Creating A Landing Page That Converts
When we meet with clients here at Net101 many
times the 1st question that we ask them is
“what do you want to accomplish with your
website”.
Often, small business people don’t think
about what they’re trying to accomplish
when someone comes to their webpage.
It’s hard to be successful when you don’t
know what your goal is.
Most websites should have at least 2 goals;
selling something to the visitor now and/or
creating a list for selling something to them
later.
The smartest thing you can do if you are not
currently selling online, is to create an
e-mail marketing list to remind people of
your goods and services and market to them
for sales in the future.
So basically, you’re looking to generate
leads, often referred to as “Lead Gen”
or lead generation.
We have other videos in our video series that
talk about collecting e-mail addresses and
giving an incentive for that action, but in
this video we will talk about increasing conversions
through the landing page that you will set
up to gather those email addresses.
Strictly speaking, a landing page is a page
created specifically to convert as many people
as possible to the action you have determined.
In this case, that would be giving you an
e-mail address.
Let’s talk about the purest form of a landing
page, which is a page that you plan to direct
traffic to with advertising.
Because you are spending money to reach new
people, the ad must convert at the highest
rate possible so you can make back as much
as you can on your investment.
Also, you should know that the landing page
is usually a freestanding page, not necessarily
matching in design with the rest of your website.
The 1st rule of a freestanding landing page
is that you should not give the visitor the
option to do much more than sign up.
You’ve probably seen this kind of page before.
They’re usually on a white background with
maybe a video at the top of the page and a
form for you to give them your e-mail address.
Many times there is a long sales letter underneath
the opening video or graphic and then another
form to give them your e-mail at the bottom
of the page.
These are fairly common among Internet marketers
and websites selling a single product.
These sites are very much a hard sell and
may not necessarily fit with your type of
business.
The one thing to learn from these kinds of
pages is that you don’t want any distractions
that might cause your visitors attention to
drift from your desired action, which is getting
them to sign up and give you their email address.
When you create your landing page, remember
that visitors come into a website and start
looking around to see what would be of interest
to them.
They may have come in looking for your business
hours or your telephone number, so your contact
information and other important items about
your business should be clear and easy to
find on your landing page.
But if you have lots and lots of interesting
things to see and do on your website and then
somewhere near the bottom you have a small
box that says, “join our e-mail list”,
it’s unlikely that very many of your visitors
are going to give you their e-mail address.
It’s important to focus your design on the
request for the e-mail address and the incentive
that you’re offering for signing up.
This should be within the 1st few inches of
the top of the page and it should go across
the page from left to right if at all possible,
since the eye starts at the top left corner
and moves down across the page.
Don’t be afraid to make this big and obnoxious,
but not ugly, if your primary goal is to build
an e-mail list.
People will not take action if they don’t
see your request or are not given a good reason
to take action.
That’s why it’s important to give a great
incentive for signing-up.
See our video “Email Incentives That Don’t
Suck” for more explanation on improving
conversions with incentives.
Don’t be shy about including a call to sign
up at the top of each page as every page on
your site can be a landing page for someone
coming into your website.
If you’re running WordPress or Joomla!,
you can put a widget or module at the top
of every page with a signup form.
If not, you should create a section in your
HTML code with your sign-up form near the
top of each page.
You will find that the placement, size, color
and incentive for your sign-up will affect
the percentage of visitors that take the action
you want–namely giving you permission to
market to them in 
the future.
