How to Design Effective Landing Pages – 3 Tips

For your digital marketing campaign to be successful, it’s essential to have an effective landing page that will convert website visitors into customers. To help you avoid wasting precious time and resources on landing pages that don’t work, we’re going share some background on landing pages and three tips for designing more effective landing pages, so you can maximize the success of your digital marketing campaign.

Here are the tips we will discuss:

1. Know Your Audience
2. Keep the Design Focused
3. Test Your Way to Success

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing campaign. This is where a user “lands” after they click on a link in an email, digital ad, or a similar place on the web. Unlike a homepage, which typically has many goals and encourages exploration, a landing page is designed with a single focus or goal, known as a call-to-action or CTA.

{ Example of a landing page with CTAs. Created by Liquid for Explorer, a GHX Company}

A call-to-action or CTA is specific copy that encourages the customer to act. On a landing page this often looks like a few lines of text followed by a button or form. Another example could be entering a name and email address to sign up for a newsletter or download a free guide.

Tip #1: Know Your Audience Better

This may seem harsh, but the truth is customers are not visiting your landing page because of your wonderful product. They have a problem and in searching for a solution, were pointed to your page. What does your page offer them? When developing copy and designing your page, instead of focusing on your product, follow these steps to provide your ideal audience the solution for which they are looking:

1. Define your customer. As a company, identify who you are trying to reach. Be sure to answer these questions: Who are they? What do they do? What are their unique motivations and concerns?
2. Lead with empathy. Show customers you understand their pain points, share in their discomfort, and value their need for a solution.
3. Show them the dream. Paint a picture of how great life will be with this problem solved.
4. Provide a call-to-action. Guide them toward the solution with a call-to-action.

Here’s an example:  

You own a clock company and you’re looking to increase alarm clock sales. After hosting an interoffice workshop, your company has identified working parents who need to get up early to be your target audience. On your landing page, you feature their pain points in the form of a testimonial sharing how difficult waking up on time is without an alarm clock. To show them the dream scenario, you could feature a hero image of a well-rested person rising to greet the day thanks to the alarm clock on their nightstand.  Finally, guide them toward the solution with a CTA prompting them to complete a purchase of an alarm clock.

Tip #2: Keep Landing Page Design Focused

Before the customer even reaches your landing page, it’s important to note that the look and feel of the ad they click to access your page be consistent with the design of that landing page. We don’t want customers to think they’ve been redirected to a random site because it does not look or feel like the ad they clicked.

{Example of consistent design between landing page and digital ads. Tiffany Tran for KlientBoost.}

Follow these tips to ensure your landing page design stays focused:

1. Place important information above the fold. The most valuable real estate on your landing page is the top of the page before customers must scroll, known as above the fold. This section should include a compelling hero image or video, a headline, and concise supporting copy. (Here is a great guide to selecting hero images for your landing page.) This is the place to showcase your dream solution to the customer’s problem.
2. Keep page navigation simple. Exclude elaborate menus or external links that may guide the customer away from the page. We want them to follow a single, focused journey without any distractions. Use visual clues like arrows or subtle animation to guide the customer down the page.
3. The layout should accommodate skimming. When bringing copy and design elements onto the page, keep in mind that customers’ attention spans are incredibly short. For instance, when scrolling through a social media feed, how long do you stay on a single post? 5 seconds, maybe. How long to do you stay if the caption is 10 paragraphs long? Most users skip right over long copy.
   1. Users are accustomed to scanning a page and then moving on very quickly. If they don’t find what they’re looking for fast, they’ll be on to the next. A few design solutions that enable skimming and keep the user focused at the same time include a one-column layout, breaking up the flow of content with a quote or testimonial, ample use of negative space, and icons that break up text-heavy content.
4. Optimize for mobile. Right now, over half of global web traffic comes from mobile devices, and 80% of all internet users own a smartphone. Moreover, mobile users are five times more likely to abandon a task if the website isn’t optimized for mobile. Don’t lose most of your audience. Design a responsive landing page that converts a desktop design to multiple sizes depending on the device through which it is being viewed.
5. CTAs should stand out. Buttons, forms, and other CTAs should stand out from other content on your landing page. Use colors that sharply contrast the page background color and test the visibility of CTAs with the trusty squint test. Zoom out on the page and squint your eyes. If you can still locate the CTAs without perfect focus, the page passes!

{Example of high-contrast CTAs that pass the squint test, via Wistia.}

Tip#3: Test Your Way to Success

Did you know that 53% of the time, visitors to mobile sites leave a page that takes more than three seconds to load? Don’t let your hard work go to waste by publishing a page with a slow load time, broken links, or blurry images. Testing the usability of your landing page is key to converting visitors to customers. There are several ways to conduct user testing, Contact Liquid to discover one that suits your needs.

Key Takeaways

Now that we’ve journeyed through landing pages, here are few key takeaways:  

• Understanding your audience is essential to providing them your product as the solution.
• The most effective landing page design will focus the customer on one journey leading to a call-to-action.
• Testing the functionality of your landing page is critical to convert page visitors to customers.

Ready to take your landing page to the next level? Reach out to the experts at Liquid for help in maximizing the effectiveness of your landing page. Our Experience Design team has designed hundreds of effective landing pages from scratch for companies in a broad spectrum of industries.

Looking for more tips on landing page design? Check out Hook, Line, and Sinker – UX Design Tips for a Successful Landing Page blog.