Landing Page Checklist/Guide

Let’s start creating the Landing Page Checklist:

• First & the most important thing is to define your focus or objective before designing the landing page. Identify what action exactly you want from your visitors on your page. You should have some goal like you want your contact form filled or you want newsletter sign ups or the final purchase of product. Your lading page should have the accurate action point which can lead to the achievement of marketing objective. For example, if your marketing objective is to sale some products then your objective would be the “Immediate Sale” and in that case you should highlight the special offerings (if you have any), your USP, any free offer with your products, any discount or guarantee etc. These things will help you to persuade visitors to take the required actions like sigh ups, purchase etc. and at this stage the action point will be a “Buying Button”, so your page must have shopping cart, checkout service or any quick buying buttons on that sales page. All of these services will allow you to make transactions quickly. Agree?

• Don’t forget to define yourself. When a visitor first comes to the website, chances are they want to find out a little more about you. Information about you adds instant credibility to the site. You can create a separate About Us page on your site. It will put a face to your site through profiling your company, business policies, and partners. It will humanize your site to your visitors. It will help visitors to understand the site as a whole. It will work as a way for your readers to know you on a personal level. Otherwise many times it is difficult for visitors to pull out his or her credit card on the spot and make the purchase.

• Try to highlight the undeniable sales points with powerful psychological triggers. This means you should have content a mix of sales points & what visitors will gain from your offering & what they might loose if they don’t. Say for example, if you are selling some cosmetics which cure the acne. Then you should highlight your best selling points like discounts, guarantee, money back guarantee etc. etc., but simultaneously don’t forget to highlight acne as the biggest issue which can harm overall look & personality & what might be the benefits/ results once someone get rid of this problem. These psychological factors are very helpful in getting the conversions or the required actions. You can miss the final sale if you miss any of these 2 things.

• Take care of the information flow. Don’t put information randomly on landing page. All information should be in right context & in an appropriate manner. Visitor should not loose interest or focus …anyhow.

• Also, don’t forget to highlight the alert factor which instantly create the urge for visitors to act immediately like if you have a specific offer for limited period then you can highlight this as “Offer is valid till…” . But don’t create unnecessary hype with misleading or false information otherwise you will loose credibility very soon.

• Try to generate maximum trust as much as you can. Users or visitors normally hesitate to give their personal contact information & other details. Try to show your authenticity to them by defining your secure transactions policy, any authoritative seal etc. You should always define them the purpose of asking for specific details with the guarantee of not selling/ reveling these information to others like spammers & hackers.

• Refine your landing page by eliminating unwanted or unnecessary elements. Unneeded baffled information can distract the visitors. It should have very specific & relevant information as people expect it & they can be disappointed by not getting the same.

• Don’t overlook the layout & design of page. It is very helpful to catch the user’s attention. Mostly visitors leave the site with in 7 seconds because of the unprofessional & catchy look. So, now you can understand the importance of looks ;)

• Be precise or to the point while asking for information. Don’t put a lengthy fill up form by making all the fields mandatory. Keep the form as short as you can. Don’t expect to fill all unnecessary information. They may leave your site as they might not have too much time to fill a big form.

• Don’t forget the “Thank You” page. Thank you page basically appears when required action has been completed on your site. We should optimize this page. We can optimize it by placing some important links of the site (which can be useful for visitors) on this page, we can ask for our free newsletters (if this is a thank you page of sales or sign ups etc), joining mailing list, we can offer free E-Books etc. which opens up more means through which you can up-sell.

• Landing page should not be a splash page as it can confuse a visitor. We should avoid using flash, animation & other fancy code to fascinate the visitors as all these increases the loading time of the page. We should focus on simple & clear layout that allow visitors to find what they want in the shortest time available.

In this guide I have tried to highlight all important factors, though there is always a scope of elaboration.

Your comments & suggestions are always welcome. In fact comments will really help me to research more on the subject matter.