You have a product or service to sell? How do you connect your customers to your product and get them to buy? Men like Claude C. Hopkins, the pioneer of modern advertising, connected their customers to their products through landing pages. The media was different but the idea was the same. They sent sales letters via mail with the intent that their customer would call or return a pre-paid sales order form, and it worked. Millions of dollars were made this way and this is a marketing strategy that is still in place today. In the digital world, we create a similar sales letter with the purpose or goal of getting our customers to take an action whether that be through filling out a contact form, starting an instant chat, calling a toll-free-number, or sending an email. Keep in mind, however, that creating and running a landing page campaign can be costly. There is the cost of the designer and programmer to get the page setup, the cost of web hosting, the cost of a CRM, the cost of an email campaign service, and the cost of any advertising you undertake to get people to your landing page. Before you go to all the effort and the expense of creating a landing page, you need to be 100% sure that you will get the maximum benefit from the page in terms of visitors and page conversion. It doesn’t makes sense to spend so much money only to find you can only make back half of what you spend.

So, how can you make a landing page that converts well? Below is an image that has been floating around the web for some time and it does a good job of explaining what is really needed to produce a landing page that can produce sales. One of the most important things to remember is that you want consistency. For example, if you run a Google ad offering a free eBook don’t take the user to your home page which is mostly about your product and service and from which they can click some obscure link to get your free eBook take the user to a landing page that is only about that free ebook. You have somewhere between 3-8 seconds to capture your audience’s attention and get them to keep reading so you want to be sure that they will find what they were expecting and not have to go searching, because they won’t.

Another thing to keep in mind when building your landing page is to keep it simple and only have one call-to-action. You want to focus your user on entering their information to get your free eBook, you do not want them navigating to other pages of your website. While it would be great for them to start looking at your other stuff the goal of the landing page is to get their information and have them download an eBook. No matter how beautiful your design, if the copy does not engage the user they will not buy. The copy is arguably the most important element of the landing page. The headline is used to captivate the user and get him to read on and the copy needs to read smoothly and get the user to take the desired action. Take a look at ”The Anatomy of a perfect landing page”, it’s got some great tips for improving your landing pages.

What things have you noticed on your landing pages that have been effective in increasing your site conversion? Have you noticed anything that has decreased your conversion?