A landing page, which literally means a “page of arrival”, is the page we ultimately want to direct our customers to. Once they have “landed” there, we do everything we can to convince them to buy our product, subscribe to the newsletter or register on our portal; in short, to “click” that famous button.

Every click we earn is a “conversion” for us, that is, an action that turns a simple visit into actual or potential profit.

Getting that click is nowhere near as easy as it seems; this is why landing pages are the subject of tutorials, courses, seminars and even paid software. We at Parklab are experts in this area, and in this article we explain how to create an effective landing page for your website.

Who needs a landing page and how to create one?

We can say that almost every website needs a landing page. Even the local five-a-side football school could benefit from a page that includes a contact form and invites users to fill it in to get information about its courses.

The value of a landing page is clear above all for those who sell products online. In that case, every page of the company website, from the home page to blog articles, aims to win readers’ trust and turn them, ideally, into satisfied customers. For this to happen, visitors need to somehow “land” on the landing page, become leads (potential customers) or complete the purchase.

Even those who cannot sell their product or service online, for example a real estate agency, can use a landing page to collect visitors’ contact details. How can we convince them to hand over their email? There are many ways to persuade users to sign up to our site, though one of the most effective methods is educational marketing: by offering them valuable informational content for free, such as the classic info-product, we can obtain the essential contact information and use it in the future to send newsletters, offers and other commercial information.

The essential components for creating a landing page

What does a landing page look like? If you want to create an effective landing page, make sure you include, one by one, the key elements we are about to present.

Two types of landing page

Landing pages differ from one another in many respects, but they share more or less the same structure. One way to classify them is to distinguish them by the type of conversion.

Sales page

Sales pages are pages built around a purchase, where the customer’s click corresponds to a financial transaction. These landing pages have to convince the visitor to spend money and therefore need to be particularly convincing. Here customer reviews are a must: people are in fact more inclined to buy what others have already chosen and recommended in the past. Sales pages very often include the “satisfaction or your money back” formula.

Squeeze page

The term “squeeze”, as in to squeeze out, refers to landing pages built for the purpose of collecting the visitor’s details. They often give the customer a product or service for free in exchange for signing up, such as an ebook, a free assessment, a discount on the product or an online seminar. These landing pages are usually barer than the previous ones and consist of a single screen: they do not aim to sell, but to collect the user’s contact details.

A template for creating a landing page: an example

The essential template of a landing page includes the following elements on the left:

• Headline
• Short introductory text
• Image or video

And the following elements on the right:

• A form to fill in
• Button with a call to action

These are the pillars of your page, to which you can add further elements to make it even more effective, such as:

• Customer reviews
• Certifications
• Social buttons
• F.A.Q.
• “Satisfaction or your money back”

Everything else should then be placed lower down as the page scrolls, alternating with the form and the call to action. These last two can, and sometimes must, be repeated at the bottom of the landing page as well.

For your landing page you can use the well-known AIDA method, a theoretical marketing principle that also applies to online sales pages. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. After catching the visitor’s attention, for example with your page headline, you can capture their interest with a video or an image, leading them to desire the product/service and to make the purchase or sign up.

Pay attention to the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), an element your landing page should not be without. The unique selling proposition is what makes your product unique or better than the others: a limited-time offer, product quality, a particular feature or value for money. The USP can be expressed through the copy, the image or the video.

Finally, to be effective, your template must get straight to the point. The user should be faced with a single possible action, namely completing the purchase and going ahead with that famous click. The menu bar too is one more distraction, absolutely to be avoided.

If you are looking for a template example, you will find hundreds of them online, as we will see in the next paragraphs.

Monitoring and optimizing a landing page

Having created and published a landing page is not in itself a guarantee of success, especially if the work has not been carried out by a professional. And even then, a landing page almost always turns out to be improvable and in need of small, sometimes large, corrections and changes over time.

Tools such as Google Analytics will help you measure the conversions you achieve and understand your users’ behavior. If your page does not generate the profit you hoped for, or none at all, there is certainly something wrong. From colors to copy, from images to page layout, any detail can undermine the success of your landing page. The choice of keywords too can turn out to be wrong: the people landing on the page are probably not interested in the product and were not searching for exactly that. So, to attract your potential customers, you might need a small restyling.

Pages that are too crowded, or the presence of distracting elements, can also affect the conversion rate negatively. The message must be clear and concise, without creating confusion or leading the reader to ask further questions.

As you will have gathered, the topic is complex, and to master it fully you need to learn not only the basics of web marketing, but also the principles of SEO copywriting , of web design and of marketing in general.

How to create an effective landing page

Creating a truly effective landing page without any programming knowledge can seem like a monumental task. Fortunately, various tools come to our aid, sometimes free and sometimes paid.

We are talking about sites such as KickoffLabs, Strikingly, Instapage, Ucraft, Webnode and Wix. Paid sites offer more flexibility, although in some cases they can prove more cumbersome and harder to use. Some sites, such as Strikingly and Wix, offer a free version and one or more paid packages; with the free version you are entitled to a subdomain, which you can customize by purchasing one of the packages on offer.

Some sites connect to email marketing and turn your newsletters into inviting express shuttles heading straight to your landing page, with no stops along the way. Some programs let you build your entire site, while others are designed exclusively to generate landing pages and are therefore more specific.

To avoid going in blind, you can rely on web marketing experts like us at Parklab. We will help you build an effective landing page starting from your product or service, taking care of every aspect of the marketing and every single graphic detail together with you.