5-minute guide for building powerful Landing Pages — Landing Page Optimization review

Landing pages (LP) are one of the most important elements of any conversion strategy. What are they? Well, basically they are “standalone web pages, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign”. As their name implies, it is where users “land” when they click on a link that is part of a marketing campaign (social media, e-mail, referral marketing, among others).

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS
Every high converting LP usually:

1. Delivers the promise made in the source (the ad, the email, etc.).
2. Answers users’ questions, reinforces their motivation and addresses possible concerns.
3. Eases the user journey from click to conversion (which can be a sign-up, a purchase, or any other type of conversion).
4. Has a clear path from arrival to conversion goal.

BUILDING PROCESS
The process of creating an effective LP includes the following 6 stages:

Source: cxl.com

1. User Research:

What are the problems of your site? and why are they happening? Some of the tools that can be used to understand our users’ behavior online include:

• Heatmaps/Scroll maps/Click maps: Mapping dynamic user behavior on our site. Hotjar is a very good resource to create such maps.
• Session recorders: Actually recording a high number of user actions on the site. It’s really good for validating optimization hypotheses (For example: Are my users really leaving the site because of a high price? Is a bug affecting the user experience?).
• Feedback polls: Simple and short surveys to get user feedback on the experience of using the page. For example, you could ask: What is most important to you?: Price?, Delivery time?, Quality of content?.
• 5 second tests: Show a marketing piece (LP, Ad, Email, etc.) to the users for 5 seconds and ask about its main message and goal. If you cannot make the user understand your message in the first 5 seconds, it will be very hard for him to understand what you offer. An online resource that I’ve used in the past to create UI design tests such as this one and some others (preference and click tests) is Usabilityhub.com. Try it out, it works really well.
• Read reviews online: Many customers use social media to express their concerns about a product/service. Use this information as possible optimization opportunities!.
• Interviews with actual customers or customer support team: Instead of hypothesizing what customers think and how they behave (what many marketing teams seem to love doing nowadays) see how customers use your product and talk to them about how they perceive it. Customer support agents are also a great source of knowledge since they talk to customers every day; they know their pain points.
• Use Google Analytics to get some quantitative data about how users interact with your site. You can check this article showing 3 reports that will help you understand your audience and site better. Some of the most important aspects that you need to clarify are your main traffic sources/mediums (is it Facebook ads? Google ads? Email? Google search?, etc), your landing, second and exit pages (where users land and exit your page more frequently), your demographic audience breakdown, and the performance of your main campaigns. Expect more articles about this topic soon :).

The overall idea with this qualitative and quantitative research is to perform a full-funnel walkthrough and understand how are your users getting to the site, how are they behaving, and where and why are they exiting the most. This will give you a list of optimization opportunities that you’ll proceed to prioritize and validate.

2. Audit:

The goal of this stage is to evaluate the current page and identify further optimization opportunities. Some of the aspects to consider here include:

• Information Hierarchy: Determine exactly which information is missing and which should be removed. As stated before, our LP should answer users’ questions, reinforce motivation and address possible concerns, then we must have enough information to do so.
• Visual hierarchy: Evaluate the visual disposition of your current site. What points can be improved? Establish the visual architecture you want to have on the new LP.
• Copywriting: Is the copy consistent throughout the page? (See image below). Is there a mismatch between the source (ad, email, etc.) and the LP’s headline?. Remember that good LP’s manage user expectations and deliver on promises.

Source: Source: https://propellerads.com/blog/6-tips-to-create-an-effective-landing-page-2/

• Design: Is design consistent throughout the page? Do the source (ad, email, etc.) and the LP share the same design?

3. Wireframe:

This stage is where we prototype our new optimized LP. There are many online tools to create wireframes, but remember that these can even be manually built. The purpose is to outline the LP structure, positioning all the different elements and messages of your LP.

The 6 main elements that you should consider to include on your LP are (see image below):

• Headline
• Images/Video
• Features/Benefits
• Credibility: Provide social proof by displaying testimonials, customer reviews, partnerships, etc.
• Expectation managers: Elements that tell the user what’s going to happen next. Positive unexpected things have a good impact on users’ perception of our offer, but the opposite is also true, which is why is better to manage expectations soon in the customer journey.
• CTA (Call-to-Action)

Source: https://unbounce.com/

4. Copy/Design:

Go deeper into how your copy and design will look like. A key aspect to consider here is User awareness, which will ultimately determine how you structure your message. Every LP should be built considering how aware of the problem and the solution every user is.

These are the 4 main levels of Awareness any user can have on your product/service:

• Problem aware: If users clicked on your marketing piece (ad, email, etc.), they are most probably aware that they have a problem, but maybe not of a possible solution.
• Solution aware: Users are aware of solutions, but not yours.
• Product aware: Users know your product/service, but they are not entirely sure it suits them.
• Most aware: Users are aware of the problem, your offer, and they actually want it.

5. Implement:

Make a controlled test on different device types and browsers. Then you can get how was the user response to these changes using Google Analytics or other online tools. You can also measure the impact on site loading speed, using Google’s page speed insights tool. This stage will let you identify bugs and major negative impacts on performance metrics before you proceed to actual testing.

6. Test & Optimize:

Many CRO (Conversion Rate Optimizers) overly obsess with AB Testing, but not all sites have enough traffic volume to conduct significant AB tests. These tests normally require large sample sizes (which you can check with online tools such as this one); otherwise, they end up in a lot of false positives, which is never good. Overall, check if you can perform AB testing, and in case you can’t, simply comparing 2 time periods (which should last at least 2 weeks to 1 month) should be enough.

Keep also in mind that, as users’ preferences and online trends evolve over time, this is an iterative process, then you should always perform optimization on your LPs. Once you create and deploy an LP, come back to stage number 1 and analyze user behavior again.

WRAP UP

You can implement all of these steps with any web development approach you use; In case you have no coding expertise, you can use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools such as Unbounce. They have some cool LP templates that will fit the needs of many businesses.

Much of this information was part of the LP optimization program taught by Michael Aagaard on CXL’s Growth Marketing program. I’ve been part of the program for a while now, and I’m honestly quite impressed, as it has a nice mix of practical and strategical advice to become a successful Growth manager.

Want to learn more about the basics of Growth Marketing? Want to find out more about how this industry is evolving in Latinamerica? Make sure to listen to our Podcast: El Antipodcast: El cliente NO tiene la razon on all streaming platforms

SOURCES

• LP optimization program. CXL.