Landing Page Design Blunders and Best Practices to Sell Twice

Landing Pages can pull your sales both ways, upward and downward. The probability of your earnings going down when your landing pages are not designed according to the marketing communication and customer needs are very high. Your visitors may leave your page in less than 4-5 second, if it does not offer what they came expecting. So, why not spend a little more time and effort on your landing pages first and then invest in advertising and promotion for generating traffic to them.

Below are few of the common errors (more like blunders since you are spending so much) and best practices that will help you improve landing page design and generate more leads and conversions.

What are the Common Landing Page design and planning Errors?

1. Messing Up the headline

Headline is the first thing your visitors are going to notice on a page, so surrounding it with messages that your visitors are not interested in is of no use.  It’s the first blunders that many websites repeat and so fail to tell what the page is all about.

Your headline must replicate the message displayed in your promotions to encourage visitors to explore more. This is especially true when you are planning a landing page for promotional offers and the visitor came looking for a specific discount or free service.

2. Too many goals to Serve

Usually amateur marketing heads force their landing page design companies to add everything to a page to please their clients and thus set too many goals for a page. This leads to a scattered picture that lacks specificity. Giving too many product or service options to visitors means you are asking them to spend time to choose one. Instead your goal should be to convince them to buy or subscribe for the one best thing that solves all their purposes.

If you have a varied target audience and a different product/ service for each, try to maintain multiple landing pages so that the most relevant landing page is shown to the related customer segment.

3. Weak Layout

There are three things basically that communicate with visitors on a landing page, content, images and CTAs. Adding content that makes no sense, or too much content that just makes them work hard in finding what they want, can put off their interest. Putting things without a planning and purpose can destroy your landing page’s layout.

Similarly, adding too many navigation options and CTAs with different purposes seems to be another reason why landing page problems occur. Giving your user too many options of further navigation can just take you further away from achieving your goal.

Also Read: Designing an Effective Landing Page – Tips, Tricks and Ideas

4. Complicated Forms to fill

Landing pages are usually used for lead generation, promotion of trial version and gathering subscriptions; thus have a conversion form. Landing pages that ask for less information in their forms tend to have higher conversion rates than long forms asking for redundant and unnecessary information. You work hard enough to drive relevant traffic to your landing page, so at least get the form filled.

Non-Optimized Forms are complicated for users and kill the business purpose. You can lose important leads even if two or three extra fields that visitors find unnecessary to fill are added to your forms or if your lead generation form is too hard to locate.  It can harm your page’s likeability and bring down the expected conversions rate.

5. Useless Footer links

Adding excessive links in footer is a common practice followed by amateurs. It’s a place that visitors use for finding some important information that they fail finding above. Don’t create chaos there. Just offer important links, especially if your landing page is not too long to read.

Sometimes if you have a much targeted landing page, it is advisable to have no links in the footer at all. The page is strictly disconnected from the main website by removing the top navigation bar and footer links and provides the visitor limited options of going to the website.

What are Landing Page Design Best Practices?

The best way to design a landing page is to focus on visitor psychology and your business objective. It should be planned keeping consumer behavior in mind so that it can engage him at the first glance and convert eventually.

1. Stick to WIIFM Principle

It must start with WIIFM (What is in it for me). Decide first what’s in it for your consumers. Think from their point of view and offer this information in the top fold itself through the heading, subheading, with the following content or an explainer video. Your landing page design should be able to highlight the key benefit of your offered product or service within the first fold. Be precise and persuasive.

SweetiQ team is doing a great job with their’s. Their landing page talks about just the core benefit unlike their website home page or inner pages which carry much more information that might distract the visitor.

2. Use Well written Copy

Study the buying behavior of your target audience and plan the content according to their preferences. Your copy should flow effortlessly and motivate them to take a decision.

• Work on your headline and supporting tagline.
• Use limited bullet points instead of big paragraphs.
• Clear and catchy display easily engages visitors and takes them to final level of conversion.
• If you have too much to say, it is better to use a video that can say it all.

3. Make the landing page self sufficient

How are the best landing pages different from your website home page and inner pages? Well, firstly they have a single purpose to not just share information. The best landing pages are designed to generate a mature lead or make a visitor subscribe to your service demo.

If the purpose of your landing page is different, it should work differently too. The conversion and navigation options on your landing page ensure that it works differently.

• No top navigation menu that gives him access to the entire website.
• Just one CTA that makes a visitor subscribe.
• No secondary CTAs or links that give him multiple product/service options or an option to further research.
• Conversion form on the landing page itself to avoid diversion to the “Contact Us” or “RFQ form” page.
• No footer links to allow secondary navigation.
• An option to go to the website home page so that the visitor does not feel trapped.

All these things insure that a visitor stays for long on your landing page and reads everything that you share instead of just scanning the main contents and moving on.

Also Read: Best Points to Design Landing Pages with Buyer Psychology in Mind

4. Create a Well Planned CTA

Call to Action is an asset to a website’s landing page. A single clear and concrete CTAs is important to assure the visitor what he will be getting if he choose to opt-in. The color, design, size and copy should make it the most distinct element of the landing page so that the visitor should not have to look for it. Having any other buttons serving as secondary navigation options on the landing page must be avoided. Here is a quick post that will guide you about which CTAs can improve online lead generation for your reference.

5. Offer Social Proof/ Validation

A website visitor needs some social proof before registering for a new service. If you are selling a product, people like to read reviews from other customers. If you belong to the service industry, then you need to share testimonials of influential clients, respectable places where your company’s work has been acknowledged, your USP, etc. All these things help the visitor trust your company and make a quicker decision.

Landing page design template/ layout

Based on all the above mentioned points, FATbit has prepared a rough draft/template of a landing page that can guide you better about how landing page best practices are to be implemented. You can rearrange the layout and customize the look and feel but stick to the core concepts at all times. Instead of using ready-made templates, it is advisable to hire an affordable yet expert web design company to custom design your landing pages.

If you still have doubts like “How can I make improvements in my landing page?” or “Should I use landing page templates or must they be custom designed?” feel free to get in touch with our landing page optimization professionals.

You cannot convince buyers with a design layout that shares no purpose and conveys no specific message. So, plan each and every element of a landing page with a view to convince visitors. Test various versions of layout and copy to find out what works best for you. FATBit follow best landing page design practices for guaranteed sales. Don’t let a single landing page drain out your marketing budget.

How else you can improve your landing page to generate more leads and sales?

We would love to hear your tips, tricks and observations through our comments section.