What’s the big deal about landing pages? It may be a first impression—the first thing a potential new client or customer will see on your website. Your goal? Find out who’s visiting your site. How do you get them to bite right away? Make it look professional through stellar design and killer landing page copy.
Here’s everything you need for a professional-looking landing page:
Keep It Simple
If your landing page looks different from your regular site, visitors might not realize it is part of your site. People can be suspicious, especially when they are giving you their personal information. If your landing page looks different, the first thought could be that it was created by a third-party company. And they know those third party companies are all about stealing your information and spamming your email. If you design your page like all your others, it’s consistent and a lot less work for you to do anyway.
Keep ‘Em Captive
Once a prospect arrives on your landing page, you don’t want them to escape. They’re going to fill this form out, and they are going to like it. So don’t give an option. Don’t provide a way around it. That’s why you can’t have navigation to other pages on your site on your landing pages. If you give them an escape route, they’ll probably take it.
Keep ‘Em Busy
Great job! You’ve got your potential customer here, now what? You’ve got to tell visitors what to do. Don’t just assume that since there is a form in front of them that they know they have to fill it out. People will actually try whatever they can to not do extra work. So unless you tell them they need to submit your form, they won’t!
Keep ‘Em Happy
Now, even with what was said above, be nice. Don’t make people hate you. What do people hate? Long forms. The more information you require, especially during the early days of your relationship with a potential customer, the more likely they’ll be to balk. Think about it: if someone walked up to you on the street and began demanding your phone number, email address, and company name, you’d get a little freaked out, right?
Keep ‘Em Here
This one goes hand in hand with the previous point. People these days have an ever-decreasing attention span. If they have to scroll, they’re going to leave. According to Nielsen, internet users spend an average of 10-20 seconds on a page, deciding if it’s interesting enough to stay. That means, if they see a form with so many questions that they actually have to scroll down to read them all, they won’t do it. Any questions below the scroll point will be ignored and the form will be deemed “not important enough to complete.” You will have lost your audience.
See? Not too hard. You just need to make a landing page that’s consistent, firm, clear, and short. Although it sounds like a lot of work, practice will make perfect, and soon your landing page will bring in the responses you’re looking for.
