I recently read an article by Ginny Soskey from Hubspot that listed some great landing page designs. These did all look very beautiful, cool, modern and followed best practices when it comes to landing page conversion. But it got me thinking; does beautiful design guarantee good conversions?
Ultimately the goal of landing pages is to have people complete the form to receive the offer. So surely the best measure of a landing pages success is how effectively it is converting visitors into leads.
“Good” design can be subjective
What constitutes “good” design is highly subjective, it’s one thing for your web, graphic designer, sales person or boss to like it. They might like green… but blue may convert better. Undoubtedly there are best practices in design, like using lots of white space, and things that are currently fashionable, like full width web sites, but nothing says success more than looking at the data. The cold, hard facts will tell you if a landing page is performing – or not. There’s nothing better than being armed with the facts when you need to have a conversation with a designer, developer or your boss about whether something is “working” or not. Conversion rates are not subjective
Valuable content is key
In my experience, nothing beats valuable content from a highly trusted source. One of my clients has landing pages that convert visit to lead at over 30%; some of their pages are even closer to 50%. From a design perspective, there’s nothing fancy about the pages but they work. Plus they do provide remarkable and very valuable content for their target market that need that advice to make critical investment decisions.
5 elements of high conversion landing pages
Apart from creating amazing content, there are some best practices that help to drive strong conversions.
- Remove the navigation – Landing pages must be clean and singularly focused. You should not confuse the visitor with multiple offerings or ways to move away from the offer, go and look at something else and then forget why they came to the page. By removing the navigation, there’s only one thing for the person to do.
- Keep the copy short and to the point – Make sure that you highlight the value of the offer from the visitors perspective and clearly give them a compelling reason to download. Such as “find out how XYZ can increase productivity by 60%”. You must emphasise how the offer addresses a specific problem that your target audience cares about. Bullet points are good here, also using a graphic of what they will receive helps to allay fears.
- Only ask for information that you need – The length of forms on landing pages is always an interesting discussion, as the answer is always. “It depends”. It depends on how valuable your content is to your target audience, it depends on whether you want loads of quick leads or fewer more targeted leads. Typically, the number of questions asked in the form should correlate to the value of the offer to your target audience. The more valuable the content, the more questions you can ask.
Make the questions easy to answer, by using drop boxes with pre-filled selections. This not only makes it easy for people filling out the forms, but it also means that you can better segment your data for future campaigns.
If you are a Hubspot customer, then the SmartForms feature is an awesome way of keeping your forms short by only showing visitors the fields that they haven’t previously completed. Plus you can progressively profile visitors, but asking different questions for subsequent visits, doing away with the need to have overly long forms.
Also, please, if you don’t need the information and don’t intend to use it, then don’t ask the question. If you aren’t going to call someone the first time they download content then don’t ask for a phone number. Do you really need a street address these days? If it’s for data segmentation reasons, would a state or postcode suffice? - Optimise your buttons - Use action oriented words on the buttons, such as “Grab your copy” rather than Submit. If you think about it, no one wants to “submit” to anything. Rather use words that relate to what they will be getting in return, such as “Download your eBook”, or Your free web marketing kit
- Use thank you pages - Once a visitor has completed your form, send them to a thank you page. This is where they can immediately access the offer and you also have another opportunity to show them a subsequent offer, such as another piece of relevant content, or show some of your recent blog articles to see if they’d like to subscribe to your blog. This is also where you can reintroduce the navigation elements of the site and see if you can keep the visitor engaged with you.
So while I love beautifully designed things and appreciate that good design helps with conversion rates, I don’t believe that you have to create bespoke landing pages for each offer. A very simple template landing page that enables the five elements outlined above, plus some killer content should get you on your way to converting your website visitors into leads.
