Landing pages are a great way to attract sales opportunities for those ‘further down the sales funnel’ leads. When your audience knows what they want – the next step is to find out where to buy it from. Hopefully, you can grab their attention and intrigue them enough to fill out a contact form and you can do the real selling offline.
Simplicity
A lot of companies that specialize in landing page design will show off super long landing page designs that scroll on and on forever. While those may be effective – I always personally prefer a short and to the point sales pitch. Think of it as your elevator pitch on a web page. Give the reader too much information and they will either be overwhelmed, or not feel the need to reach out for more information.
On the other hand, giving not enough information isn’t the answer either. Finding the proper balance of information on a landing page is the key – but whether you have a lot or a little, keep the layout simple, easy to navigate and follow.
Clear Value Proposition
What value are you offering to the person who is on your landing page? Why should they fill out that contact form?
People can be stingy with their email addresses. If you aren’t offering something of value, you may not receive any feedback from your landing page forms. A downloadable e-book or white paper is an easy way to get that contact information. Giving away information may seem counterintuitive to making a sale, “Why buy the milk if you can get the cow for free?” But you aren’t giving away the cow – you can give away the cow feed and still make a sale. Only you hold the key to turn that cow feed into milk. (If you’re following my dairy farmer analogy correctly…)
Call to Action
The placement, color and words you use on your call to action button and or/form are nearly as valuable as anything else. You could spend weeks working on the perfect content and layout for your landing page, create a perfect value proposition but mess up the call to action form and be out of luck. What good is a landing page if you can’t get conversions?
If you are going to include any type of complex contact form – limit it to no more than 5 fields. Optimally: name, email address, phone number, comments/questions and maybe a drop down box that sorts your lead into your CRM (Salesforce, etc) or email marketing platform. I prefer going more for the simplicity here as well. Name, Email Address and a small comment field. That’s enough to get started.
In Conclusion
Landing pages are an important tool for a business that tries to gets leads from their website. It’s not a bad idea to have many landing pages on your site for your different services and the different types of clients that use those services. For example – if you are a company that sells computer equipment to schools, but also sell to hospitals, have a landing page dedicated to schools, and another dedicated to hospitals. Optimize the content to target to the specific needs of each client. Businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100. So get on the landing page bandwagon and give us a shout to see how we can help!