Landing pages are the least popular type of sign-up form, but they have the highest conversion rate - 23% compared to the average form’s 10%. So why isn’t every form a landing page?
Making a landing page is a whole thing. You need to design it, A/B test it and make sure it works on different screen sizes… It often involves input from multiple departments.
Especially when you’re making landing pages for your agency clients, the approval and optimization process can get tedious. That’s why I’m here today to show you how I make quick landing pages and what metrics I look for when I optimize them.
But before we start…
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a quick web page that people “land” on. They can land there after clicking the link in your emails, your ads or your social media posts. It’s specifically designed to convert people who land there into customers. The conversions you can typically design a landing page for are:
Registrations
Email subscriptions
Webinar registrations
Call & appointment booking
Downloads
E-commerce purchases
What Are Landing Pages Used For?
Landing pages are used to convert clicks into leads. Unlike your website, that people can access from many different channels, a landing page is something that lives in your marketing campaign. You can use landing pages in:
Social media ads
Google search ads
Email marketing
A landing page is not something that pops up in organic search results, it’s not a part of your website. It almost exists in a vacuum. A perfectly optimized and A/B tested vacuum.
What’s the Difference Between a Landing Page and a Website?
A website is something visitors can explore - there are many places to click, resources to check out, videos to watch and articles to read. A landing page is more focused. It exists to funnel people towards one, specific action.
Here’s a list of things you typically don’t find on a landing page:
Navigation bar. You don’t want to give people options. You want them to do one thing and that one thing is linked in a big bright button.
Multiple traffic sources. While various parts of the website can be accessed through various channels, landing pages tend to be campaign specific. People land on them after clicking on ads, emails or CTAs on your website.
One-size-fits-all messaging. Landing pages are made for specific campaigns. All messaging is created to sell one product to a target demographic. A study shows that addressing specific buyer fears increases conversion rates by 80%.
How to Build a Landing Page for Marketing Agency Clients
Creating campaigns for clients is the second most important responsibility agencies take on. The most important responsibility is keeping everything organized. Combining these two is how people get stuck and overwhelmed.
The landing page builder I’ll be using to build my landing page today has built-in functionality to help agencies streamline the process. It also has over 200 templates that you can edit. And did I mention it’s free?
Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to build a landing page in under an hour:
1. Pick a Landing Page Template
To get started, head over to involve.me and grab one of these landing page templates.
Get Started with Converting Lead Pages
With One Of Our 200+ Templates
You can pick a template for two reasons:
The design. If you like what it looks like, you can fill it with any content.
The functionality. If you need help setting up accepting payments on your landing page or creating logic branches, use a template that already has the functionality.
Of course you can edit everything about the functionality and the design, so no matter what template you choose, you can make it work. Templates are just shortcuts.
2. Add Your Logo, Text, Background and Font
You want everything to match your client’s brand. In involve.me you can control everything from layout to custom fonts and button roundness to match any brand.
3. Personalized Content
According to a recent study, personalized CTAs convert 203% better than default versions. The simplest way to personalize your landing page is using the visitor’s first name.
To call your landing page visitors by their first name, or use any other personalization information you want (like order details for example), you need 2 things:
1. You need to already have this information. Duh. This only works for leads you already have in your database. It will not work for new visitors you have no information about. Double duh.
2. You need to have the information in a channel you’re distributing the landing page with. So if you’re sending a marketing email that invites your leads to a webinar and you want the CTA on that webinar’s landing page to be personalized, that means all personalization details need to be in your email tool.
This is how you do it:
Click Hidden Fields in the top right corner. Click “add hidden field”. Then under “Contact Data Fields” select First Name. You will get this little snippet that you’re going to add to the link to your landing page.
But before you do that WAIT! See where it says “INPUT” here? That’s just a placeholder. So unless you want to call everyone “INPUT” as their first name, you need to replace that with a personalization token from your email tool.
This is different for every email tool, but for example, I’m using HubSpot and in HubSpot it looks like this {{contact.firstname}}. I found this by searching “first name token” in their help center, which works for most tools.
4. Preview Your Design on Desktop and Mobile Screens
If your landing page doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work at all. Over a half of the world’s internet traffic comes from mobile devices. So unless you’re using your landing page in an ad restricted to desktop, preview your design for mobile screens as well.
If the background doesn’t look right, you can upload a different one just for mobile devices.
5. Publish Your Landing Page
Once you’re happy with how everything looks, hit “Publish”. This will let you know if there are any errors on your page - for example I forgot to add a button to this page so I’ll get a message telling me what page the issue is on.
Once that’s fixed, you can move on to publishing your landing page. On this page you can set up the URL, which you can just type in and leave it at that or you can select a generic domain to hide the involve.me branding. You can also use a custom domain on higher plans.
To set up automated emails, tick this button. You can personalize the subject as well the text of the email with any information you collected. Just type in @ and select the first name for example.
6. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Making a landing page is not over once the page is live. Making a landing page is never over. The more data you collect, the more informed changes you can make to your page.
Businesses that use optimization software for your landing pages see a 30% increase on conversions. So let me show you the optimization software I use.
This is the Analytics section of involve.me. To get here, click on the drop-down icon on the landing page you made here and select analytics.
The key metric so keep an eye on before anything else is the completion rate.
It shows you how many visitors you converted.
If you set up an email, you’ll see the email open rate here. If it’s too low, the easiest way to fix that is to personalize the subject line like I showed you earlier. If you need more help making emails, I made a video about that, you can check it out below.
Upping your completion rate is a bit more challenging. The more complex your landing page, the more factors you need to look at.
You can see your conversion funnel on the detailed metrics page.
If there’s a steep drop between your visits and starts, there’s something wrong with the design of the first page. This means that nobody wants to click on anything on your page. Maybe the button is too low. Maybe the images you added are too large and are taking forever to load. Maybe there’s too much text it’s not scannable on mobile. Maybe the background is too busy and the text is illegible. Have a look at your landing page and look for reasons why people aren’t clicking the button.
If there’s a steep drop between your starts and all submissions, there’s something wrong with your form. Specifically, it’s the first thing you ask. All submissions means people leaving behind any information, answering any questions you ask. The most common reason people don’t make it to “completed submissions” is that you ask too many questions.
Most visitors will answer at least the first question before they get bored and click away. But if your visitors get stuck here, that means they are not even doing that. They’re not even answering the first question. So there’s something with how you ask it and what information you ask for.
This is a common case for job application pages. People read the job description, they are enticed, they click the Apply button, and then the first question is asking them to upload their CV. If they don’t have the CV ready, they click off and the conversion funnel has a steep drop between starts and all submissions.
If there’s a steep drop between all submissions and completed submissions, you’re asking too many questions. This metric means that people answer some of your questions, but not all of them.
How do you know how many questions are too many? Scroll down to Question funnel. Here you can see how people gradually drop off.
If there’s a steep drop between completed submissions and lead collected, this just means that people don’t want to give you their personal information. This can mean that what your landing page offers is intriguing enough to make people click, but not enticing enough to make them give their email. The way to fix this is to make your landing page offer enough value to justify asking for an email. Lead generation is about equal exchange. Make the offer worth sharing private information for.
Wrapping Up
Now you know how to design, build and optimize a landing page for your marketing agency clients. It's as easy as picking a template. For more information about involve.me landing pages, here's an interview with a marketing executive using involve.me to get 10.000 segmented leads every month.
