If you started a business that relies on a strong online marketing strategy, you’ll likely see your fair share of landing pages. You can make separate landing pages for different types of customers. You can make a new landing page for every marketing campaign you start. Different landing pages for visitors from different channels are also common.
A landing page is a conversion-oriented web page, and as such, it’s an asset that’s too important to be left to someone who isn’t very proficient in making them. But even people who are well aware that web design professionals can do a better job of creating a good landing page then they would still want to have their opinions heard. So if you’re about to head into a new landing page creation cycle, here are some tips about the things you might discuss with your web designer and actually improve your landing page’s performance.
Let’s Do More With Less
Minimalist design for landing pages isn’t a web design trend for no reason. Landing pages have to balance effective copy, visual elements, social proof, a form with a call to action, statements, lists of benefits, and closers. Of course, you can throw in as many other elements as you want, but there’s a good argument why you only need to include the elements you absolutely have to.
Everything that doesn’t support the page’s goal of getting the visitor to click the call to action button or fill out the form is a distraction. Having too many colors on a landing page is a distraction. Using too many different fonts is a distraction. If it’s not done well, video can be a distraction, and it can decrease the loading speed of your landing page which will decrease its conversion rate.
Is It Time to Deploy the Long-Form Landing Page?
The fact that more is less doesn’t mean that you have to scrap long-form landing pages altogether. In fact, a long form landing page can still benefit from all the appeal of minimalist web design, and still, have everything you need it to have.
And why would you want to have a long-form landing page? In some cases, visitors will need more convincing and assurance than a short-form page could offer. Think of it this way, would you be interested in having elective surgery done by a practice you’ve found online by visiting their very short landing page? Probably not. Surgery is important and it warrants a deeper dive into the matter, even on a landing page. Expensive, complicated, or important products and services tend to do better with long-form landing pages.
Real Testimonials Written by Real People
You can have the testimonials for your landing page written by a copywriter, and then slap a stock photo of a pleasant-looking person next to it, and have all the social proof you’ll ever need. Or, you could get social proof the right way.
If you dig a bit deeper into the psychology behind lead generation, you’ll find something that’s called implicit egotism, a concept that proposes that we gravitate towards people and things that resemble us or we can identify with. In that case, your social proof should originate from a person that resembles your target audience. If your ideal customer is a stay-at-home parent, get testimonials from stay-at-home parents. If you sell software to small business owners, get testimonials from small business owners. If you’re aiming at several different groups of consumers, create several different landing pages.
You can also take a different route and use expert, or even celebrity testimonials. Either way, everything is better than a made-up testimonial from a non-existing person.
Balancing Between Segmentation and Conversion Rates
If your landing page has a form — and a lot of them do — the one question you’ll be asking yourself over and over again is how many form fields are too many. The numbers say that shorter forms tend to perform better. And it makes perfect sense because you can’t expect the people who land on your landing page to have the time to fill out elaborate questionnaires. You need to keep your forms short and sweet if you don’t want their length to interfere with your conversion rates.
On the other hand, the more information about your customers you have, the better you can segment and target them. From that standing point, it makes sense to have longer forms because they will let you ask the questions you need. So it really comes to a choice between higher conversion rates and more information about your customers. The choice is completely yours, but remember that you can always put some form fields as optional, and let the customers decide for themselves how much information they want to give.
