Hey everyone I’m Indradip Ghosh. I am the founder of Conversion Valley Agency. Today I’m talking about landing pages Optimization. I saw that only a few marketers actually know the secret, but most people think it’s part of web design. But unfortunately, it’s not. If your goal is to become a great marketer ( I mean it, because this blog is not for every marketer) then this blog is only for you. Here is the things you can expect from my blog..

Table of Content

What Is a Landing Page?

Let’s start with the most basic of questions: what exactly is a landing page? If you went by the name alone, you might think a landing page is whatever page your potential customer lands on when they visit your website. But you’d be wrong.

Just because someone visits your website and lands on your homepage, that doesn’t make your homepage a landing page.

In fact, if you EVER use your homepage as a landing page – and actively send traffic to it – you might as well take a lighter to your ad money and watch it go up in flames.

A landing page isn’t just where your potential customers land. It’s built with a very specific goal in mind – to convert those potential customers like crazy.

Depending on your goals, “converting like crazy” might mean collecting email addresses, selling your newest product or service, or gathering registrations for an upcoming event, webinar, or virtual summit.

But no matter what your end goal, the most important characteristic of a landing page is that it’s designed specifically to take your web traffic and convert it to reach that goal.

Different Landing Page Categories

Just like you wouldn’t use the same pickup line on every Tinder match, you shouldn’t use the same landing page for every function in your business. As mentioned, not all landing pages have the same end goal, and there are different landing page categories to drive different results. These include:

Splash Page 

A splash page, also known as a welcome gate, is an introductory page that acts as an in-between for people visiting your website. It’s typically used to immediately gather email addresses from your website traffic.

Real talk? Splash pages are useless. In fact, they’re more likely to hurt your conversions.

Do yourself a favor and skip the splash page. If you’re set on some sort of welcome screen, use pop-up instead.

Squeeze Page : 

A squeeze page is the most common type of landing page. It gets its name from its primary purpose, which is to “squeeze” information out of your potential customers. What are you squeezing? Typically, email addresses.

Your email list is literally the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Squeeze pages are specifically designed to entice your visitors to pony up and hand over their email addies, usually in exchange for something they want to get their hands on, like an e-book, video, cheat sheet, or another lead magnet.

Sales Page

A sales page is – you guessed it – designed to go straight for the sale. Sales pages work best for warm traffic that’s already familiar with your brand (although, if you’re a total boss with an irresistible offer, it can work for cold traffic as well).

Sales pages go right for the money by a) building the value in your offer, b) creating a sense of urgency, and c) driving the sale.
Alright, so now that we’ve revisited what a landing page is, let’s take a look at the logistics of building a landing page.

What Options Do You Have To Build Your Landing Page?

When it comes to building landing pages, you have a few different options:

Custom Landing Page  

If you want to build a unique landing page, your in-house developer or agency partner can whip you up a custom page from

scratch using HTML and CSS. Landing pages are fairly straightforward and don’t take a lot of work on the back end, so any developer worth their salt should be able to deliver what you’re looking for.

The biggest pro of designing a custom landing page? It puts you in the driver’s seat and gives you full control of design and functionality.

Plus, once it’s designed, you don’t have to worry about paying any of those membership fees that you’ll deal with when you go with a landing page builder or subscription service.

Landing Page Builders 

If you don’t have someone on hand to build you a page from scratch, you can also use a landing page builder, which allows you to build your page from a pre-designed template.

If you’re in a hurry or have to churn out a large number of LPs, landing page builders are great; you can’t beat the simplicity of the drag-and-drop.

There are plenty of landing page builders out there (and new ones popping up every day), Again: landing page builders are convenient and easy. But nothing easy comes free, and you’ll definitely pay a premium for that convenience: anywhere from $25 a month for a basic plan all the way to hundreds of dollars per month for more advanced or enterprise plans.

That monthly cost can put a hurting on your ROI, so before you go the landing page builder route, make sure it makes sense for your overall goals and budget. 

When Do You Need A Landing Page? 

What a landing page is: check. How to build one: check. When you need a
landing page: let’s go.

Here’s the short answer: you need a landing page when you want to convert your traffic and drive them to complete specific actions. Nine times out of ten, that action falls in one of three categories:

Anytime you’re looking to drive one of those actions, a landing page should be your go-to solution. End of story.

Ok, the review part of things is over (that wasn’t too painful, right?). Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty and look at the how. In the next chapter, we’ll cover exactly how to build a killer landing page that converts like crazy.

 it’s time to dive deep into the details. We’ll show you exactly how to build a  killer landing page – and what you need to include on every page if you want to see your conversions go through the roof for an upcoming event, webinar, or virtual summit.

But no matter what your end goal, the most important characteristic of a landing page is that it’s designed specifically to take your web traffic and convert it to reach that goal.

The One Step You Need To Take Before Building Your Landing Pages

 But before we start our deep dive, there’s one step we need to cover that
happens before you build your landing page. This one step will have an insane effect on your conversions, but it’s one that way too many marketers breeze over. And that’s getting to know your audience.

Some people are in such a hurry to get their offer out to the market, they don’t take the time to get to know the people they’re making an offering to. And that’s the biggest mistake you can make.

Before you even think about building a landing page, it’s absolutely crucial that you know who you’re building that landing page FOR. If you don’t know your audience, you can’t build a page that speaks to them. Your customers are looking for a personal experience, and if you have no idea who they are, you can’t deliver it.

Be warned: if you skip this step, be prepared to hemorrhage a massive amount of time and money.

Before you build your landing page, at an absolute minimum, there are three
basic questions you need to be able to answer about your audience:

Without the answers to those three questions, you’re shooting in the dark.
With those answers? You have a roadmap to creating a personalized landing page strategy that will connect with your audience on the deepest level. 

I also, recommend taking it a step further and using those answers to create an ideal customer avatar. An ideal customer avatar is a composite character that acts as representation of your core demographic. It gives you a “real” person to target all of your content and communications to, which will make your landing page feel more personalized and deliver that one-on-one experience that your customers crave.

When you’re creating your ideal customer avatar, go nuts: give them a name, an age, a location, and a back story: the more specific you get with your ideal customer avatar, the easier it will be to build your landing page, write copy, and customize your offer in a way that speaks to them. With your landing page, your goal is always to have your visitors think “Wow… it’s like they’re talking directly to me!” The more your audience feels like you “get” them, the more willing they’ll be to shell out their email address, money, or whatever else you’re looking to get.

So, the moral of the story: before you create your landing page, do your research, know your audience, and create an ideal customer avatar. That way, you know who you’re creating your landing page FOR – and you can use that knowledge to drive your strategy and conversions.

Elements Of A Great Landing Page 

Now, it’s time to talk about actually building your landing page. There are certain elements that every great landing page – no matter what niche, industry, or business you’re in – needs to have in order to convert:

Direct Response Copy

You can’t have a website – landing page or otherwise – without a copy. But on a landing page, the copy is KING. It’s the secret ingredient, the special sauce, the piece of resistance to converting your visitors.

There are a few copy categories that you need on every single landing page:

The Right Headline 

If you can’t come up with a great headline when you’re building your landing page, you might as well save yourself the time and give up right then and there, because you’re going nowhere fast. Your headline is one of the most important pieces of copy on your landing page.

Just like skimming a newspaper headline to see if they want to pick up a copy of the paper, your audience uses your landing page headline to decide whether you’re worth the time and energy it takes to continue reading. And if your headline is a dud, literally nothing else you do matters – your audience won’t make it past that first line.

You need a headline that speaks to people. It needs to jump off the page and immediately grab people’s attention. Your headline should be:

Informative: it lets your audience know where they are and why they’re there.

Engaging: it hooks their attention and makes them want to keep reading.

Relevant: it’s an accurate representation of what’s to come on the rest of your landing page (people don’t like to be duped, and if your headline doesn’t match the rest of your content, it doesn’t matter how informative or engaging it is – your audience won’t convert

An Offer They Can’t Refuse

When you get down to it, the point of a landing page is this: you’re offering your visitors something (like a piece of content or a service) in exchange for something else (like their email address or a purchase). So, if you want them to take action and give you what you’re asking for, you need to build the value of what you’re offering.

Or, as they’d say in “The Godfather”, arguably the best film of all time – you need to make them an offer they can’t refuse.

In order to convert, your offer needs to be: Clear and easy to understand: there should be no question as to what the audience is getting in return for their email/purchase/registration.

Value-based: your offer copy should be focused on how your offer can fill a need or solve a problem.

Concise: while we’re sure you could go on and on about how amazing your offer is, keeping it short and to the point will drive more conversions

Persuasive: if there ever was a place to bust out your salesperson chops, your offer is it.

Best Practices For Copy 

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when crafting copy for you don’t use over-complicated language. Keep your copy clear and easy to understand. Be as concise as possible. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short. If you don’t need a word or sentence, get rid of it. Trim the fat.

People don’t read, they scan. Make your copy scannable by using bullet points, subheadings, data, statistics, and bolding key points. Avoid big blocks of text like the plague.

Use easy-to-read fonts and sizes; if your audience has to put on magnifying glasses to read your copy, they’re not going to read it.

Visuals:

Your copy is important, but no one wants to look at a landing page that looks like a page out of a textbook. The right visuals will elevate your landing page, make it look more polished and professional, build the value of your offer and drive conversions in a big way – up to 300%.

Some visual design elements that can take a landing page from “meh” to “WOW” include:

Colors:

Colors are more than just the visually-stimulating portions of the rainbow. The colors you choose for your landing page play a huge part in how it’s received by your audience. By leveraging the principles of color psychology, you can use color ninja-style to appeal to your audience’s unconscious color associations and inspire specific emotions and

Actions. So, for example, let’s say you want to frame your company as trustworthy (who doesn’t?). Then you’d want to incorporate blue into your palette, which inspires confidence. If you want to create a sense of excitement to drive purchases, red will give your audience that jacked-up anxious feeling that puts them in the right mood for dropping big bucks.

You definitely want to use color, but remember: you don’t want too much of a good thing. Don’t go crazy – stick to three colors in your palette; more than that and you risk looking like a bag of Skittles threw up on your landing page.

Photos:

Photos are a tricky thing. If you have a photo that perfectly supports a bullet point in your offer, then sure, you’ll want to include it. But don’t slap a bunch of photos on your landing page just for the sake of making it “look good”; it

won’t add anything to the experience and can actually detract from your messaging. And always, always, ALWAYS use custom photos. Stock images are easy-to-spot, scream “generic” and will 100% turn off savvy customers.

Charts:

If you’ve got a ton of numbers, data, or statistics floating around in your landing page copy, it will feel overwhelming to your visitors (especially the visual learners). Take those numbers and crunch them into a custom chart graphic; it brings your data to life in a much more engaging (and, let’s be honest, less boring) way.

Arrows :

Landing pages are not the place to be subtle. If you want to call attention to something, go big and go obvious. Big, bold arrows can direct your reader’s eye to exactly where you want them to go – and help increase conversions along the way.

So how to build and what to include on your landing page is covered. Now, it’s time to move onto the next level: optimizing your landing pages.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, optimization is “an act, process, or methodology of making something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible.”

When applied to landing pages, it’s the act of continually changing and evolving your page to deliver more value to and convert more of your visitors. Or, in other words, continuing to make your page more awesome (and as a result, making more money).

But how, exactly, do you do that?

Testing

The most effective way to optimize your page is through testing, testing, and more testing. We know it sounds boring, but testing WORKS. Because here’s the deal: what you think will work and what will actually work are more often than not two completely different things.

Landing pages aren’t the place to follow your instincts. Sometimes the ugliest pages that make the least sense to you are the ones that convert the best. And the only way to know whether your idea will convert is to give it a trial run with your audience.

There are two main testing methods for optimizing your landing pages:

A/B Testing

A/B testing (aka split testing) is when you create two identical versions of your landing page; identical, that is, save for one core element. Once you have your two versions, you test them against each other to see which converts at a higher rate.

Testing different landing page elements can help boost your conversion in a serious way.

HubSpot ran a test and found that a whopping 21% more people clicked on a red CTA button on their page than a green one, a lucrative piece of information they would’ve never known without the good old A/B test. There are tons of landing page elements you can test during A/B testing,

including:

Headline

Offer copy

Call-to-action

Colour palettes

Font size

Button size

Button colour

Images

Offer

Bonuses

Once you’ve run your split test and know which version converts better, you take the more successful of the two and create another A/B test to test another element. You keep split testing different elements on the page until you have a landing page that’s converting like crazy. Done and done.

Multivariate testing 

Multivariate testing is like A/B testing on steroids; the concept is the same, but it tests way more variables – and way more versions of the page – at once. Think of it as “A through Z testing”; A/B testing pits one page against another. In multivariate testing, you might test ten or 20 or 100 different landing pages at once.

Marketers love multivariate testing because it will get you to the highest

converting the landing page quicker than A/B testing. But it’s definitely more of a hassle to set up and execute, so make sure you have the support (and patience) before you go down this road.

The Framework For Testing

Just like a neurobiologist uses a framework to conduct every experiment, you as a marketer want to follow the same framework when running your A/B or Multivariate tests.

Ask A Question

What question are you trying to investigate? What information do you want to gather from your test?

Create A Hypothesis

What is your predicted outcome for your tests? What do you think is going to happen?

Conduct An Experiment

Run the tests.

Gather Data and Draw Conclusions.

What happened during the tests? Which landing page performed better?

Then go right back to the beginning and start investigating another question. When you keep this framework throughout the testing process, you’ll always be improving on your landing pages by exploring different questions, testing your hypothesis, and drawing the right conclusions – which will lead to more conversions.

Use The Scarcity Trick

Another great way to get the most out of your landing pages and boost conversions is to leverage scarcity. Or, as the kids call it these days, FOMO

(fear of missing out). Scarcity is one of the six “principles of persuasion”

highlighted in the seminal marketing book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Dr. Robert Cialdini. Scarcity creates a sense of urgency to sign up for your offer by instilling a fear of loss within your audience. By placing limits on your offer, your audience worries they’ll miss out and are more likely to sign up.

Examples of scarcity on a landing page include:

Putting an expiration date on your offer

Flash sales

Countdown clocks

“Doors are closing”

“Only X left at this price”

“Buy before X to avoid a price hike!”

Scarcity has been shown time and time again to skyrocket conversion rates. The best marketers use it because it works. And if you want to play with the big boys, you need to be using it, too.

Add a Video

If you want to increase conversions, video is definitely a way to do it: video can increase conversions on a landing page by up to 80%. Not too shabby.

Videos drive up conversions by:

Keeping people glued to your landing page; giving you more time to get your message across. Creating an engaging and interactive experience for your visitors (in terms of engagement, video is always better than static images) Increasing trust and credibility (when your video looks professional, your audience will assume you are, too)

That being said, video isn’t a band-aid for a crappy landing page; it’s not like you can just throw a video up, sit back, and watch the conversions roll in. Videos only increase conversions when they actually DO something: add to the overall experience and build more value for your visitors.

Look at your landing page and ask yourself “how could a video amp this up to the next level?” It might be an explainer video that walks through your offer, saving your visitors the time and hassle of reading your bullets. Or it might be a Q+A with your CEO, which gives a face to your company and makes your audience feel more connected to your brand.

Once you know how you want to use video on your landing page, put in the

effort to script, film, and edit a video that will blow your audience away. A great video will boost conversions, but a sloppy or unprofessional video will only drive people away.

Make sure your landing page is relevant

One of the biggest factors in how you’re ranked with the search engine is relevance.

Your landing page needs to be relevant to what users were searching for when they found you, otherwise, your rankings are going to tank.

So, for example, if you run an ad that promises you’ll teach people how to make money online but the ad leads them to a landing page that’s about how to reorganize your home in three easy steps? You can expect to watch your rankings plummet.

Your ad text and concept should always match the text and concept of your landing page. Think about relevance and consistency when creating your landing pages. Your search engine rankings will thank you

Drive traffic to your landing page

This one should be a no-brainer, but it’s not enough to build an amazing landing page that converts; you need to actually drive traffic to it in order to see results.

There are tons of ways to drive qualified traffic to your landing page:

Facebook ads

Google AdWords

Webinars

Content Marketing

Partnerships

Affiliate Marketing

Email Marketing

Again, just remember to keep that whole “relevancy and consistency” thing in mind and make sure that the look and feel of your landing page match the look and feel of the method you use to drive traffic. So, for example, let’s say you’re driving traffic to your landing page through an email campaign.

The email you send should look similar to your landing page to create a consistent experience for your visitors. If the email has a blue, green, and purple color palette and the landing page is red and black, your visitors are going to be like

“….what?” That confusion and inconsistency will thank your conversions.

Leverage Social Proof

Every marketer worth their salt knows that “all the cool kids are doing it”

doesn’t end in middle school. People (or “sheeple”) are followers, and they’re about a million times more likely to move forward with an offer when they know other people have already done so – especially if those people are people they respect or admire.

Play on that insecure middle school mentality and fill your landing page with social proof. Use testimonials from past customers or logos of recognizable companies and industry leaders you’ve done business with to help boost your credibility – and your conversions.

Match Your Landing Page Offer
With Your Traffic Temperatures To
Explode Conversions

If you went to a restaurant and ordered a medium-rare steak only to be served a steak so well done it might as well be a hockey puck, let’s be real: you’d be sending that steak back.

On a steak, the temperature has to be right before serving. And the same thing is true for landing pages. If you want to convert your visitors, you have to match the temperature of your traffic to your landing page.

There are three kinds of traffic:

Cold Traffic: Cold Traffic (as we like to call cold traffic) are people that have no idea who you are. Just like a random Facebook profile, you’re a complete stranger, and what they see on your landing page will determine if they want to leave or know more.

WarmTraffic: Warm traffic is – you guessed it – just like a second date. They’ve met you, they know you, but they’re certainly not sold on you. They’re trying you out to see if it’s a fit, but one wrong move, and you’re history.

Hot Traffic : Hot traffic is the audience equivalent of a long term relationship. They’ve worked with you in the past, they’re all about you, and they’d spend all their time with you if they could.

Now, if you serve a hot landing page to cold Traffic, their reaction is going to be something like “I have no idea who you are, so…. Yea, this is just too personal.” But if you serve a cold landing page to your hot audience, they’re going to think “IT’S LIKE THEY DON’T KNOW ME AT ALL!”

If you want to maximize conversions, you need to consider where your traffic is coming from and adjust your landing page to best suit that audience. Your messaging, design, and what you include on your LP should be targeted to maximize the relationship you have with your traffic.

Trying To Fit Every Photo, Image, and Graphic In Your Library Onto One Landing Page 

when it comes to landing page design, less is more. If you try to fit every graphic, chart, photo, and another design element onto one landing page, your audience is going to take one look, be totally overwhelmed, and run in the other direction.

Keep your design sleek and simple. Visually overwhelming your audience is a
fast track to crashing your conversion rates.

 Uninterrupted Words

Copy is a good thing. And long-form copy is also a good thing (in most cases, it converts
at a higher rate). But big blocks of copy that look like they belong in a textbook? Not a good thing.

Just like students feel overwhelmed by textbooks, your visitors feel overwhelmed by big blocks of text on your landing page. When your audience looks at those big blocks of text, reading them will feel like a chore – even if they’re full of great content. You want a lot of copy on your landing page, but structure it in a way that’s easy for your audience to digest. Make it scannable

A Confusing Offer 

If your audience has no idea what you’re offering in exchange for their email address/registration/purchase, you’re doing it wrong. A landing page is no place for ambiguity. A confusing offer will have your audience scratching their heads – and taking their business elsewhere.

Your offer should be clear: I am giving you X in exchange for Y. Your audience should understand what they’re getting – and, more importantly, why what they’re getting is an insane value.

No Specific Goal

Sign up for my email list! Watch my video! Like my Facebook page! Buy my product! If you ask your audience to do a million things on your landing page, I’ve got news for you: they’re not going to do any of them.

If you want to drive conversions, keep it simple. Have one call-to-action. The less you ask your audience to do – and the clearer you are in what you want from them – the more of them will, you know, DO it

A landing page is a standalone webpage designed to capture and convert website visitors into customers. This means that, as you’re creating your website content strategy, it might be wise for you to think about the pages on your site which are most likely going to turn those sales prospects into paying customers.

If this sounds like something you need help with – or if you’d just like some more information before diving in – we can do all of that and more!

Contact my team today and let us know what kind of support (or insight) would make the biggest difference for your business goals. And while we’ve been talking conversion rates up until now, don’t forget about bounce rates – they’re an important metric too. 

Claim Your FREE Digital Marketing Blueprint To Double, Triple, or Even Quadruple Your Business (worth $750)

With the information contained in this guide, you have everything you need to get out there and create killer landing pages that drive conversions and help you hit your business goals. However, if you would like to just have us do it for you and you’re serious about dominating your market and maximizing — down to the last dollar — for a limited time we’re offering you a 30-minute strategy session where we’ll discuss your business goals and challenges and draw up a Digital Marketing Blueprint for you for free.

Please note this is NOT a sales call. You will be speaking with me directly. 

WARNING: Before you claim your free strategy session you must understand that this is only for people serious about setting up their business for long-term success. We’ll do the brunt of the work, but to truly get your sales figures skyrocketing we need your commitment and dedication. If you’re not ready for that please don’t waste our time. But if you are ready to kick your business into overdrive and skyrocket your profits book your FREE strategy session call now.