Landing Page Conversion Short Course – 6 Elements
Successful communication for persuasion has always been about reducing and simplifying the message. Most business owners will include 2 or 3 times the information on a web page or advertisement that should be there. It is the same way that our nervous system create order from chaos. Our entire nervous feeds millions of bits per second to our brain, but our conscious mind only processes about 20-50 bits per second. That means that we make sense of the universe by what our nervous systems throws away. It is the same with advertisements, landing pages, sales letters, or websites.. For ultimate clarity, we must reduce the details, distill the message, in other words less is more.
It all starts with the headline. For 100 years it has been a principle of advertising that the bulk of work and testing goes into the creation of the headline. Landing pages require the same approach. If you remember the AIDA (Attention, Decision, Interest, Action) formula you will notice that attention is first on the list. As such it is the gate-keeper for aligning the elements.
Fast Access Elements
There needs to be bullets, lists, graphs or illustrations that support and build on the content of the page. This allows the visitor to dip into the content of the site a little bit at a time. First the headline, then the bullets, then a graphic. They drill down step by step , pulling the data to them as they increase their interest
Images
The landing page must have an image that has a connection to your product or service. The image needs to be high quality and one of the central features to the site. The image should reinforce the content, headlines and bullets.
Single Minded Purpose
Remember that the person visiting your landing page most likely got there by searching in Google for a single phrase. This means that eventhough they may have many questions and complex needs, there is still a single phrase that brought them to your website and is the broadest definition of that need. Use that need to grab their attention and offer to satisfy that need in some immediate way and you can turn the visitor into a lead.
WIIFM (What’s In It For Me)
Focus ENTIRELY on the visitor’s needs. Don’t tell your story , it has no place on your landing page unless it relates specifically to how you can uniquely fill your visitor’s needs. If you had 30 seconds to tell a prospect why they should use your service, would you spend any time at all talking about your story, your past, your background. If you did, you would lose their interest quickly.
Pathway To Action
Clear the way for the visitor to take easy action. If the question is whether they call you or fill out a form, remember that they already have a computer mouse in their hand, not their phone. Make the response form as simple as you can while still gathering enough information to be able to contact the lead. You will never close the lead from the response form submission, so gather just enough information to contact them. Whenever you can require one less field to be filled out, your conversion rates just jumped.