Anatomy of a High-Converting Custom Landing Page

Creating a good custom landing page comes with experience. But, if we know the basics, we can master this art much sooner than the rest. Today, we're going to look at the anatomy and traits of a highly-converting landing page. Follow these guidelines and see your landing page deliver the results—right from day one. This guide is not about tools or software solutions to create such page but it's all about coming up with the right framework and skeleton for the same. Once you get a good grasp of the landing page anatomy, feel free to use your favorite tool to materialize it on your website. No matter what the goal of your landing page is, the pointers discussed below apply to all of them. If you're making a custom landing page for the first time, make sure the design part is tackled by a professional. The investment made on the design will get recovered quite easily at a later stage. Let's get started and learn about the structure of a—performing—custom landing page that's capable of generating leads and customers.

Website design layout on different devices

Remember, while designing such elements for a business website, it's not about getting huge traffic. What matters most is the conversion rate that is precisely quantifiable by you.

In general, every marketing effort—done online—is a combination of technical stuff combined with the best practices relevant to that effort. This principle applies to custom landing pages as well.

Before you go ahead creating one for you, these questions must be answered.

Do you have enough technical resources to create a landing page?
Are you clear about the goals and returns associated with your landing page?
Are you familiar with the basics of lead capturing system?
Are you ready to devote enough time in analysis and optimization?

If the answer to all these questions is YES, you've already taken the first step towards creating a killer landing page.

So, let's get started and go through a ~~not so~~ simple process of creating a powerful custom landing page.

Follow the One Page—One Goal Principle

I'm assuming, you've already done your preliminary homework and you have the answers to the following questions.

What product or service you're going to sell or promote?
How it solves the most common problem of the prospects?
Who's the target audience?
How you're going to channel them towards your landing page?

Phew! Is that too much even before you start thinking about the design of your landing page? Well, all this research and information will serve as a foundation to build a business generating page.

With all this information in hand, the first thing that needs to be taken care of is the goal or purpose of your custom landing page.

That's where most landing pages fail.

Either the goal is not clearly reflected through the content or the landing page unsuccessfully tries to accomplish several goals at a time.

Throughout the copy, a landing page should address one and only one goal.

For example, the moment you plan to sell two or more products on a single landing page, you're a dead duck! This approach leads to indecision and confusion in prospect's mind.

Remove Distractions and Unrelated Exit Doors

Landing pages are like honeypots made for capturing sales. A slight distraction can hurt your efforts to generate business through it.

In this context, what do you mean by DISTRACTION?

Well, any web page element that contributes in diverting the mind of the prospect is considered as a distraction or a conversion killer.

There are two types of distractions that ruin even a well-designed landing page populated with killer persuasive content.

Unnecessary content sections - Apart from the primary content section, a good landing page needs none other to avoid any kind of distractions. Often we do not remove header, sidebars and footer from the landing page. This is one of the huge mistakes that lead to poor conversions.
Unnecessary or irrelevant hyperlinks - Links like privacy policy and disclosure should be completely removed from the landing page. They can distract a prospect very easily. And if these links are present near the checkout section, nothing can be worse than that.

The more you prune and weed out unrelated junk from your landing page, the more it converts.

A good landing page always avoid irrelevant or unnecessary exit doors.

If you struggle to mess with code for removing these elements from your landing page, you can take help of a plugin to get things done—quickly.

If you're making several landing pages with almost a similar layout, it's always better to create a WordPress page template to reuse it again and again across the whole website.

Combine Text, Bullet Lists, Illustrations and Videos (If Any)

Instead of going ahead with a long text-only version, opt for using all the available visual elements for presenting your value proposition in a strong way.

The two most effective options are bullet lists and custom images.

Depending on the type of product you're selling, you may also include short intros through videos. There are two things that need to be taken care of while preparing videos for your landing page.

They should not exceed 2 or 3 minutes in length and must also include prompts, speech bubbles, and other effects to make them interesting and irresistible.

If you lack the necessary skills but have enough budget, you can hire professionals to create a highly-converting video for your landing page.

When it comes to including bullet lists on a landing page, one common mistake ruins your entire effort.

What's that?

Instead of using a default (plain) bullet list supported by your content management system, use custom lists that include image as the bullet.

Does that make SENSE?

Similarly, typography and white space play a big role in designing a killer layout that doesn't repel the reader.

Fonts used for different sections (titles, headlines, sub headlines), margins, and alignment of key sections must be designed with great care.

Use C.R.A.P principles of design to get things done - the RIGHT way!

I'll strongly suggest you avoid the use of multiple loud colors (as a background) in a limited space on the landing page. It's one of the conversion killers that are hard to detect through analytics tools.

If you're embedding multiple videos on your landing page, DO NOT stuff them at close proximity to one another.

The sooner you learn the art of combining various on-page multimedia elements in a correct way, the better landing page comes out from your design efforts.

Add Testimonials to Make a Big Difference

Although there of hundreds of active landing pages that convert very well even without any kind of testimonials, adding them can certainly give a huge boost to your existing squeeze page.

The inclusion of this important section becomes more essential if the product is relatively new and has a decent price tag.

Testimonials can backfire too!

What???

Don't panic, I'm talking about the poor implementation of the same.

Have you ever seen a testimonial that appears crappy, artificially crafted with no credible information about the person who's firing a one-liner - 'Great product!'?

With such kinds of testimonials, all your time and energy spent in designing an appealing landing page will go in vain.

First, we'll see what options you have at your disposal to collect the right kind of testimonials.

There are two common ways for the same.

Either you compile a list testimonials provided by the company who created the product or you directly contact some of the customers to get the relevant data.

The latter option may be a bit cumbersome process, but the results are—above excellent.

Before embedding a testimonial in your landing page, make sure it fulfills the following criteria.

Thumbnail image - If potential buyers can see the person's photograph, it adds more weight to the testimonial and nothing can be better than that.
Full name - Instead of using the first name, provide complete name of all the individuals included in the testimonials.
Short intro or bio - This essentially means who the person is and his profession. Here I must emphasize that this entry is not mandatory.
Link to his website or social media account - This is one of the huge credibility boosters that validates the testimonial. You don't necessarily need to hyperlink the same, but a legible entry is a must.
Meaningful testimonial copy - And last but not the least is the real part—the testimonial itself. Instead of collecting one-liners (e.g. What a great product!), concentrate on collecting real testimonies where the beneficiaries are talking about several benefits they're enjoying since the product purchase.

If you have enough testimonials in your database, spread them across the whole page at the targeted locations.

Testimonials—if done correctly—are like adrenalin for a custom landing page.

I must repeat it once more.

Use testimonials very carefully on your landing page. They should be authentic and should not appear artificially crafted—at all.

Test, Track, and Optimize

I call it a BIG SIN when landing page elements are not tagged at all.

Do you track and analyze your website's or blog's traffic? Yes?

Then why not do the same for one of the important pages that can bring you—big money?

What's the advantage?

You track them, you collect data, you find pitfalls, you find weaker sections, you optimize them, and in turn, you get more business.

Here's an easy-to-follow tutorial for using Google Optimize to track your landing page performance.

If you're already getting a large volume of traffic, design multiple landing pages for the same product and test each one of them simultaneously.

There's one more TRICK to make most out of your tracking efforts.

Through this advanced Google analytics tracking script, you can monitor how prospects scan your landing page. This essentially means that you can easily keep an eye on causal scanners and readers.

Your analytics dashboard is the key to more sales from your custom landing page.

Biggest affiliate marketers and professional bloggers use web analytics to come up with killer landing pages through extensive testing and tracking on a continuous basis.

It's not that hard and once you get hang of it, you can easily come up with unique and intuitive ways to track important actions and events happening on your landing pages.

What's Your Biggest Concern?

Now it's your turn to share your experiences with custom landing pages you've built to date.

What's the biggest challenge you've always faced while designing a landing page?

If your landing page is not giving the desired results, here's a simple exercise for you.

Go to your landing page and note down at least two important factors that may be hindering conversions.

Share it here and we'll try to remove the obstructions if any.