People love making snap judgments. It saves us time. That’s why the old saying “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” is so true. Humans take one look at someone or something and make an immediate decision whether or not to invest any more time or money into it. When it comes to the increasingly important online world, that first impression is your landing page.
The goal of your landing page is to convert the casual browser into a serious customer. If they come to your site and it’s a mess of whirling gifs and theme music, they’re going to hit that back button faster than you can say “lost customer.” Unless you’re Ling’s Cars (https://www.lingscars.com/), which while amazing, is a total aberration. This isn’t 1997, and you’re not a free Geocities site. Putting your best foot forward is far more complex than just not designing something garish.
In terms of raw numbers, the best landing pages will convert in the neighborhood of 27%, while the median is around 2-6%. This is a vast gulf for a number of reasons, including personal taste, design trends, web traffic, and the nature of the site itself. Don’t expect a giant leap immediately, either. Designing the perfect landing page can take a lot of testing, and feedback from your target audience.
Some simple things to keep in mind. The first and most important is the customer experience, you know, the goal of every business ever since the beginning of time. As a rule, customers like intuitive and clean designs. Lucky for you, there are thousands of studies out there of great user-experience design focused on the best ways to get your customers to convert. https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/landing-page-essentials/
Take that simplicity to heart. When it comes to landing pages, clutter is the enemy. Think about it like a house. If the first thing you see when you come through the door is clutter and chaos, chances are you don’t want to stick around to hear their thoughts on car financing.
Think about what the visitor has to see as soon as they arrive on the page. All the important stuff you want your customers to experience when they visit your site. Then make certain that appears “above the fold,” as it were. That’s an old newspaper term, when the big headlines would be on top. In website terms, this means it’s on screen before any scrolling happens.
Lastly, if you want your page to convert, your call to action, whatever it may be, should be simple. That’s the overarching idea of landing page design. You want everything so simple that your customers know exactly what to do.
