Landing Page Design Tips: Increase Your Sales! (Part 1)

profit graph Landing Page Design Tips: Increase Your Sales! (Part 1)

So, you’re not seeing the sales you thought you would when you created your sales pages and landing pages for your product or service? Well, just because you think something looks good, alluring and motivating (to make a purchase) doesn’t mean everyone else does.

I’m about to lay down some tips that make my own landing pages successful for both myself and my clients. Everything you need to know about knocking your conversion ratios clear out the park is about to be broken down to you in simple English. If you take the time to read over this guide, and practice what I preach, there’s simply no way using these tips won’t increase your conversion ratio. Are you ready? Well, let’s get on with it!

The Basics: Simply using these basic rules will ensure you never have a bad landing page for your visitors to run away from. Consider the following information your foundation.

Don’t forward your traffic to your homepage. Your homepage encompasses everything. You want link-driven traffic to land on the most relevant and product or service -specific page possible.
Make sure everything sounds the same. What I mean by, “the same” is, keep the design and tone similar from your landing page to the product page to the checkout page. A successful landing page is a consistent landing page. You want your landing page to flow right into the next page which then should lead to them making a purchase and putting cash in your pocket.
Don’t waste time. There’s an extremely small window of time available to get your visitor from reading about what your selling to paying for it. Don’t bombard your potential customers with unnecessary content. Get to the point!
Make that headline as short and clear as possible. That big, bold text somewhere near the top of the page is going to determine if your visitor keeps reading, stops reading and leaves, or moves on to the next bit of content, but leaves because it doesn’t mesh well with that initial text. Don’t ever try to trick or manipulate your potential customers. You’ll lose more customers than you’ll gain by trying to “outsmart” them.
Match your landing page to the traffic. The same ad on two different sites might bring in the same amount of traffic, but that doesn’t mean it will be the same “kind” of traffic.
Navigation should be almost non-existent on your landing pages. “Trapped” may not be the best way to put it, but you really don’t want anything extra on your landing page that can take the focus off the point(s) you’re trying to make and the product or service you’re trying to sell.
Make your most important points first. Like I mentioned above, you really only have seconds at a time to keep your potential customer interested in what it is you’re trying to sell. Each sentence to push your potential customer one step closer to buying.
Utilize your premium webpage space. This is the space that fits into your visitor’s browser without them having to scroll. Most resolutions on monitors have 800-1000px of vertical viewing area. Currently, my rule is to fit everything on my landing and lead pages withing 900px of page height. My “buy” links are always safely withing half of that web page real estate.
B, C and D better support A. What that means is, if “A” is your title, that main text that gets your visitor to keep reading, every other element (your design and copy, or pictures and text content) better support what your main message is.
Switch things up and monitor your stats. For some sales pages, a video featuring your product or service in action may bring in more sales. For other sales pages, a few pictures could increase sales.
Make it viral. While I’m sure they’ll be replaced one day, at the time of this article, Facebook and Twitter are huge! It’s good practice to gracefully add a Facebook “like” button and a Twitter “Tweet This” button to get your visitors to promote you. It’s free advertising and users of those social media platforms surely love clicking those buttons.
Give ‘em a little something extra, Lagniappe if you will! If you’re gathering any type of data from your visitors, without them purchasing anything, be sure to greet them with a “Thank You” page once they hit the submit button. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to provide something useful to them along with your gratitude. Maybe you could link them to relevant content or give them a free sampling of what it is you’re offering. For instance, if you’re trying to sell an eBook, why not give them a link to the first chapter or two for free?