A landing page isn’t just where prospects happen to stumble across your offer after idly surfing during a lunch break. It’s a finely tooled and carefully calibrated machine designed to move those prospects one step deeper into your sales funnel. Because it’s specific and targeted, it needs to have the right structure and copy to be compelling on its own, not as part of a larger whole. Here’s a brief guide to punching up your landing pages and turning them into high-impact sales tools.

One Page, One Option

Landing pages make a single offer and feature a single path to take visitors who wind up there to your desired location. They don’t lead to multiple sites or ask viewers to choose from a wide array of calls to action. Once they’re on your landing page, they’re presented with one opportunity – the chance to subscribe, download your white paper, sign up for your service or otherwise contact you. Remember, your landing page is there for a single purpose; if you add more reasons to be there, you dilute that original purpose and make it less compelling.

Repeat Your CTA

You want viewers to take only one action when they visit your landing page, but you should make taking that action as easy as possible. Position multiple calls to action toward the top of the page, in the middle and again at the bottom to minimize the travel time for viewers’ eyes and cursors. Some content creators balk at the direct, hard sell such frequent CTAs represent, but this is precisely the point at which a little push is acceptable.

Under-using your CTA on your landing page is like creating an irresistibly delicious restaurant and failing to give diners a menu. They’re hungry, and they want you to make it easy to order. Your landing page addresses people who have already decided they’re interested enough to investigate, so they’re amenable to forthright calls to action placed prominently throughout the page.

Streamlined Design

Save internal links, menu bars, mission statements, plug-ins and other details for pages that are part of your website, not your landing pages. Customers will have time to learn those details from you once they’ve taken a step forward and clicked through your landing page. Identify the problem your visitors want you to address, position your offer as the solution and back up your assertions with a few salient details. Bullet lists of benefits, testimonials and images designed to showcase your offer should be the focus of your landing page.

Make It Perfect

Landing pages are concise, and you have limited space with which to communicate your message and build viewers’ confidence in you. You might not think swapping “your” for “you’re” makes a difference, but when you’re earning your readers’ trust, every hallmark of quality counts – including your grammar and spelling. Poor grammar suggests you went with a cheaper option for your landing page copy instead of hiring a professional content creator. Viewers will notice, and they instantly become skeptical of even the most glowing testimonials if the page itself is less than polished.

Responsive in Every Sense of the Word

Responsive web design turns static pages into fluid, dynamic entities that look equally good on any platform. Whether your visitors see you on their desktop screens at work, on a laptop in a coffee shop or on a smartphone during their commute, you want your landing page to be fully functional. Responsive design may cost a bit more time and effort initially, but the payoff for that investment is potentially huge. Don’t leave any part of your audience out by failing to take their devices into consideration.

In a more general sense, the overall responsiveness of your page is also crucial. It needs to load quickly and with a minimum of waiting or unnecessary downloads. Visitors don’t want music, auto-play video or other elements that diminish a site’s speed or preclude older devices from displaying some of the content.

Test, Then Test Again

With landing pages, perfection is a moving target. What works brilliantly one season may lead to lukewarm response rates a few months later. By tracking key details about your site, such as overall time spent on the page and any drop-off points at which you’re losing viewers, you build a baseline view of its effectiveness. Test new CTAs or reposition your original ones to determine which performs best. Because landing pages serve a single purpose, A/B testing on them is especially simple. Take full advantage of that and don’t be afraid to change elements on your pages.

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