How to design the ultimate landing page for conversions

Minor tweaks, like removing navigation from your landing page, can double your conversion rates.

With results like these, all enterprise organisations should have a serious conversion-rate optimisation (CRO) strategy. With a larger customer base and higher levels of website traffic, even a small uplift in your conversion rates can drive serious revenue.

Common places to run conversion optimisation include:

• Homepages

• Pricing pages

• Blogs

• Landing pages

But no matter which page you’re optimising, the right design is crucial for boosting your conversion rate.

The decision to add (or takeaway) certain features has a dramatic effect on your results, for example:

• Addressing buyers’ fears can increase conversions by 80%

• Asking for more than three pieces of information during sign up can reduce conversions.

• Adding embedded video content can increase conversions by 86%

• Today, we’ll focus on a prime opportunity for CRO—landing pages.

Calculating Your CRO Metrics

Before you start optimising your landing page, you’ll need to know its current CRO metrics. There’s a wide variety of metrics that you can measure, but the following are good places to start:

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate shows you how many visitors complete the desired action. This action could be signing up for a newsletter, buying a product or something else.

How to calculate your conversion rate:

Desired Action / Page Traffic x 100 = CR%

Bounce Rates

A landing page’s bounce rate is a vital metric. The purpose of a landing page is to drive some kind of action, if prospects are leaving a page without taking action, the landing page has not done its job.

How to calculate your bounce rate:

CTA clicks / Landing page sessions x 100 = Page Bounce Rate

Form Abandonment

A high abandonment rate could mean that your contact form is too difficult to fill out. Keep it as short as possible by asking for the essential information.

How to calculate your form abandonment rate:

Forms Completed / Forms Started x 100 = Form Abandonment Rate.

Pageviews

While a high conversion rate is important, it won’t help your business if only 11 people view your landing page.

How to calculate your pageviews:

Your analytics platform (e.g. Google Analytics) will have a pageviews tab.

Top CRO Strategies

Before we dive into the examples, below is a practical summary of some of the top CRO strategies for improving your landing pages:

• Text-based CTAs: Prospects are bombarded with colourful ads every single day. So sometimes, the best way to improve conversions is to do the opposite. Across ten blog posts, HubSpot found that basic, text-based CTAs were responsible for 93% of conversions.

• Test your landing pages: What works in one industry may not work in another. So skip the guessing game and run tests on your target customers to see what resonates. Make minor tweaks to your pages, stick with the best performing page and continue iterating.

• Optimise pages for buying intent: It’s often better to focus on lead quality over quantity. For example, HubSpot found that their highest converting customers booked product demos rather than free trials.

• So they pivoted their messaging to focus on booking demos.

• Automatic follow ups and retargeting: Some prospects need many touchpoints before committing to a purchase. They’ve already shown interest in your offer, so it’s worth reaching out again. Plus, these strategies also see higher engagement than focusing on cold customers.

• Add live chat to your landing page: Live chat provides a human element to your landing page, and it allows prospects to share last-minute concerns.

Tactics for Designing the Ultimate Landing Page

Now that you know some of the high-level strategies you can use, here are some of them in action:

Social Proof

Shopify takes the simple approach to social proof.

They share logos of well-known companies that use their platform and a text-based testimonial to drive it home. While they could feature hundreds of businesses and testimonials, sometimes keeping it simple is just as powerful.

Limiting Choices

Pixenio, a responsive website builder, limits user choices on its homepage and landing pages.

Prospects have two options on the site: to view some examples or start creating a website and playing around with Pixenio’s functionalities. This strategy removes distractions so prospects are presented with two options, one of which is the preferred and more prominent choice.

Keep Pages Short and Stay Above the Fold

Landing pages are often long sales letters but keeping them short and sharp can often be more effective.

For example, SnackNation could use the screenshot below as a standalone landing page as it covers everything prospects need to know. The page also includes targeted CTAs for different types of customers.

Again, this strategy removes distractions for prospects and helps them focus on what’s most important.

Make Form Submission Easy

Nobody enjoys filling out forms, so you need to make it as easy as possible for your prospects.

If you can’t give them one-click sign ups through Gmail, Facebook or another source, keep the information form under three sections.

And if you absolutely can’t, you must minimise perceived effort. Quickbase provides the perfect example of this where they spread the signup form over two pages.

Use Directional Cues on Your Landing Page

Directional cues help you guide prospects’ eyes towards the page’s most important elements.

In this example, Codify Academy uses directional cues in three main ways:

• Compartmentalising each major section so that prospects are drawn to “Become A Front-End Developer In 16 Weeks, Part-time!” And “Begin Your New Career Today By Talking To An Admissions Mentor.”

• Using the colour scheme on the right-hand side to point at the signup form.

• Using a bright colour for the CTA button, so it stands out.

Use Targeted Offers

Targeted offers are a powerful way to improve your conversions as they speak directly to your prospects’ problems.

Curology provides its customers with a textbook targeted offer—custom creams for each individual.

Clear Visual Hierarchy and Prominent CTAs

The visual hierarchy of your page needs to make sense. Otherwise, customers will feel uneasy about the transaction.

You want important parts of your copy to stand out, such as your:

• Value proposition.

• CTA and form.

• Company name.

Here’s an example from UPack that does just that.

Run A/B Tests

Finally, you want to test all of your landing page iterations to narrow down which are the most effective.

You can do this by running simple A/B tests on small tweaks, such as your:

• CTA button text.

• Headline.

• Creative.

• Number of form fields and more.

Once you find something that works, incorporate it into your default landing page and keep testing ways to optimise it.

Creating the Ultimate Landing Page is a Process. No matter how much experience you have in CRO and creating landing pages, building top performing pages takes time.  What works for one offer may fall flat for another. And over time, consumer preferences change, so you’ll need to update your pages over time.

The good news is you can mirror the strategies in this guide as a starting point for optimising your conversions. But in order to manage it you will need to be able to measure it by tracking your key conversion metrics.

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