When you decide to create a landing page, there are three simple questions that need to focus on. By keeping these three questions at the top of your mind, you’ll make sure that the time you spend on building a landing page brings you results rather than being wasted altogether.

The three questions that I’m talking about include –

#1. What’s the Offer?
This is where the story begins. Every landing page presents visitors with an offer they can’t resist. An offer is simply anything that you provide your visitors with in return for what you ask them to do. Now, this offer can be anything, from coupons and discounts to a free version of a product.

While putting together an offer for visitors, you should always do it in a way that pulls the latter deeper into the conversion funnel.

Once you have planned or worked out an attractive offer, you should also be ready to present it in a compelling manner. Apart from explaining your offer in an easy way, you’ll need to create some sense of urgency with it. Therefore, it’s vital to design your offer attractively enough, so that you can encourage more and more visitors to go after the same, at the very first glance.

What’s more important to remember in this regard is that you focus on just one solid offer rather than presenting too many offers. Making a decision becomes tougher for visitors when they see many offers.

#2. What’s Your Value Proposition or USP?
In order to make your offer highly saleable and the earn the trust of visitors as well, you must also talk about the USP of your product. Unless you are ready to explain why your offer is important or a unique one, you won’t be able to compel visitors to go for it. So, ask yourself – if I was my customer, why would I be buying a product like this? These reasons will help you craft your value proposition.

The best idea, in fact, is to think of the USP(s) in advance, as it will allow you to build them into the product. Depending on the niche you belong to, you can do some competitive research and come up with a couple of unique selling propositions to be built into your offer or product.

So, find a way to be unique.

#3. What Do You Want the Visitor to Do Next?
Once you have explained the offer and compelled the visitor to go for it through your USPs, it’s time to tell them what to do next. This is what we call the CTA or the Call to Action. While creating the CTA, therefore, you should ensure it’s easy for visitors to understand quickly. If your CTA isn’t clear, you are very likely to lose the visitor even if they liked your offer.

Regardless of what you want the visitor to do on your landing page, you need to make your call to action crystal clear as well as well-placed. CTA should always be designed and placed in a way that they attract the visitors’ attention quickly.

Do you think you have built your landing page keeping all these three questions in mind? Feel free to comment.

But that’s not enough.

Testimonials are social proof for a landing page. However, you need to use them with wisdom and care. When you want to persuade prospects to buy a product or service that you sell, you should always remember to list only those real testimonials that you think will make a cut.

Listing the most effective testimonials can quickly increase the rate of conversion for your landing pages.

So, how do you know which customer testimonials to use?

Relevance
First and foremost, you need to have a microscopic look at the profile of your prospects. What do they do? What industry do they belong to? What’s their profession or occupation? What’s their geographical location? When you know what your prospects look like, you’ll be able to feature testimonials from relevant customers, those customers that are similar to your prospects.

For example, if your prospects are doctors, you should be careful enough to list testimonials from doctors itself. You can strike relevance even in terms of the geographical location of your prospects.

Just be relevant!

Particulars or Specifics
In order to get the most out of your customer testimonials, you also need to include those with specifications. When you take a closer look at all of your submitted customer testimonials, you’ll find many that carry specifications like time period or percentage of increase in sales among others.

Testimonials carrying specifications make the most impact. So, choose them carefully to increase landing page conversion quickly.

Customer Information
Your customers are not aliens. If someone is really your customer, you must know at least a couple of things about them. Rather than featuring only the name of the customer against a specific testimonial, try to include details like their names, job titles and locations. If possible, you can also include your customers’ phone numbers. This makes your testimonials look amazingly real.

Also, don’t make the mistake of including only the initials in place of a customer’s full name. This is something you should avoid at all cost.

Photographs
Customer testimonials work best only when they look real. If you are really serious about increasing the conversions for your landing page, you should go one step ahead and add the photographs of your customers as well.

While adding pictures or photographs to your testimonials, you should always make sure they are of high quality. Images included with fake testimonials are usually blurry or hazy. Today’s prospects are smart enough to see through such deceptive tactics. Brace yourself!

Adding customer testimonials is a great way of increasing the weight of your landing page and making a strong impact on prospects. Use testimonials only to influence prospective customers rather than adding them only because everyone else is doing so. Unless you are able to build credibility with testimonials, there’s no point in using them at all.

It’s time to take a closer look at your testimonials page and start tweaking it right away for more sales. Are you ready?

There are a lot of online marketers who end up picking the wrong colors for their landing pages, which drives away visitors quickly and reduces the rate of conversion to a great extent. That is why it’s important to know what colors can do for you and how you choose those that work best for you.

Different Colors, Different Meanings
Before you start to design your landing page, you should clearly understand what each of the popular colors stands for. Each different color conveys a specific message to your visitors. If you are not aware of it, you might send a signal which you don’t actually want to convey.

Have a look –

Blue symbolizes loyalty and sincerity.
Red symbolizes excitement, energy and strength.
Green symbolizes prosperity, wealth and health.
Orange symbolizes passion and security.
Black symbolizes sophistication.
Pink symbolizes romance and feminine.

Likewise, there are several other popular colors, each of which conveys a unique message to the visitor. Psychologically, each popular color is associated with a specific kind of feeling. When you are planning to create a landing page that converts really well, you should keep colors and their associations at the top of your mind. With this knowledge about colors, you’ll never end up sending the wrong message to the target audience.

Readability
The meaning of colors is, however, not the only thing that you should keep in mind. One of the most important things that you should never forget about is readability. While choosing colors for your landing page, you should go only for contrasting color combinations so that readability is not affected. The content that you place on your landing page must be clearly visible to the eye. If your visitors have trouble in reading those messages, you will lose them forever.

The font color of the text and the color of the background should be in contrast with each other while complimenting each other as well. Most importantly, the color of the call-to-action buttons should be chosen in a way that stands out and creates urgency among the visitors.

Don’t Forget to A/B Test!
Though it is wise to choose colors according to their meanings while focusing on readability, you should never forget to test. Conducting an A/B test will help you choose a color version that makes the most impact. So, you can create two different versions (that use different colors) and run a split test to find out which colors convert visitors the best.

It’s not just the message or the copy that will help you achieve a higher rate of conversion for your landing pages. Among many factors that influence the customers’ behavior, colors (the most significant in terms of visual cues) play a vital role. So, make sure you pick the right colors.

Does your landing page use the right colors? Please feel free to share your opinions and knowledge on this issue.

Once of these is understanding what your customer’s objectives and motivations are for buying your product or service.

The objective your customer has depends on two things:

1. The product or service you’re selling; and
2. Their situation for needing it

Let’s look at an example from the customer’s perspective.

Say I’m browsing for a cake tin. It’s fair to say that it’s likely I’m about to bake a cake. That’s why I require a cake tin.

My primary objective is to find a cake tin that will satisfy the needs I have in baking that cake.

Peripherally, I would also like to know various other attributes about this product.

Like:

• What other types of cakes I could bake with it?
• Can I make bread in this tin?
• Is it suitable for baking slices too?
• Is it made from silicon so I can pick it up when it’s hot?
• Is it non stick?

Although this is a simplistic example, you can see how I have a primary objective of finding out if this tin will suit for baking the type of cake I’m baking. There’s also a least a dozen different secondary objectives as well that I consider in my purchase.

If you address the primary objective of your customer first and foremost it will get them into the frame of mind that they can continue reading your landing page.

If you don’t address the primary objective first, then your customer might assume that this product or service doesn’t serve their purpose, even though it is revealed further down the page that it does.

In this article, we’re going to simplify your task. Below, we’ll focus on just three steps that are vital to landing page success.

Step #1. Create a Great Landing Page

The story of a highly converting landing page begins with the design. An attractive landing page is comprised of multiple components or elements. Each of these elements is designed in a way to attract the attention of the visitor immediately and compel them to complete a specific action.

While designing a landing page, you need to focus on –

1. Simplicity
2. Logical flow
3. Relevance

Simplicity is critical so that you don’t confuse or distract visitors. Logical flow is essential because it helps the visitor comfortably move towards the goal of conversion. In addition, the landing page design should be relevant to the source, from where you send traffic.

Though a landing page may have several design elements, the most critical part is the ‘call to action’. Apart from creating a simple (but engaging) design, you need to pay careful attention to what action you want the visitor to perform. One thing that you should always keep at the top of your mind is that your landing page must focus on just one action. If you have too many call-to-actions or focus on multiple actions, you can easily distract the visitor.

Step #2. Set Up a Split Test

By conducting a split test, you can be able to get the best rate of conversion on your landing page. Too many online marketers ignore split or A/B testing because it consumes time. But they have no idea how the result can surpass the amount of invested effort.

Setting up a split test is not tough. All you need to do is create a new version of the original landing page. You can improve all the elements (that you think will impact the rate of conversion) and include them in the new version. Once the two versions are ready, you can get yourself a split tester or A/B testing tool (like Simple Page Tester) to set up the test.

Step #3. Track Your Results

Now that the split test is set up, it’s time to track the results. The accuracy of results is foremost if you want to find out what really works with your target audience. Any good split testing tool helps you track the rate of click-through and conversion. What you shouldn’t forget is that you select a considerable sample size and run the test for an adequate span of time. Once you have the results, you can analyze it and go with the version that works best.

Are you getting the most out your landing page? If not, it’s just the right time to split-test it and find out what really works. Check out our product tour.

Once you have decided what elements you would really like to test and set up the test (through a split testing tool), it’s time to track the results and improve your landing page so that it gives you the best ROI possible.

Click-Through vs Conversion

Any split tester (whether free or paid) will provide you two important pieces of data – the click-through rate and the rate of conversion. Before you start to study the results of the test, you should first of all be very clear about what these two terms actually mean. Usually shown in percentage, click-through rate (CTR) is the number of clicks received divided by the number of times an ad is displayed to the visitor. If a web page or ad, therefore, is displayed 100 times and it gets 15 clicks, the rate of click through would be 15%.

On the other hand, the rate of conversion can be defined as the number of goal achievements divided by the total number of visits. The word conversion is actually used to signify a ‘completed action’. You may have different conversion goals depending on your specific requirements.

A 35% conversion, therefore, means only 35 people completed an action (signed up or made a purchase) out of every 100 visitors that your web page of landing page received. A higher rate of conversion states you’re making more sales on your website or landing page.

Tracking the Results

Let’s now get back to split testing and the results tracking part. At the start of a split test, you have two versions (original and new) at hand. With the help of split tester like ‘Simple Page Tester’, you can set up the test in a way that both the versions of the page are displayed to the visitor (either simultaneously or randomly). After the testing has ended, you’ll be able to study and analyze essential data like the rate of click through and conversion rate.

By comparing the data available for both the versions, you can easily find out which one performed better or brought in more sales. And that’s how you choose the winner. However, split testing is not just a one-time process. You can choose to conduct these tests every couple of months, as customers’ behaviors and preferences keep on changing with time.

What’s More Important?

One thing that you really need to make sure at any cost is that the results of the split or A/B test are accurate and significant enough to use for the improvement of the landing page. You should decide the time span for the test really carefully. At the same time, you need to work with a considerable sample size. An inadequate (or too small) sample size may provide you with inaccurate or skewed results. If the results are accurate, you can use them effectively to enhance the design of your page and generate more conversions or sales.

So, are you ready to conduct your first split test? Please feel free to share your views and opinions in the comments section below.

Given below are some of the most important tips that you can use to create a highly converting landing page.

#1. Focus on Just ‘One’ Action

A greatly designed landing page should instantly tell the visitor what it’s about. Within a few seconds, the user should be able figure out what they need to do. If the action to be taken is not obvious instantly, you have a high risk of losing a lot of potential visitors. Would you ever want to lose visitors?

If you don’t want to drive away visitors, you need to make your landing page highly actionable. More importantly, you need to make sure you have only ‘one specific action’ in your mind while designing the page.

If you focus on too many actions, you can easily confuse visitors as they won’t be able to decide what the best way to go is. So, the rule of the thumb is – one action, one landing page. Got it?

#2. Build Trust

The biggest reason that prevents visitors from converting is that they have many fears and objections. You may drive tons of traffic to your landing page, but you can’t convert them without earning their trust. Therefore, the second most important step in landing page creation is to make it as much trustworthy as possible. But do you know how to build trust?

Here’re a couple of tips –

• Put your real/ physical address
• Display your phone number
• Use trust seals and symbols
• Include a privacy policy
• Also mention reviews, testimonials and awards
• Offer a money-back guarantee (if possible)

Whether or not your landing page builds trust will make a huge difference to your rate of conversion.

#3. Conduct a Split-Test

If you want to ensure the best ROI, conducting a split or A/B test is just the right way to go. To get started, you can create yet another version of the original landing page. In the second version, you can make changes to vital elements like the title, headings, introductory paragraph, call to action, images, hyperlinks, pricing and offer among others. Changing the location of these elements can affect the rate of conversion. So, be ready to experiment and go with the version that makes the most impact.

There are different types of split testing tools (both free and paid) that you can use to set up the test. ‘Simple Page Tester’ is a useful tool that you can use to compare the two versions (original and the new) of the landing page. It’s highly recommended, as it’s pretty easy to use and accurate.

Does your landing page convert really well? Please feel free to share your views and opinions in the comment section below.

Most of the internet marketers continue to optimize their web pages or landing pages to enhance the rate of conversion. Rather than optimizing your pages over and over again, you should get started with split testing.

Getting Started

You might have heard about split testing or A/B testing before. To get started with it and do it the right way, you need to be aware of the basics. During a split test, you’ll be able to compare two (or more) versions of a web page so that you know how each of them actually performs.

It’s true that split testing consumes time. If you are not quite well versed with what the different elements of a web page and completely understand the analytical data available, it’s tough to conduct this test on your own. If you think you don’t have enough expertise to do it on your own, it’s always advisable to use the services of a professional.

First and foremost, you should create a list of all the essential elements that comprise your landing page. Initially, the list that you prepare may be too long. But you won’t test all of them. Instead, you’ll need to filter out only those vital elements that you think are highly impacting. At this stage, you really need to act like a critique and rank the elements on the grounds of urgency or priority.

Setting Up the Test

Once you’re ready to measure things that you should, it’s time to create different versions of the page that you want to test. If you’ve chosen to test color, content, images, headings, call to action and banners for example, you should create different versions of the page by tweaking these elements differently.

Next, you’ll need to install a script on your web server so that the different versions of the landing page are displayed to visitors randomly (or simultaneously).

If you’re working in WordPress then you’ll definitely want to check out our tool, Simple Page Tester.

Tracking the Results

Split testing will help you increase the rate of conversion only when you’re able to measure the results accurately. To get the best results from the test, you should focus on three things which are as follows.

1. Effectiveness of the Data
2. Size of the Sample
3. Timespan

Unless you work with really strong data, a significant sample size and appropriate time-span, you may get skewed data (which can turn things the wrong way). Ones you’ve tested the first few elements and improved them as well, you can move on to test the other elements on the page.

Bonus Tip

Before you start to split test, you should ensure that you have one call-to-action on the landing page and that the elements that you select for the same are pertinent to that specific action.

Each of these optimization-testing methodologies has its own strength and advantageous use. Understanding and using the best method for obtaining the information sought is important.

Using Split Testing

Split testing, also known as A/B Testing involves comparing two or more web pages using one variant.

For instance, several landing pages might be tested to determine which holds a reader’s attention the longest per visit once a specific amount of traffic has landed there.

If split testing can provide the necessary information, it is preferable because it is the simplest to implement and understand. It gives truer results when used on smaller trafficked sites and completely new design changes can be tested to determine possible superiority.

Downsides of Split Testing

There are situations where split testing is less than ideal.

For instance, this type of testing is general considered inefficient when applied to large sites, although there are some mega companies that would dispute this.

Additionally it does not provide a way for deeply analysing why one page is better. You can determine which page workers better via conversion statistics, nothing more, which means that further improvement requires additional testing.

The only option for continued improvement is to make changes to the better page and analyze it against the poorer performing page and against the original best page. This can be a lengthy process.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing, on the other hand, is able to measure, and thus compare, several different elements per page. One could set up a test that measures the effects of several different headers, headlines or font styles simultaneously.

The advantages are obvious, knowledge of exactly which variables affect the site, the degree of affect and which choices are best. However, in order for this testing method to work the site must have a high level of traffic.

Additionally, it require a greater degree of expertise to implement, which makes it out of reach of many less computer savvy individuals.

Although the only viable option for testing small sites is the split (A/B) method both methods can be used on larger sites. If a site has enough traffic to warrant the use of the multivariate testing, finding and paying someone to either set up the testing or teach the site owner the necessary skills might be worthwhile.

Split Testing is Easier to Setup and Execute

However, where A/B testing will suffice it is easily used by even the most techno-phobic with a testing plug-in, and split testing works best for isolating variables.

Variables that can improve a web page’s performance are many and include the page layout, background color, copy text and even the font type and size.

While not each variable will have a significant effect, due to the large pool of consumers an internet site reaches and at a relatively low cost even a small different can translate into a large profit.

Split or A/B testing may seem too simplistic to obtain significant results. Potential users might worry about the limitations it is considered to have when used on large traffic sites. However, when one considers that such familiar names as Amazon, BBC, eBay, Google, Microsoft and Netflix and Playdom have used this method of website optimization it places the split testing method in a more favorable light.

The Damage of Impatience

The majority of website owners known split testing is necessary, but most don’t wait long enough. They think they can make an informed decision after gaining some simple information. That’s just not the case.

Being impatient can really damage your website, and kill your conversion. Think about this for a moment. You test two different designs. Within one week, you notice that your original design is raking in better sales, so you abandon the new design and stick with the old one.

If you tested longer, then you might have found out that the other design could actually pull in 20 percent better conversions. That can be a lot of lost money on the table. You need to keep testing until you have enough information.

Longer Tests

You know why longer tests are needed, but why would a short test be inaccurate? A short test only gauges the results of a few sales. When a business is about to release a new product, it doesn’t just ask a few people what they think about the product. The business goes after hundreds or even thousands of people. Larger tests give you a better picture of what your entire demographic thinks, not just a small portion of it.

By performing a short test, you are just relying on information from a small portion of your market. If you want to really improve your website, then you cannot use short tests. You need to split test until you get a good amount of statistically relevant data.

Optimum Test Length

Just how long should you let the test run? That is a hard one to answer. It matters on how many current customers you have, how long your website has been doing business and many other factors.

For example, the Amazon website would probably wait several months and after thousands or even millions of sales before deciding between two different designs. Your website probably isn’t that large, so you probably don’t need the same amount of information.

You usually want to wait over a month for the split test to really capture data, though larger websites should wait at least several months. You also want to capture a good amount of sales. Relying on information from just 10 percent of your monthly sales would be a bad idea.

Let at least one hundred sales occur, though most websites should actually wait for more. Just let the sales keep going until you feel you have enough information to make a good decision. Leaving money on the table is never a good idea, so let customers come in and keep buying until you see one design really win over the other.

Conclusion

Split testing is a great way to increase your sales. It gives you the chance to test different designs, and it gives you the chance to improve your conversion. Just make sure that you let the test run its full course. If you don’t, then there is really no point in performing the test in the first place. A short test is an inaccurate one, so let it run until you have enough information.