
It is also important to make it very clear what your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is, which is nothing more than a slogan that summarizes to your potential customers what your product or your business can offer that has not been offered before by someone else. Believe us when we say that without a USP your conversions will be reduced.
Your landing page has too many escape points
On your website (as on any website) your visitors can follow many different itineraries depending on their needs through sections, menus, and links. That’s why if you direct the traffic from your marketing campaigns to one of the pages on your website, it may be difficult for your visitors to focus on a single goal. Because the main difference between your web pages and your landing pages is precisely this: the absence of distractions.
A well-designed landing page should be like a dark room with a single exit at the end: the conversion
A well-designed landing page should be like a dark room with a single exit at the end: the conversion. Obviously, the user can also go back using their browser or, they can directly close your page in your face if they are not interested in what you are telling them. But if everything goes well, it’s about taking your visitors where you want without unnecessary distractions. Therefore, one of the best practices for creating a landing page is to avoid escape points and draw a clearly marked path for the user to direct them to a specific action.
Your landing page is not designed for your customers
One of the big questions that arise when designing a landing page is whether to do it thinking about a very specific audience or a more general one. Although the temptation is often to think that the larger the audience, the better the results, the truth is that the best practice for creating a landing page that converts is to always focus on the most specific audience possible. If many of the visitors who reach your landing page leave without more, it may be because you are attracting the wrong audience with your marketing campaigns. Campaigns that target very heterogeneous audiences almost always tend to have a conversion rate much lower than those focused on a specific, well-defined, and potentially interested audience.
So the best strategy is to stop and get to know your customer and their behavior, segment your campaigns, and design your landing pages based on that. Having a clear idea of who your visitors are, knowing what impulse has brought them to you, and what they expect from your product is the only way to convince them that you are the best option for what they are looking for:
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Answer all their questions: A visitor who lands on your page has a head full of questions. Having your landing page answer these questions and do so in the right order is undoubtedly one of the keys to success. Because no one is going to fill out a form to, for example, sign up for your event or request a quote without first gathering some basic information. Find out what this information is and include it on your landing page.
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Connect emotionally with your customer: Landing pages that make it clear to their visitors that they understand them and are on their side work much better. The PAS (Pain, Agitate, and Solve) is a copywriting technique that, when well used, can serve to increase the conversion of your landing pages. Most campaigns usually address both the pain and the solution, but those that also work on the emotional part and encourage their users to do something in one way or another have better results. Testimonials and ratings from other customers usually work better than data.
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Make the benefits clear: Many landing pages talk in detail about a product but completely ignore the benefits the user will get. And it’s not about saying that a product or service is the best on the market, but how that product will improve the lives of those who use it or how it would specifically solve a particular problem. Visitors who reach a landing page should not have to figure out how your product will benefit them, but it is your landing page that should expressly show them. So remember, you should not talk to your users about you, but about themselves.
As you can see, your customers should be the reference point when designing your landing page. In this regard, it will be very useful to have a buyer persona to help you get to know your customers better.In this article, we give you some clues on how to develop it.
Your landing page is boring
As with web pages or emails, landing pages are usually ‘scanned’ more than read: visitors first perform a quick recognition of the page in search of relevant content and only if they find something of interest do they go on to read the content of the page. Therefore, landing pages with little visual content, with unattractive designs, or that use large blocks of text to explain their product usually do not convert very well. It’s better to use photos, infographics, tables, graphs, illustrations…
But at a visual level, it’s not enough to use just anything. Many landing pages resort to stock images that rarely tell the same story as the text and that can hardly convey the personality and freshness that a page whose goal is conversion should have. So striving to have quality visual content will help improve your conversions.
On the other hand, building a landing page almost identical to the competition’s will not help either. Obviously, there will be elements that you find in the strategies of other companies that are working well and that you should implement, but always adapting it to your personality and adding something that differentiates you from the rest.
Your landing page is not coordinated with your campaigns
Generally, your landing pages will not rank organically. The reality is that the origin of most of their traffic will come from the specific marketing actions you carry out, whether through Adwords, advertising banners, social media posts, or . So your landing pages should always be designed in conjunction with the rest of the campaign.
Because if a user has arrived at your landing page from, for example, an advertising banner, it is because some element of it (its color scheme, the image, or the claim) has managed to catch their attention. So when they land on your landing page, they cannot find a different ‘universe’ than the one that enticed them to make the initial click, because not only will you generate confusion, but you will also waste all the previous work that your marketing action has achieved. Using the same concept, the same design elements, and the same copies will help your landing pages have more conversions.
The form on your landing page is a torment
If there is something that unites all of humanity, it is undoubtedly the hatred of web forms. However, most landing pages usually include a conversion form, whether to make a registration, leave your data, or buy a product in an online store. If your form is bad, the conversion data will also be, so one of the best practices for creating a landing page undoubtedly involves improving the usability of forms. A good form should broadly meet these 5 requirements:
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Accessibility: If the goal of your landing page is for users to fill out a form, you should ensure that this is the protagonist of the page, being visible and quickly accessible at all times. Sticky forms (which always float on the page regardless of scrolling) are a highly recommended option in these cases.
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Brevity: A good form is one that asks for the right and necessary information to achieve our goal. Never ask for more data than strictly necessary because each new field you introduce reduces the chances of conversion of your landing page a little more.
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Simplicity and clarity: If your form is not easy to fill out, no one will do it. Specify well what data you need in each field (helping yourself with labels and placeholders) and clearly differentiate the required fields from the optional ones. Put a title on each form that makes clear what it is for and reinforce this idea with the copy of the send button.
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Usability: Input and select type fields are very accessible both from the desktop view and from the mobile view. However, radio buttons and checkboxes can be somewhat more problematic in small resolutions. On the other hand, being able to advance from one field to another using the tab key facilitates navigation through the form.
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Friendliness: If it is necessary to validate the fields to verify that the information provided by the users is correct, try to do it each time a field is filled out instead of once the user has clicked on the ‘Send’ button. And try to make error messages very clear and not alarming.
Your landing page does not load quickly
If you want to get good conversion results with your landing pages, it is vitally important that your creations load quickly. A high loading time (generally more than two seconds) can have very negative effects on the results of your campaign, as generally no user waits more than that time to access content. So if this is your case, good optimization tasks can undoubtedly help you increase conversions.
Tools like Google’s Page Speed Insights are very useful for improving the dreaded loading times of your pages. However, it is advisable not to limit your optimization tests only to the time of launching your landing page, but to perform regular tests throughout the time your campaign is active.
A loading time of more than two seconds will have negative effects on the results of your landing page
On the other hand, it is also very important that your landing pages are displayed correctly in all browsers. Before launching, check that it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Internet Explorer, both in Windows and Mac environments. And of course —although we suppose that at this point in 2023 it is not necessary to say it— check that your landing page is fully responsive.
You’re not listening to what your landing page is telling you
Finally, another of the best practices for creating a landing page is to track its visits. The conversion data from a campaign are very useful for correcting errors and for applying them to others.
The vast majority of landing pages have at least one analytics tool implemented, usually Google Analytics, but there are also many other tools that can help measure how your visitors interact with the landing page, such as Hotjar or Mouse Flow.
Measuring the results of your landing page in isolation will not be of much use to you. As we have already said, landing pages are just one link in a larger chain that are your campaigns, so only by measuring the entirety of these campaigns —from the marketing actions that are bringing or not bringing traffic to the landing page to the completion of the conversion in the corresponding department— will you be able to have a clear view of its performance and draw accurate conclusions.
We hope that with these best practices for creating landing pages you will be able to improve your conversions. And if you need help, at OKB Interactive Studio we specialize in creating custom landing pages, aligned with your brand image and with a focus on conversion, so that your paid campaigns on AdWords or social networks get more leads and improve their ROI. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need us.
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