What makes effective landing pages?

So many things can affect the success of online direct response activity. Who do you target? What message do you put in front of them? Where do you find them?

So once you’ve attracted the attention of your potential customer, you’ve done the job, haven’t you? Well, no. It’s easy to forget about the importance of where you land them.

What makes effective landing pages?

Some things are simple:

• If your users could be on mobile devices, don’t expect good conversion rates from a page that isn’t optimised for a smaller screen.
• How much data are you asking for on your form? More fields means more effort, which means fewer conversions.
• Is it easy to find the calls to action? Don’t make it harder than it needs to be to get to the point of conversion.

Think about what your user responded to. What was it that made him or her click? Is the landing page relevant to it? There’s nothing worse than clicking on an ad about apples and landing on a page about carrots.

Think about exactly what response you’re looking for. If you’re focusing purely on conversions, then strip out anything unnecessary. There might be times when you want to take a softer approach and provide more information about your products and services – but remember, the more complex you make the journey for your user, the less conversions you will get.

What do you want them to do? Book a test drive? Request a brochure? Configure a vehicle? Ask for a quote? Review latest offers? Read about spec and prices? If your landing page has a plethora of CTAs on it, your conversion rate will reduce.

Maybe your product is complex and your route to conversion is complex. In which case, there may be times when you want your users to engage with your content and do their research – which is fine; just don’t expect the conversion rate to be as high as a ‘pure’ direct response campaign.

Maximum conversion rates will only come from optimised targeting, ad content (copy, images etc) and landing page. Working together, these three elements can be hugely powerful. Overlook any one of the three and you’re wasting your budget.

What’s the recipe for effective landing pages?

• Make it relevant – If the user is interested in apples, give them a landing page about apples.
• Keep it simple – Capture the data that you need, but don’t ask too much.
• Optimise – What devices are your users going to be using?
• Make sacrifices – Do you really need to talk about all of those product features or offers on this page?

There is no ‘one size fits all’ answer when it comes to effective landing pages, but follow these simple steps and you’ll be well on your way.

As with everything, though, don’t forget to test and learn. If it’s not right the first time, make changes, measure the results and evolve!