A customer walks into your office. You give your sales pitch. The customer listens intently. She looks around at the photos on the wall and the condition of the office. She evaluates the benefits you are providing. She then makes a decision in her head to either accept your message, or not.
If she buys, it’s a conversion.
Now imagine 1,000 customers walk into your office over a year’s time, and 10 percent of those customers end up buying from you. You just converted 100 customers at a 10 percent conversion rate! That’s a good thing!
Those customers obviously appreciated your sales message, how your office looks and your overall presentation, which is why they bought from you. Now imagine if you could increase that 10 percent conversion rate to 11 percent, or 15 percent, or even 20 percent?
Wow! How much more money would you be making every year with those numbers? So you would do your best to make sure that your office was professional and clean, and your sales pitch was practiced, right?
If you’re doing it offline in sales meetings and with your printed materials, why wouldn’t you take the same care and preparation online with your website, your blog and your landing pages?
For your small business, the same sales process that happens in your office is happening online, but you may not give it as much attention as you need to.
You may be trying to sell your product or service, or get more email newsletter signups, or get more downloads of your new ebook or white paper. But if you’re not doing it the right way with high-quality landing pages, you’ll never get the conversions you need to see your conversion rate increase.
So what is a landing page? A landing page is a single Web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.
- A landing page is not your website.
- A landing page should not have website navigation.
- A landing page should not try to offer more than one main focus.
Effective landing pages work because they focus the potential customer on the direct benefits of one specific offer. This allows the customer to decide to take an action, or to not take an action. Either way, you win. It’s when a potential customer gets distracted that you lose, because they haven’t been forced to decide either way. Indecision is the enemy of a great sales pitch.
So How Do I Create High-Quality Landing Pages?
Here are some resources that can help you create effective landing pages.
Premise is a plugin that works with WordPress. It allows you to create landing pages off of your website or blog. You can download a set of free landing page templates for Premise to get an easy jump start on landing page creation.
Unbounce offers a set of Web-based landing page tools that you can use to build your landing pages online quickly and easily.
Invesp offers a white paper entitled “30 Principles of Landing Page Design” where you can pick up even more tips on great landing page design and implementation.
The bottom line is that until you seriously focus your online efforts with good landing page design, you’ll never be able to reach the pinnacle of high conversion rates that can explode your company’s bottom line.
As an online business, we have to make sure our website and landing pages are high quality. If they’re not, you can bet that our sales will suffer. Great article! I posted it to http://www.facebook.com/nametaginc.
While people should have gotten the message, I just want to emphasize that the home page is NOT a great landing page. For paid search, the intent expressed by their search query should allow you to design a better landing page. Emails should have landing pages that match the offer/messaging of the email. Great post Jim.
Jim Kukral
Exactly Robert. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.
Charles (ReachableHQ)
One reason not to go with WordPress to build landing pages is that there is no built in ability to A/B test.
We have many clients who started using WordPress but eventually went with Reachable because they wanted to test different aspects of their landing pages. It is possible to do this using WP but there is not builtin way to compair the results of one page VS another.
Keep in mind that which ever route you go A/B testing is the holy grail of building great landing pages.
I couldn’t have agreed more Jim. We follow a simple framework to create our landing page templates. The framework comprises headlines, call to action, benefits that a user will get, image/video, trust that a website visitor entrusts on us and finally the speed with which it delivers. Here is an article on the same that speaks of landing pages best practices to help you convert website visitor to customers: http://www.leadsquared.com/6-habits-of-a-conversion-optimized-landing-page/
I agree Jim, creating a high quality responsive landing page is not a easy task but currently there are so many software offering easy pick and drop feature, which made landing page creation simple. Anyone can easily embed images or videos. The most important thing after making landing page are to drive traffic and wait for conversions. Here is one of the article to improve conversions on landing pages: http://www.firecart.io/blog/how-ab-testing-can-improve-your-website-conversions/