How to build marketing landing pages

Headlines

Use No-Nonsense Headlines

The purpose of your headline isn’t to straight up sell. Instead, the #1 goal of your headline is to show people the benefit of using your product.

That’s why you want to use copy that highlights the #1 benefit people will get from your product or service. 

Another good way to practice is to go back and look at the headlines on your current marketing materials and website. Rate them using the 4 U’s and see if there’s room for improvement. Don’t sweat it if your headlines don’t all get perfect 4’s; just try different ways to make them more attention-getting and throat-grabbing!

Make Your Headlines ULTRA Specific

It’s a fact: vague headlines don’t sell. Instead, you want your headline to be insanely specific about what your product or service does. Yes, you may turn some people away. But your target customers will eat it up.

Instead of something lame like “The Next Generation of T-Shirts”, they go with the much more specific “The easy way to design and sell t-shirts online”.

Nice.

Test Negative Words In Your Headline

Outbrain discovered that negative words in headlines like “never” and “worst” outperform positive words, like “always” and “best”… by 63%.

CTAs

Replace “Buy” or “Sign up” with Benefit-Oriented CTAs

The word “buy” reminds someone that they’re about to make a big commitment. Not good. So instead of “buy”, use CTAs that emphasise what they’ll GET.

Instead of “Buy Plan”, they say “Start My Free 30-Day Trial”, which is much more benefit-oriented.

Show Your Price on Landing Pages

If your price is lower than average, don’t hide your price. Why?

Well, when you hide your product’s price, people think: “Where’s the price? This thing must be crazy expensive.”

In fact, Market Dialer found that including a price of “$75 per seat” doubled conversions.

Landing Page Copy

Use Action-Focused Copy

Copywriters have long known that this action-oriented copy is more persuasive than the passive copy.

So instead of highlighting facts (“Our product helps people lose weight”), describe what will HAPPEN when someone uses your product (“Lose that stubborn belly fat”).

Inline validation=awesome. Ever spend 10-minutes to fill out a form, only to see a “You need to accept the terms of service” error message?

Instead of showing people errors after they fill out and submit your form, inline validation gives people notes as they work. Here’s a real-life example:

And there’s data to back this up: several case studies (including this one) found that inline validation significantly improves form completion rates.

Social Proof

Show Expert Social Proof

Social proof isn’t all about having thousands of customers. You can also use social proof in the form of quotes from experts, logos of companies you’ve worked with, and awards you’ve won. In fact, expert social proof (“Our clients include Microsoft”) can be more powerful than sheer numbers (“We’ve served 876 clients”).

Include logos of places the company or product has been featured.

Use Likes, Users, Followers or Customers as Social Proof

Whether we admit to it or not, social proof has a strong influence on what we do. In the world of CRO, you can use social proof in the form of Facebook likes, customers, total users, number of downloads… or anything else that shows off social proof.

Like anything in CRO, social proof doesn’t work 100% of the time. So if you already have social proof on your landing pages, you might want to test removing social proof from your landing pages (or try a different form of social proof).