Landing Page Optimization Process- Complete Step by Step Guide

You might have landed on this page as you were trying to build a new landing page or want to optimize your landing page for increasing your conversions if you might be feeling your landing page is not converting enough. Whatever be your position, you are in the right place. In this article, we try to give you a step by step process for building a landing page and optimize it so that you get maximum conversions.
Landing Pages have become a crucial element of marketing strategies today. The ultimate aim of landing pages is lead generation. However good looking and appealing is your landing page, you get the leads or the conversions you expect only if you have the right elements in right place on your landing page. In fact, all landing pages are not the same. They do differ in intent, product, focus, target audience, industry or many other elements. But , despite all these differences, we can identify certain factors common for conversion guaranteed pages. These are certainly small but valuable points that could really help in optimizing your landing page effectively. Here, we discuss a step by step approach for designing landing pages.

1. Understand and Define your campaign’s goals

This obviously is the first step when you decide to have a landing page. You obviously need to understand what is the need for creating your landing page and what exactly are your expectations out of it. There can be different goals for a landing page- like are you just trying to gather some leads for your business, or you want to sell or promote a product or an offer, or you want to ask people to register for some webinar, etc. Based on your goals, landing pages can be mainly classified as Lead Generation Landing pages and Click through landing pages.

Lead Generation Landing Pages:

These pages are used to gather information from prospective customers you could market to or connect with. The pages usually consist of a form which asks for user data such as name, email address, contact no. etc. You would certainly have to give something to get the user information. Some of the common things that a lead generation landing page could offer to its users for getting the details may be a free trial of a product, a ebook or whitepaper,a blog subscription, presentations or recorded sessions, consultation for some professional services, discount coupons/vouchers, a contest entry or even a notification of a product launch.

Click-through landing pages:

This is another type of landing pages commonly used in e-commerce which persuades the visitors to click through to the next page or stage in the sales funnel. The next page could be your product page or your shopping cart or an onboarding flow. The click-through landing page acts as a warming up a page for your customers describing a product or offer in an attractive way convincing him to make their purchase decision. Click through pages don’t have any forms unlike the lead generation pages, but they come with strong Calls-To-Action (CTA) throughout the page. The CTA is usually the button directing the user to the next page.
Identifying the goal of your landing page is important for designing your landing page appropriately with the required elements.

2. Build your first page

Once your goals have been defined, and you have decided on the type of page you to design- like is it a Click through page or Lead generation page, you can start designing your landing page by placing different elements appropriately. Landing pages can be typically broken into following elements:

• Headline: Your page’s headline is what visitors see first when they land on your page. So it is really important to have a strong and appealing headline which is eye-catching and at the same time should be simple and straightforward as well.
• An Image or Video: Apart from the content on your page, relevant images and videos should be included to gain user’s attention.
• Benefit Statement or value propositions: This section of your landing page is essential to make the users aware of the benefits of your product or the value of what you offer them. It should be presented as something extraordinary that the user’s get by opting for your product or service. It may be added in the form of bullet points making them easy to read.
• Form: Most important element in a lead generation landing page. Make it as clear as possible visually on your page by using the form within a colored box or so and take care of the information you collect and stick on to minimum information that really matters for you.
• Call-To-Action (CTA): One of the most important elements of a landing page as it prompts the user’s to take action. It might just be a button, but take care of it various features like color, size and the message as these factors get the users to take action. The color of the CTA button and its size should be apt so as to gain attention of the user’s and doesn’t go unnoticed. The color of the button should be in contrast to the background for maximum visibility and the size should be right size and sync with the design.
• Trust Indicators/ Social proof: This part of your landing page is to give more confidence to your customers for making their decision. It could be anything like customer testimonials, or a list of customers using your products or a stream of positive tweets about you. It helps in establishing trust on the users and presenting yourself as one who knows the job well.
• Post conversion page: Once the user has taken the desired action in your landing page, you could take advantage of the happy customer again by redirecting him to a post conversion page which asks them to do something else after the conversion. This could be a simple Thankyou page which gives you the opportunity to show prospects your appreciation, and make another offer for buying something else at a discount or asking them to sign up for your newsletter for building a further relation with the prospect.
  Now that you have seen the various elements of landing pages, keeping your goals in mind, come up with a design placing the various landing elements for your page appropriately in such a way to attract the customers.

3. Drive Traffic to Your Page:

This is an important step for Landing Page Optimization. However, good is your landing page design it doesn’t do any good if you are not able to drive traffic to your page. How to drive traffic to your landing page? This is a very common question and there are multiple answers depending on the nature and size of your business – and if you are just starting out or you are already established.
If you are just starting up, paid advertising like the Pay Per Click (PPC) ads such as Google AdWords works the best. But if you are already established, you might already have a list of leads for e-mail marketing, social following on social media like twitter, facebook or your blog which you could use to drive traffic to your page in addition to the PPC ads.
Content marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your pages these days. Creating educational and informative content in form of blogs or infographics or ebooks helps in attracting attention to you. Guest blogging can also be very useful to drive traffic to your pages and you could use a n targeted landing page to direct readers from your guest post.

4. Gathering data and feedback:

Once you have designed your landing page and have driven traffic to your page, now it’s time to gather some feedback. Gathering feedback data is crucial to gain insights on how well your landing page is converting. There are various methods to gather real time feedback like on-page surveys, Live Chats, Usability testing, etc. From the results, try to gain insights on what does not go well on your landing page and what are the pain points existing in your funnel. At the end of this step you would have all the information on the areas to be optimized for a better customer experience and usability.

5. Create Hypothesis from the gathered data:

Once you have collected the data, you need to form hypothesis based on the feedback. So, what is a hypothesis? A hypothesis is usually defined as a statement based on some experiment which is not yet proved and can be used as a starting point for further investigation. So basically, the hypothesis that you form might be true or false. You can come to a conclusion only after you further test it and prove it. Here you need to come up with new ideas and changes that you think can be made to your landing page to increase the usability and thus conversions based on the insights you got from the feedback collected. For example, your lead generation form might be having so many mandatory fields which the customers might not be willing to disclose. You can come up with a hypothesis to decrease the number of mandatory fields, make it much easier for the customer to fill out and more customers might be willing to fill the form with this change. You may come up with more than one hypothesis as well.

6. Perform A/B testing or split testing on your landing page:

You have made your hypothesis and now it’s time to apply them on your landing page. But wait, instead of just making all the changes you feel might increase conversions to your landing page, wouldn’t it be wise to test if your thought were right. Like already mentioned, your hypothesis is not yet proved. So the best way to prove it is by testing. This is where A/B testing or split testing comes in.
A/B testing or split testing is nothing but testing different variants of a single page to identify which is the best. Based on your hypothesis you can come up with different variants of your landing page. Split the traffic to these variants and identify which variant converts the most.
From this type of testing, you could easily make out which page converts the most and determine the winner. But before you finalize the page, ensure you have run the test at least for a week or so, so that your results are more accurate and cover the daily fluctuations in access to your page. Another important thing on testing your landing page is never stop testing. Continue monitoring your conversion and you could even repeat the split testing process over and over again to further optimize you landing page and identify the most optimized landing page.
That brings us to the end of the topic - Steps for Landing Page Optimization. Finally, landing page is not an easy task and does not have a single proven formula. The above steps are just the foundations that could help in creating your landing page effectively for maximum conversion. Ultimately, you have to keep on testing and do continual optimization to achieve your conversion goals. Hope the article helps your campaign!