You may have not known the definition of a landing page, but you’ve definitely come across a landing page before. The best way to describe a landing page is a website page focusing on one feature, and serving a purpose to direct the visitors towards one single action. It’s the page where you “land” after clicking a link, and more often than not this happens as a result of a marketing campaign. This is the main difference between the landing page from other, multi-purpose pages on the website (e.g. homepage or blog.)
While narrow in usage (e.g. a Christmas landing page would be useful for a month during the year), when done correctly, landing pages are a beloved channel among marketers around the world. The simplicity of navigation and a complete focus on one topic makes landing pages an extremely effective promotional channel that boasts improved conversion rates while lowering cost per acquisition.
Usually, the main purpose of the landing page is to generate leads, whether it’s a product sale or an event registration. Marketers and businesses for conversion and sales-oriented tasks, such as
- Promoting new products;
- Growing subscriber lists;
- Boosting sales and attracting leads;
- Capturing important insights and assembling data.
But how to make sure that you’ve built a landing page that will be effective? What should you keep in mind during the entire creation process? To help you answer these questions, in this article, we’ve taken a look at what a great landing page should consist of, as well as answered all the important ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ you need to know.
Why Do You Need a Landing Page?
But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the landing page creation process, let’s first understand why your business needs a landing page. After all, creating a website page just for people to fill in a form may sound like too much work. Can’t you just add it to your homepage?
Well, yes and no. While you indeed can add the information to the homepage or elsewhere on the website, having a dedicated landing page yields a number of benefits for your business. Here are a few of them:
Helps with lead generation — Having a separate landing page will help you remove all distractions and competing links, drawing the undivided attention of the visitor to what you want them to do: fill in the form, start the free trial, or purchase the product. By having their attention, you can guide them through the process you’ve so carefully designed, significantly improving the chance of attracting and capturing a lead.
Attracts different types of customers — You can create custom landing pages to attract different types of audiences, based on your interests and needs. You can use them to reach people from different locations and belonging to varying demographics. Experimenting with the design, content, and the offer itself will allow you to appeal to different groups.
Here’s an example of two different landing pages by the same company, design platform Venngage, created to attract two different audiences. The first one is an Infographics landing page designed for professionals looking to present their data in a more visually appealing way.
Source: Venngage
Another one is a YouTube banner maker, an entirely different solution from the same company, this time targeting video bloggers, marketing specialists, musicians, and more.
Source: Venngage
Improves Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign results — If you are running PPC advertising on Google or other search engines, having a dedicated landing page for them will improve your ad rankings. Because the quality of the PPC ad is also partially judged by the link attached to it, having a highly-relevant landing page at the end of your ad will positively impact the end result.
This was far from being an exhaustive list of benefits of having a landing page, but it will hopefully give you an idea of why creating a landing page is worth the effort. And now that you already understand the importance of landing pages, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that’ll help you design a landing page that converts.
Landing Page Design Best Practices
As mentioned earlier in the article, landing pages, though similar to regular websites, serve a different purpose. That’s why, to be effective, they also have different design needs. Here are some of the key characteristics and design tips that can help you create a landing page that both looks great and brings results.
1. Visual Simplicity Is Key
Keeping your landing page visually simple is important as it helps to keep the focus of the visitor on the main aim of the landing page. Too many colors and too many elements can be distracting, while a clean minimalist design will focus the attention of the visitor on your value proposition and guide them through the conversion process.
Here are some characteristics of visual simplicity and clean interface:
- Visual simplicity leaves a lot of white space on the page in such a way that the attention of the visitor is focused on the CTAs of the page.
- Visual simplicity isolates CTAs from other elements to avoid a “crowded” page, making them easier to stand out.
- Visual simplicity creates a smooth design flow by placing the elements on the page in such a way that visitors keep reading without getting distracted by any element, CTA, or an unnecessary contrast of colors.
Here’s an example of an effective eCommerce landing page design that’s clean and simple, yet contains everything needed to ensure the shopping process goes smoothly.
