Landing Pages – How To Build One That Converts

Mario Didier

Founder, East Side Mafia

How To Craft A Well Designed Landing Page that will get you leads and sales.

First of all, for the benefit of those that do not know what a landing page is, it is simply a page where your users of customers land on when they visit your website.

For example, if you were to do a Google search for “Website Design Singapore“, you would see the results on the search results page.

Upon clicking on the results, you will then go to the respective “Landing Pages”.

However, you will notice that most of the results on the SERP are leading to the respective homepages of the website – which is not a good practice, UNLESS the homepage has been designed as a landing page in itself.

Any good web designer in Singapore will tell you that a well-designed landing page is one of the keys to your internet marketing campaign.

In this article, i will go through all the aspects that a well-converting landing page should possess.

A landing page should be:

Clear and simple
Have a well defined and easily understandable message that will motivate the reader to perform a specific action – buy your product, subscribe to your service, or opt in to your email list.
Trustworthy and believable, you should have testimonials, client logos if any, more testimonials, case studies, evidence that your product or service does what you say it does. We call these trust signals, and there are an essential component to a high performing landing page.

Keep it clean and simple.

A great landing page will not be cluttered with information.

perfect day

Some questions we ask ourselves before designing a landing page:

Is my headline compelling enough?
Should i include a sub headline?
Do the images blend in with the story of the landing page?
Is the use of animation of GIFs needed to make this page more appealing, or shall we just use static images
What is the ratio of white space that’s needed to maximize the visual impact of the design?
Have we tested enough fonts? Do we have a strategic A/B font testing plan that will result in more conversions?
Do we have scarcity signals? Countdowns, “While Stocks Last”, “Limited Stock Available”
Do we have enough testing plans for CTA buttons, are the CTA buttons on the page sufficient?
Where does the CTA button bring our visitors?
Do we need a pre-sell lander?

These are some tough questions, and they can be hard to answer, so we strongly suggest asking these questions BEFORE you start your campaign, not when it is failing, and you’re struggling to get results.

Failing to plan for landing page design can have detrimental results on your paid traffic campaigns.

At East Side Mafia, we believe that every campaign deserves its own landing page, and some campaigns may have hundreds of landing pages, dynamic keyword insertion landing pages etc.

The Most Important Elements Of Landing Page Design (In Order)

Copywriting
Layout
Design

Number 1 & 2 may be interchangeable, according to different scenarios and campaigns, but number 3 is ALWAYS last.

In our Website Design Agency, We will NEVER design a landing page with dummy text, and fill it in later on according to the design.

Our practice is always to write the ad copy first, which takes the most time and thought, design the layout, and subsequently send it to the design team.

If you want some great resources to landing pages, we suggest visiting the following sites:

Land Book
Swiped
Instapage Blog
Unbounce Blog

One copywriting resource that i highly recommend is Copyhour.com.

But before you buy anything from them, make sure you’re willing to commit to performing the tasks for 30 days in a row, if not you’ll be wasting your money.

Basically you pay $499, and they send you the best performing sales letters of all time, and you have to rewrite those letters by hand.

The concept is to internalize and understand how and why those letters were written.

This has made me a better copywriter and is BY FAR the most effective method to improve your copywriting skills.

Another amazing article i would recommend reading would be “Using Psychology To Get Conversions”

The article explains how human beings make irrational choices based on what you show them and their past experiences.

For example, simply have images of men and woman in white lab coats in your landing page would project the impression that your product is endorsed by the medical community – which is why you see this technique being used all over the marketplace, even detergent ads are now using this.

Another example – Perfume ads always have images of Good looking men and woman, simply by looking at these images, our minds are conditioned to assume that by buying that particular brand of perfume, we will exude the sex appeal similar to the models in the ads.

The funny thing is, the models in those ads are not even using the perfume most of the time.

This is known as conversion psychology.

A quick recap of what your landing page needs to have:

Your headline has to be compelling and encourage your user to read the rest of your page
Images have to be clear, and appeal to your users emotions, and try to make them make decisions based on emotions
Your copy should be clear, and easily understandable – a good rule of thumb is that a 16 year old teen should be able to understand it.
Trust signals should be clearly presented and well positioned, testimonials should be displayed prominently
Your lead form should be easy to fill up, and only contain information that’s necessary for your offer.
Your CTA buttons should be compelling, and make the user want to click on them, the colours should be tested vigorously for conversions, and only the best converting colours and fonts used
Your scarcity elements, sense of urgency etc should be scattered throughout your landing page.