The Six Steps of Landing Page Design

Last week I started a mini series on landing pages, which relates to your internet marketing efforts.

The good news is a landing page designed for higher conversion rates probably won’t cost you much more than landing pages you are creating now. It’s more of a paradigm shift, a better way of thinking.

And with some agents saying they are lucky to sell one house a month, better conversion of leads into clients, especially buyer clients is more important than ever.

The bad news, however, is this: it will take you more time and thought. But…you take the time and effort and mental sweat to convert more leads…and you’ll rise above your competitors.

Many marketers don’t want to work all that hard. They like to coast. If you’re prepared to roll up your shirt sleeves, the battle is yours.

Here’s are the six steps to designing better landing pages.

Step One | Landing Page Conversion Definition

Before you start designing your landing pages, define precisely what you are trying to do:

• Lead generation: Are you giving away an article, report or webinar?
• Branding or education: Do you have a significant amount of content on your site that you want prospects to read and interact with? Then your landing page would serve as a gateway for this content.
• Relationship: Are you promising to send them more info about homes, market conditions?
• Membership: Perhaps you have some sort of “second home” club or charity event you use to generate business.
• Viral: Is this leading into an effort to encourage people to share the content on the landing page?

Note: Landing pages should handle only one conversion goal.

Step Two | Selecting URL and Hosting

Here are some questions to think about when selecting the URL:

• Will the landing page have it’s on URL?
• Will each prospect you target have their own URL? [This only works if you have a house list]
• Will you need many URLs leading to the same landing page?
• Is there a chance someone will need to type in the URL? Or cut and paste?
• Does the URL need to be easy to remember?
• How about easy to spell?

One more consideration: use Google Analytics to track results. It’s free. And then decide who is going to monitor those results. It must be a person who can make changes rapidly.

Step 3 | Landing Page Demographic Research

Get your mind off your campaign, your messaging, your creative, your offer and into your prospect’s mind.

Spend some time thinking about the perfect person you want to convert. Then construct your landing page for that perfect prospect.

Don’t try to segment your market here. If you think your market needs to be segmented, then each segment is it’s own campaign.

Here’s what I know: don’t construct a page to appeal broadly. It won’t appeal to anyone. Visitors have to believe the appeal is perfect for their individual needs.

Step 4 | Landing Page Layout

Make a list of all the elements that need to be on the page and then sketch out how you see the page. This is called wireframing.

One thing you want to pay attention to is where your fold is. This is important when you go to write copy.

Step 5 | Landing Page Copywriting

Divide copywriting into 3 steps.

First, your headline. Understand this is the most important element to your landing page. And slight tweaks to headlines can cause conversion rates to soar or plummet.

Second, consider your call to action. You are asking them to do something, correct? Test this with your headline so that they match. And make sure that your call to action not only appears in the copy but appears in on button: “Join Now”.

Third, go through several rounds of writing copy. This includes sub-headlines, bulleted lists, guarantees, testimonials, explanations and descriptions. Getting the copywriting right is critical to your success so don’t cut corners.

Finally…

Step 6 | Testing, Measuring and Tweaking

Here are your standards:

• Lead generation: leads v. number of visitors, estimated sales value per lead generated by traffic source, readiness of particular leads
• Education: Percent of number of leads who stay on your site longer than 30 seconds. The percent over one minute. Average visit time, page views and click paths of visitors who stay a minute.
• Relationship: Opt-ins or feed subscribers as a percent of total visitors. Percent of return versus one-time visitors. Average dollar amount of each visitor.
• Membership: Length of active members. New Members as a percent of visitors.
• Viral outreach: Viral growth curve [visitors per week charted over time]. Number of line-backs from blogs. Emails generated with email tool.

Keep this in mind: try not to rush a landing page. However, you can test and tweak throughout a campaign to optimize a landing page so you don’t have to wait until you have a perfect landing page to launch.

Testing and tweaking is key to getting the best results.

Next post I promise to share with you 5 of the greatest mistakes in landing page design.