How to Create a Great Landing Page

chillibreeze writer — Vekat Ramakrishnan

A landing page, in many cases referred to as a conversion or lead generation page, is the individual webpage of an online site that a visitor may get to via various channels. These include search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing referring websites that link to these web pages, such as review sites, blogs, forums, and so on, as well as pay-per-click (or impressions) ads shown on such search engines and referring sites. Because this is the first page of your website that the user will get acquainted with in the course of being introduced to your business, it is important to showcase the content on this page in the best manner to hold the user’s attention and evoke their curiosity to know more.

There are a few landing page essentials that have proved to be the hallmark of success for several highly-visited and commercially booming websites. Though the degree of customization of a landing page depends on the kind of business being promoted, and the consequent level of detail and amount of information needed to be given to a targeted visitor, some common elements of great landing pages include providing critical information at the very beginning/top of the page, and removing all unnecessary content, text as well as multimedia, from the page.

Applying this formula to your web pages helps create a website with a clean and conveniently navigable interface that provides only required information, and provides it in complete detail. This leads to an overall positive user experience, for instance, even when said user doesn’t perform the expected conversion action, such as a sign-up or purchase, but nonetheless stays on the page long enough to check out the content at length. Some of these visitors may also provide feedback about the experience they had navigating the website, or suggestions to improve the same, which will benefit the website owner further in improving the site.

Here are some tips for creating a good quality commercially viable landing page that can create a favorable impression on a first-time visitor:

Show the most essential information at the top of your landing page:
A good user experience involves the visitor getting to know the gist of your business within the first 300 pixels of your page; the user shouldn’t have to scan the entire page in order to understand the nature of your business. It also helps attract user attention if some of the keywords contained in your ads are also present in the summary that is condensed at the beginning of your web page, as this helps establish relevance and credulity among interested prospects that have come to your web page via your ad, and encourages them to check out further content.

Keep your page simple and effective:
While focusing on balancing the elements of multimedia and text content on your landing page so that they complement one another and help explain your business in an attractive as well as lucid manner, the site owner or webmaster must take care to avoid including any unnecessary content, not directly relevant to the main content of the page. Besides such information contributing to an inferior user experience, the load time of the page will also be affected, and users are less prone to re-visit sites, or even let landing pages load completely the first time around. Thus, if using multimedia content such as flash animation, the site owner should ensure that this element is required and relevant to the core content of the page, and is not affecting the site’s load time.

Have an FAQ section where useful:
Visitors are reassured to see FAQ sections mimicking their own questions regarding the business listed out clearly and answered in detail. Instead of having several paragraphs of text describing all content simultaneously, breaking down the different aspects of the business into questions in the FAQ section will provide a complete perspective in a clear and concise manner to visitors, and can quickly help engage their interest.

Testing multiple landing pages:
With the availability of tools such as Google’s Website Optimizer, a website owner can now test multiple versions of their landing pages to see which version attracts more visitors, and equally importantly, more return visits. This feature allows an online advertiser or a website owner earning money via paid ads shown on their landing pages to examine the effectiveness of each element of their landing page minutely, by making changes to the placement or design or other characteristic of the element on the page and observing user reaction to this change.

There are two kinds of landing page experiments that can be conducted in the course of testing multiple versions of your landing pages: A/B testing, and multivariate testing. While A/B testing allows you to test the performance of two or more completely different versions of your landing page by allowing you to make changes to the content, move around your layout, or alter the look and feel of your page, multivariate testing allows you to test alternate versions of individual sections within a landing page to see which combination works best for you.

This experiment allows you to create three versions of each section of the landing page chosen by you for improvement, for instance, the headline, image, and promotional text, and you can try out different combinations of all three versions on your web page to get a range of web page layouts and styles, and can compare user reactions to a minute level. This kind of testing applies more to web pages requiring high traffic, such as ecommerce sites.

Consider having an opt-in box at the top of the page:
Having an opt-in box with a clear disclaimer stating that a user can, at any time, opt out of email newsletter subscriptions or other notifications that they may receive once they submit their email address may help you get valuable leads; people who’re actually interested in the products/services you have to offer. Assuring users in your disclaimer that you will never disclose their email information to any outside agencies or third parties can also help create an atmosphere of trust for visitors interested in opting in.

The opt-in box can be made distinct by choosing a different background color for it. You can attract further attention to this section by posting a freebie offer (such as an ebook, white paper, or report) for opting in, and making this offer text stand out visibly by using larger font and bold text type to make it plainly visible. It also may help if the opt-in field has other attractive features such as a sleek frame and an attractively colored or shaped button to click on to submit one’s email address.

Besides these, having feedback forms or survey questionnaires can help obtain valuable feedback to create further incentives to draw in more prospects, improve your products and services in general, as well as make suitable improvements to your landing page, considering visitor preferences.

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in May, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Venkat Ramakrishnan is a post-graduate (MBA) with 4 years' experience in online advertising and marketing with a top-ranking search engine brand. In the course of his work experience, he has interacted via the written medium with advertisers all over the world, and has honed his selling and problem-solving skills via this medium. He also maintains a blog dedicated to one of his passions, music, as well as plays the guitar. He is currently based in Hyderabad.

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