In the Spirit of March Madness:

A landing page is like a possession in a basketball game. You have your players (forward, centers, and guards) who have one singular combined goal of getting the basketball through the hoop.  It seems pretty simple but there are a lot of different factors that are involved. The goal is to dribble the ball down the court and execute a passing game strategy with your teammates in hopes of scoring the ball in the bucket  without it being stolen by an opponent or causing a foul. Once a basket is made you’ve got yourself a CONVERSION!

Just as a team of 5 guides the basketball to the hoop in hopes of a point conversion, a landing page guides your prospects to a call to action in hopes of a lead generation conversion.

The purpose of a landing page is to capture online leads to send to your sales team.  It is a special web page designed to present your visitors with a relevant and personalized experience.

A visitor could get easily frustrated going through your website home page trying to track down more information on exactly what they are looking for. That’s where landing pages come in. They help your customers and prospects to avoid the information overload challenge by having a call to action for a specifically targeted offer. Visitors could arrive at a landing page through a pay per click campaign, email campaign, direct mail, or social media advertisement.

Once the basketball is in your team’s possession it’s up to the skills of the players and the offensive strategy set in place to successfully complete the point conversion. Once your prospect is on your landing page, it is up to the headline, copy, and design to lead the prospect to take the desired action.

Here are a few tips to get the best response rate on your landing page:

1) Headline:

This one is important…think of a powerful hook! You’re going to want to spend the extra time to craft a compelling headline for your landing page. Don’t forget to use your keywords for SEO optimization. A good rule of thumb is to keep your headline as short as possible and your sub headline (if you have one) to around 16 words. Always ask yourself if your headline is concise yet creates enough curiosity to give you the desire to continue.

2) Copywriting:

Keep it very simple! People already don’t have enough time in their day to read the novel they bought for their personal enjoyment let alone the novel you wrote on your landing page.  Your copy along with your headline should state:

1. What it is

2. What you get

3. Why it’s important

Bullet points are easy to read and focus on, however keep them to a minimum – shoot for only 3. Always keep in mind the customer’s needs. Think about what is motivating the customer to arrive at your landing page and what will motive them to take the desired action.

3) Form:

Ask for as little information as possible! Your database team might give you the “we-need-at-least-this-many-fields-completed-to-use-this-information” speech but you must compromise. Decrease the friction caused by form fields by keeping it to a bare minimum.  If you absolutely have to have numerous fields then make sure to capture an email address on the very first page for follow up purposes.  Also, a new trick I learned recently from an A/B test case study revealed that if you have all of your fields optional (and you note on the form that they are optional) you’ll bring in better quality leads and you’ll get a higher response rate.  The study showed that the asterisk star next to the questions created anxiety and caused more people to abandon the page. Cool trick huh!

4) Call to Action Button:

You want it to POP! The color of your button doesn’t necessarily matter, as long as it catches the reader’s eye. It’s important for your button to be action oriented and to appropriately describe what will happen once clicking on it. The reader wants to know exactly what she will get if she clicks. Buttons to always leave out: “Clear Form”, “Reset”, and “Cancel”. You don’t want your reader to accidentally click one of them and then end up abandoning the page because they don’t want to take the time to do it again. Also, remember to use text links as well. Some feel more comfortable clicking on a text link rather than an image button and sometimes readers will have their images disabled and will only see the text hyperlink.

5) Last but not least – Distractions:

Be sure to remove all possible distractions. Your design layout should be very clean, crisp, and clear. You don’t want too much going on because that defeats the whole purpose of a landing page to begin with.  Beware of a designer or a web team wanting to add too much fancy flare to your page. Also, there is no need for a navigation bar on your landing page.  Keep it simple.

If you have any tips or tricks to add to our list of key things to remember when building a landing page please let us know with your comment below.

A couple other great sources for landing page information can be found here:

Hubspot – 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Landing Page

Copyblogger – Landing Pages Turn Traffic into Money

Seth Godin – Vocabulary: “Landing Pages”