Landing Page Design and Its Impact on Internet Marketing
By Gregory Smyth
Analysis has shown that people spend eight seconds or less assessing a website's landing page to see if it matches their expectations. Unfortunately, this assessment is often based on factors other than your product offering, expertise or service skills. We look at how to give your web marketing strategy a boost with proper website design, and more specifically, landing page design.
A landing page is generally the most important part of your website's design - even if the remainder of the site is beautifully and professionally designed your conversion rates will languish without an effective landing page design. When a visitor lands at your site, they are looking for the answer to several questions. They want to know whether this is the right place to meet their needs, whether it matches their expectations, whether your company is trustworthy, and how much time it will take on your site to find and complete related activities. Expert internet marketing services and search engine ranking optimization can bring more traffic, and better qualified traffic to your site - we show you how to ensure that you maximize that opportunity with your landing page design.
Basic real-world and internet marketing principles need to be applied to a landing page just as with any other business activity. You need to understand the type of visitor that will be coming to that site, and who is most likely to convert (demographically). Set your metrics and put in place ways to measure the success of your landing page modifications. Once the metrics and measures are in place, it’s time to focus on the visual website design elements that will help achieve better conversion rates.
Landing pages need to be simple - if people can't find what they are looking for within an extremely short time frame, your site will be assessed as requiring too much work, and your visitor will leave. Blocks of color, secondary navigation bars, and unnecessary clip art all serve to distract your prospects. While they may help the site's general appearance, they won't help the conversion rate. Website analytics, using packages such as Webtrends available from internet marketing service providers, will reveal quickly whether your landing page is too complicated, with a high dropout rate for the amount of time spent on that page.
Hard-to-read type is another deadly sin when it comes to landing page design. Font sizes less than 10 points should never be considered - no visitors will read it. You should also follow basic typeface rules such as never reversing text (putting large blocks of light text on a dark background), and keeping font styles simple. And, following the same rule as not having extraneous visual elements, you should not try to put more than one offer on your landing page. This will only confuse prospects, negate internet marketing efforts and lose sales.
Try to match your creative advertising brief (both copy and design) to your landing page. This is one way of ensuring that visitors know they have come to the right place, and greatly improves conversion rates. This is the reason why your website's home page should not be the landing page for advertising offers. The only exception to this rule is if you have a very specific, very static offering, and the homepage was designed with it in mind.