If you’re spending a tonne of budget driving traffic to your website and struggling to deliver the downloads/sign-ups/registrations you hoped for, this article is for you. We’ll demonstrate how optimal landing page design drives customer action, supporting your marketing goals.
And if you take nothing else away from this article, remember: Never Start A Marketing Campaign Without A Dedicated Landing page
What we’ll cover:
- Landing page: a definition
- Landing page types
- Long vs short landing pages
- Well-designed landing pages
- The psychology of colour
- Benefit-driven content
- Where NOT to send campaign traffic
- Matched design: why it increases conversions
- Conversion tracking
Landing page: a definition
A landing page is a dedicated webpage with a single objective: to close a deal. It’s the foundation of a successful digital marketing campaign.
According to Unbouce “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic”.
This separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting and testing simpler.
Landing page types
There are two types of landing page; lead generation and click-through.
Lead generation landing pages
The primary objective of a lead generation landing page is to get the contact details of your target audience, so you can follow-up with them later. Usually with sales or marketing content.
To get site visitors to relinquish their contact details, you’ll need to offer something in return. Something of [perceived] value greater than their contact details. This is called your Lead magnet.
Possible Lead magnets include:
- Access to exclusive content
- A webinar with a Key Opinion Leader (KOL)
- A presentation or report
- Infographics or graphical abstracts
- Symposium recordings (video or audio)
- Competition to win a car (JOKE!!!)
If you’re a pharmaceutical or healthcare marketer, your Lead magnet must be compliant with industry regulations. So too the language used to describe the value exchange.
But whatever your offer, offer something of high perceived value.
Click-through landing pages
Click-through pages are designed to ‘warm up’ your audience and generally used as the middleman between your ad and desired target page. These pages provide enough information about the value of your product/service before pushing your audience further down the funnel.
For example, if you are a healthcare publisher and you want to direct your audience to research specific blog articles, instead of creating multiple off-page ads/URLs create a click-through page that introduces your content and the benefits along with clear call-to-action buttons to direct the visitor to the various content pieces.
Long vs short landing pages
In short [forgive the pun] both work.
If you’re offering low risk activity [e.g. to download, subscribe or view] a short landing page may be all you need.
Where the perceived risk is perhaps a little higher [e.g. to buy, trial or sample] you’re likely to need longer landing pages, providing more detail on the benefits and features you’re offering.
If you’re not sure which to use, test them both! Conversion rates will tell you all you need to know.
Well-designed landing pages
It takes 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website. First impressions count.
Make sure your audience – healthcare professionals [HCPs] and consumers – have a positive first impression of your site.
Successful landing pages aren’t just about having a straightforward objective and message, they’re about providing a clear and visually appealing journey for users.
Every aspect of the landing page must be considered: from font size, colour and graphics to the positioning of your calls to action [CTAs] and how well pages are optimised for different devices.
Recommendation use relevant images, videos and graphics that support your landing page objectives. 40% of people respond better to visual information than text. It provides a more positive user experience.
Anatomy of a perfect landing page
The psychology of colour
It’ll come as no surprise that colour is an essential aspect of a landing page design. If done correctly it will increase on-site conversions significantly.
Don’t go overboard with too many colours and, if using background colours, be sure not distract attention away from your primary objective: lead generation or click through.
CTA colour is key
You must convince and inspire HCPs, consumers and patients to take action on your website i.e. click your CTA button. But how?! Make your CTAs STAND OUT! Use a contrasting colour from the rest of the page.
Furthermore, test your colours. Create two identical landing pages and test a different coloured CTA button on each by driving similar volumes of traffic to both pages.
Benefit-driven content
As per classic marketing communications, start all your on-page communications with service or product benefits, followed by features. Not the other way around.
Consider the key challenges your customers are trying to address by visiting your site and ranking these in priority order.
From these, create a bulleted list. This makes the benefits and features super-easy for site visitors to understand.
That’s it.
Where NOT to send campaign traffic
Your homepage.
Do not drive traffic to your homepage. Ever. Your homepage likely contains various sections, services and links. What’s your customer to do? Where should they click next?
I don’t know and neither do they!
Think about all those links on your page as ‘leaks’. Each link that doesn’t represent your conversion goal is a distraction that will dilute your message and reduce your conversion rate.
If you want someone to perform a specific action – MAKE IT OBVIOUS. Have only one action on that page that they can perform. Nothing else.
Matched design: why it increases conversions
In a nutshell: your campaign messaging and design must be consistent along the entire customer journey: from original ad to landing page.
Your landing page must reinforce the messaging presented on the original ad. This will increase conversions and time spent on your site.
Conversion tracking
What gets measured gets improved.
Like all campaigns, it’s important to track how many conversions you get and from which sources. This will provide valuable insight into what works, what doesn’t and where to focus more attention.
Golden rule: keep testing.
Traffic from one source
This is fairly straightforward. If your landing page is getting traffic from one source it’s fairly easy to measure the results. Make sure you link your main CTA to Google Analytics and set it as a goal. This will give you a clear indication on conversions along with other useful stats.
You could even link the landing page with your CRM using some great third-party software, like Zapier.
Traffic from multiple sources
If your landing page is getting campaign traffic from multiple sources, it’s vital you track which channel provides the best results.
Do this by creating unique UTM URL codes for every campaign. They’re variables recognised by Google Analytics to track your marketing campaigns.
A good article called The 10 Best Ways to Use UTM Codes For Conversion Tracking by Search Engine Journal will show you how to set them up.
Social media optimisation tags
If you are running paid social media campaigns, make sure your landing page includes all the relevant tracking pixels and key pieces of content are tagged correctly to help increase social optimisation. (I will go into more details about this in another article)
In summary
As I’ve described above, a dedicated landing page is key to campaign success. Remember these top tips when you approach this:
1. Focus on your campaign objective
2. Align creatives and messaging to your CTA
3. Create your landing page with only one CTA
4. Populate it with benefit-driven content that’s easy to understand
5. Track and measure everything, using UTM URL codes
Got a question about any of the above? Drop me a note in the comments below
About the author
Jon Rayner
Design - I help to improve the design and user experience (UX) of clients’ websites, optimising them for search engines and conversions to deliver clients’ commercial objectives. I focus on visitors and their needs - this needs to be a top priority and is reflected in Method site designs and functionality.
