7 Important Elements of a Landing Page
Landing pages have a very specific job to perform for your business. When you create and optimize a landing page for a product, service or any other reason, the goal is always to convert prospects into leads or visitors into subscribers. It’s not easy to get visitors to become buyers and most companies would love to set this process on automatic.
Creating a great landing page is serious business and not as easy as one might think. If you don’t do it right, you could waste marketing dollars and end up with a ton of visits, but very few prospects or clients. Here’s a quick look at seven elements every landing page should include.
Incredible Headline
Before you add any other element to your landing page, you better have an attention-grabbing, knock-your-socks-off headline. Without a great headline, engaging visitors on your landing page becomes a much harder task. Your headline should:
- Grab the attention of the reader
- Tell the visitor what the product or service will do for them; quickly. This can also be done by an accompanying image
- Be concise and to the point. Usually, less than twenty words and around 10 words is best.
You don’t have to use a clever headline to grab attention. Sometimes simple is better and you may only need a few words to create a very powerful, attention-grabbing headline.
Excellent Pictures
While the quality of your pictures doesn’t need to be the best in existence, they should be clear and not pixelated. Your landing page should include large images to help keep the reader engaged and communicate your message.
Did you know the human brain can process an image about 60,000 times faster than the written word? Make sure images are found early on your landing page to grab attention and keep the reader interested.
Touch on Pain Points
One of the keys to selling something is to touch on the pain points of the target audience. Whether this type of pain is physical or emotional, the reader should understand the pain they are suffering without your product or service. Then, they should understand how your product or service will alleviate that pain.
It’s important to cover what your users will lose without your product and not just what they will gain. It’s often more powerful to motivate someone by what they might lose rather than what they might gain. For example, it may feel nice to receive $50, but it may be far more painful to lose that $50.
Value and Benefits
Another very important element of any landing page is known as the value proposition. This is basically the benefits of the product or service your customers will gain when they buy it. The easiest way to look at the value and benefits is to simply answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” for the consumer.
This essential element can be spread all throughout the landing page instead of just in one area. All of the benefits, however, need to be clearly focused on the visitor and not on you or your company.
Be Able to Build Trust
There are several ways to create trust throughout a landing page. While the way you go about it isn’t important, building trust is very important. The last thing you want to do is sabotage the trust of a visitor with huge claims you cannot back up.
Your landing page doesn’t need to be perfect, but it does need to include high quality, compelling content. With excellent copywriting and honest claims, your landing page will build trust with visitors.
A Contact Method
It would be rather silly to create a landing page without any type of contact method. Of course, you can sell without a contact method, but what will you do if someone has a question? Some of the best landing pages found online today provide multiple ways to contact the company, such as an email address, contact form, phone number or physical address. You may even encounter a pop up allowing you to easily chat with a customer service representative.
You need to provide at least some form of contact to help build trust with consumers. Without any type of contact, they may assume you’re not a real company. The best choice
is to always include a physical address, phone number and email or contact from.
You don’t have to use live chat, but it can be very helpful. Live chat can give customers more assurance that your company will support them if they have questions or need help after the purchase.
A Very Powerful Call to Action
The Call to Action or CTA tells the visitor what you want them to do. It should be large, compelling, include a button and should be of a contrasting color.
Whether you’re optimizing landing pages yourself or you have hired someone to do it, you need to make sure these seven elements are a part of every page. Without these seven landing page elements, you’ll likely have an uphill battle to fight to get new customers.
