Your Recipe for an Awesome Landing Page

A perfect landing page is a little bit like baking the perfect meal. Some elements are great in moderation, but use too much of them and you’ve ruined the whole dish. Landing pages, like recipes, are all about balance. A little bit of honey might be great in a savory recipe, but use a cup and you’ve likely made your dish inedible. A powerful Call to Action is great, but go overboard with CTAs and you’ll turn your audience away before they’ve had a chance to be converted.

Whether you’re selling food, jewelry, software or your latest e-book, great landing pages have a few important elements in common related to content and design. Make sure to hit all these areas when creating your next landing page.

Start With Fantastic Design

Why is this the first section we bring up? Because it may be one of the most important. The design of your landing pages is the digital equivalent of a first impression in business. You’re probably aware that people make up their minds about what kind of person you are almost immediately. It’s the same for web pages. Good design is the indicator of a company that knows their stuff and has it together. Think about how easy modern tools make it to produce great design. WordPress themes, ready-made graphics, cheap stock photos, easy to customize landing page templates: all of these things practically make websites for you! Even if you don’t have a professional graphic designer on staff, there is almost no excuse to have substandard design on a landing page.

Want more ways to get and keep people interested in your landing page? Use high-quality, attention-grabbing photos that pertain to what you’re selling. Ipsy, a beauty product subscription service, does a great job of using simple, eye-catching design and beautiful photographs on their landing page.

Add in a Great Headline

The headline is an integral part of your landing page, but it only works if you craft it in the right way. Your audience doesn’t have a lot of time to spend on your landing page, which means you need to get to the important benefits of your product or service fast.

A good way to think about crafting very short pieces of marketing copy like headlines or Call to Action button copy is to aim for focusing on benefits instead of features. As HubSpot explains, speaking too much about features right off the bat can alienate some groups who might not know a lot about your product or how it could help them.

Take HelloFresh, for example. This company allows people to purchase subscriptions to a service that will deliver them boxes of fresh ingredients that can be used to easily make home-cooked meals. This service probably appeals to foodies, but it also might appeal to people who want to make more meals from scratch but don’t know how to go about doing it. The copy on one of their landing pages is crafted perfectly so as not to scare off people who don’t have a lot of knowledge about cooking. It simply reads “Everything you need for easy, home-cooked meals!” Notice, they don’t lead with all of the features of the service, the kinds of ingredients they use, or how the subscription works. They simply present one of the key benefits of the product: convenience.

Note: The features of a product or service will likely be interesting to your potential buyers as they start to learn more about what you offer. Because of this, it’s good to include this information, but not necessarily above the fold. If you scroll down on the HelloFresh landing page, you’ll see that they include more details about the product for people that want to learn more. You should also consider your SEO strategy when crafting copy and make sure to include lots of related keywords surrounding your topic area.

Use Just a Pinch of Social Proof

We’ve already addressed the fact that people visiting your landing page are short on time and attention. If your design doesn’t grab them, they’ll leave in a few seconds. If your design is on point but your headline doesn’t speak to their needs and present benefits they can understand, they’ll be gone in a minute or less.

But what else helps your audience make a quick decision? One answer is social proof. If you’ve ever felt encouraged or compelled to try something because you saw a lot of other people doing it, that’s social proof. It’s also the reason that people give more credence to things that are endorsed by experts and celebrities. It’s why Facebook tells us when our friends like a page that shows up in our feeds.

Faced with the need to quickly decide whether something is worth buying, social proof can be a very convincing factor. Here are a few examples of how to leverage social proof for your landing pages:

• Instapage, a popular landing page building software, includes the following line on their landing page: “1 Million Pages with an Average Conversion Rate Above 25%”
• Dollar Shave Club, a company that sells shaving implements and accessories, includes social sharing and endorsement buttons on their landing page
• Le Tote, a personalized fashion and stylist service, includes logos from well-known fashion magazines that they’ve been featured in

Present Next Steps to Your Audience With a Solid Call to Action

What’s the final touch to making an awesome landing page that will keep your audience interested and convince them that your product or service is worth trying? A Call to Action, of course. A good CTA, according to Wordstream, is short, focused on the readers, and uses action verbs.

You may have also heard that color is important when creating a CTA button. There are numerous different opinions floating around about which specific color is the best for conversions. According to this article from ConversionXL, it’s impossible to name one best color for buttons. Rather, think about how a CTA button works with the entire design of your page, and make sure any CTA buttons are obvious to your audience.

A Few Final Words on Landing Pages

The theme of all of these ingredients to creating a great landing page is convenience. All of these aspects help your audience save time and get to the point of your product fast. In addition to the tips above, you should also focus on being brief and to-the-point whenever possible. Forego long paragraphs of text for bullets, quick phrases, pictures, infographics and video. Allow scrolling if you wish, but make it possible to get the key information quickly. All in all, make your landing page an attractive and focused destination that gets to the heart of your product fast and gives customers a good reason to take the next step and convert.