Landing page essentials to turn traffic into sales

901A4211

Share This Post

If you’re finding you’re getting a good level of traffic to your website, but it’s just not converting into sales, your landing pages could be to blame.
We’re taking a look at what exactly is a landing page, plus we’ve got 9 absolutely essential actions you need to take on each of your landing pages to help your visitors become customers.
These are really straightforward, practical tips you can action today to help boost your sales & drive your business forward.

Landing Page Essentials – Video Transcript

“So sometimes it can be really difficult to work out why you’re not converting more sales in your ecommerce store.

It could be that your Facebook ads are working really well, you seem to be getting lots of clicks, you’re doing Google advertising, you’re ranking well, you’re getting loads of traffic through to your site, but all that hard-won traffic just doesn’t seem to be converting.

Now, there can be a number of different reasons for this, but one of the main reasons we find is that your landing page just isn’t good enough. It’s not well-optimised, you’re not ticking all the boxes.

Now that’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s relatively easy to fix. So let’s jump in – I’m going to share with you my best strategies for creating a well-converting landing page.

So for the best advice on how to grow your ecommerce store quickly and sustainably, then check out my YouTube channel, hit the subscribe button, ring the bell… I’m going to be releasing a new video every Thursday.

I’m Sarah, I’m founder of The Fastnet Agency, and we help ambitious, up-and-coming, exciting, adventurous ecommerce stores to scale quickly online, using the power of digital marketing. So check out our website if you’d like some one-to-one support, but otherwise take a look at my channel. I’ve got lots of great advice for you there.

So first of all, let’s address the obvious thing. What exactly is a landing page? Well, it’s super simple. It’s basically the page that you’re driving traffic to, for whatever reason.

Now it could be that you’re doing Google ads with a certain key term, and that key term is going through to that page. It could be you’re running Facebook ads with a similar thing. It could actually just be organic search in Google.

But if somebody is searching for something in particular, or clicking on a button, and they land on your website, that is the landing page for that particular item, or product, or type of service, and you need to make sure that you are capturing people at that point and giving them the information that they’re looking for as quickly as possible, because we all know that in this day and age nobody has any patience with anything.

So it’s all about quick delivery. So let’s dive into that in greater depth. I’ve got nine really good tips here – I want you to work through all nine of these factors and make sure that they’re working for your site, because if any one of them is off, it could result in a really big loss of sales for your business. Tip number one.

Make sure that you have a really clear, eye-catching, attention-grabbing headline for your page. So if this is going straight through to your product page, this can be a little bit more difficult. But try and think about how you can create a headline on that product page that really grabs their attention and gets them interested in what you have to offer.

So, I don’t know, if you’re selling hats, for example, it could be, you know, the warmest hat for outdoors campaign. You know, check out this hat here. It’s a silly example, but it just gives you an idea of exactly what you’re looking at.

And a lot of ecommerce stores miss out on this actually, they don’t make the most of it. So really think about what that headline is going to be and how you can really capture their attention when they land on that page. So just a little bit of an example of what you should be looking at with that headline. It needs to be short and sweet. It should be no more than 20 words. And ideally, you want to get it down to 10. But it needs to be descriptive, and it needs to show exactly, straight off the bat, why this is solving the problem that your customer has.

Step number two. Now you’re limited in your headline. I’ve just said it needs to be 20 words, max, ideally 10, so there’s only so much you can pack into 10 words. The way you get around this is by having a really good sub heading just underneath it. So think of this as a journey. Initially, you grab somebody’s attention with the headline. Ok, you’ve got them on the page, they’re staying, they’re not bouncing back off again.

Then you back up that decision not to go by the subheading, so they think oh, yeah ok, this might be of interest to me, and then the subheading makes them think oh, yeah actually, you know, this is interesting to me, So the subheading needs to be that back up to your headline. Make sure it’s descriptive. Make sure it mentions features and benefits. Make sure it’s very aware of the problem that your customer is trying to solve.

Number three for your landing page – include as many pictures, or videos, as you can. Now, particularly if you’re looking to promote a product, when people are looking to buy, they are very curious about this, they can’t see it physically, we can’t pick up in the store and have a look at it, so they want to get as good an overview of your product as possible.

So as many detailed pictures as you possibly can about the product, preferably a video as well, is gonna go down really well to building that trust and making people believe that actually, yes, this is the thing they’re looking for, this is the answer to their problems.

Now, if you’re not an ecommerce store, if you’re a service provider and you’re looking at this video for tips on your landing page, then photographs are still really important, and those photos are still all about building trust.

So take a look at maybe including photos of your team so they know who they’re gonna be dealing with, maybe photos of where your office is based, photos of how you guys work, you know, So, you know, how do you come up with ideas?

Do you all get around a whiteboard and think about it? Put a photo of that in there. What you’re wanting is people to kind of visualise who you are and what you’re doing, and that in turn is going to help build trust because they know then that they’re dealing with people, not some faceless organisation.

Step number four. Make sure that your information is clear and concise, but that you’ve included enough information so that people know that they’re making an informed decision about your products. Now a really clever way of doing this is actually a bit similar to how journalists write news stories.

I don’t if you’ve ever noticed this, I did PR at university so it’s something that comes quite close to my heart, but with news stories what they do is they create a summary, a headline summary, so the first paragraph is normally a summary of the entire story, so people can get a really good overview of exactly what’s gone on.

And then what they do is they go into the detail, so they’ll go into the detail in every aspect of the storey and fill out that information. But the idea is that if you just glance at it, you can really get a full understanding of what the story is all about and you need to do the same with your products. So to start off with your description, make sure you’ve got a really good summary paragraph, a couple of paragraphs giving all of the basic information that anybody needs to know, and make sure that you then include a Buy

Now button just underneath that, because if that’s enough to secure somebody, you don’t want to have to scroll further down the page, you want to capture them then. Then you can go into a bit more detailed information. So maybe you go into more information about the manufacturing of your product, then put a Buy Now button.

Maybe you then go into more information about the details, you know, the fabrics or the materials that you’re using in your product, or whatever details that might be, then put a Buy Now button. So whenever your customer gets to the point in time where they’re like yeah, okay, I’ve seen enough now, I’m happy to buy, there’s that Buy Now button, but you’re constantly adding to that information.

So when they scroll down that page, they can get as much or as little information as they needs before committing to purchase. Point Number five is to highlight loss.

Now it’s this weird thing, scientists have done studies on this, but we feel more emotion towards having lost £50 for example, then we would feel in terms of finding £50. So the elation we feel at finding it is less than the negative feelings about losing it. We hate losing things, we hate feeling like we’ve lost out, it is a very strong human emotion.

To try and evoke this emotion in some way on your landing pages is really, really strong. Now it needs to be carefully done, we’ve all read naff landing pages, that try to kind of initiate some sort of loss for you and feel very, very sales-y, and I’m not a big promoter of that. I don’t think that landing pages should feel to sales-y, but certainly invoking some sort of loss there is a really good way of getting people over the line.

Now there’s a few different tactics, I’m sure you’ve seen all of these before. It could be something along the lines of, you know, an early bird deal, if they, you know, they subscribe sooner rather than later than they get some sort of discount. It could be along the lines of saying that you have limited stock, or limited availability.

It could be something along the lines of saying that, you know, this is, you know, a special product that is only going to be available for a set period of time and is therefore a special edition. All of these tactics can be used to invoke the sense of losing out if they do not commit.

It’s that ultimate sense of FOMO, it’s that fear of missing out and you want to try and evoke that in some way on your landing page. So let me know, do you run an ecommerce store? What are your biggest frustrations when it comes to growth? I’d love to hear your thoughts and your views, pop a little comment down below and let’s get the conversation going.

Step number six. So having highlighted the potential loss, show the amazing benefit that your customer is going to experience from buying your product or service. So if you’re selling a physical product, it could literally be, you know, this product is going to revolutionise your life by solving this problem. This product is going to make you look great.

This product is going to make you feel great. Those are the three criteria when it comes to evoking that sense of transformation with products, it’s what makes you look good, it’s what makes you feel good, it’s what solves a problem. If you tap into all three, even better. If you’re more of a service-based business, then again, you’re looking at transformation.

You know, if you’re a coach, for example, you know, trying and evoke the sort of level of transformation that your client is going to receive at the end of your service, as opposed to at the start. So at the end of this, you are going to feel X, Y and Z, you’re going to be so much more confident you’re going to be so much more this, you’re going to be so much more that. It will make people excited about joining up for your service and allow them to visualise what could potentially happen in their life if they commit to you now.

Ultimately, step number six is all about making your customer feel good about their decision. Point number seven is to be really, really clear about who you are. So many landing pages do this, I think they get it wrong, you know, people need to know who they’re buying from, they need to have that degree of trust.

And so by not providing a phone number, or a clear email address, or even letting people know where you are based, that can put a big barrier to commitment to potential customers, because they feel like they’re buying from a faceless organisation, and the whole thing with this landing page is about building trust and reassurance.

So make sure that you’re really transparent with that. There’s clear phone numbers, there’s clear help options. Maybe you’ve got a chatbot with a live person behind it, ready and willing to answer questions, whatever that might be, make sure that that’s on there.

Point number eight is to ensure that you’ve got reviews and customer testimonials on your landing page to back up their decision. So it’s kind of like don’t just take our word for it, this is what other happy customers have found from our products.

Now that could be an automated thing, where you have a reviews platform on your site and you send out an automatic email to anybody that’s bought your products asking for a review on it. And then, of course, you’ve got those five star reviews.

They’re like gold. I mean, look at something like Amazon. You know, the first thing we do is go to the review section at the bottom and see how good this product is. So definitely reviews, absolute gold dust. If it’s not a physical product, if you’re selling a service, the same thing applies.

Make sure that you’ve got testimonials from clients, and a good way to ensure that these are authentic is to take snaps, you know, snapshots of conversations, maybe in your slack channel or in Whatsapp or in a Facebook group, or to include a video testimonial, anything that shows that this is a genuine, bona fide testimonial or review. and not something you’ve just made up in order to secure your landing page.

So have a really careful think about how you’re going to display that. But absolute gold, needs to appear on every single landing page.

And finally point number nine is to have a really, really clear and strong call to action. Now, what is a call to action? Well it’s just telling people what to do next when they make that decision of yeah, ok, this sounds good. I’m ready to go with this. What do they do next? You need to make that really obvious for them.

So with an ecommerce store, that’s pretty simple, it needs to be a Buy Now button, but there’s Buy Now buttons on there’s Buy Now buttons. So you know, you need to think really carefully about exactly what your button looks like, how obvious it is, how many times it appears on the page. As a general rule of thumb, it needs to be as big as possible, so it’s really obvious where they go. The next step needs to be as obvious as possible.

Do you direct them straight to the checkout? Is it obvious that you’ve got a little basket up in the top corner of your screen, you know, where does that product go once they hit that button? Make sure that’s really obvious so people don’t get confused, and you’d be amazed how people can get confused by this, and make sure that it’s a colour that stands out, pops out, from the rest of the page.

So, ideally, you want, if you’ve got a lovely colour scheme, which is all really, really nice and integrated, you want to make sure that your Buy Now button is the only colour that stands out from the rest, because you want to make that pop.

If you’re selling services, this obviously is going to be slightly different. It might be a button to go to the next landing page to book a call. It might be a Get in Touch button, but whatever is, the same rules apply. Basically your call to action button needs to be big, bold and impossible to ignore. There needs to be no confusion about how your customer commits to your product.

So if you’re finding that your website isn’t converting sales as efficiently as you’d like to, and you’re not really sure where to start, then myself or a member of my team can help. Now we do a free strategy session for 30 minutes, completely free.

You can book this straightaway online right now by going to fastnetlive.wpengine.com/apply So take a little look at that. We’d love to help you out if we can.

Alternatively, if you’re really wanting to get this sorted yourself, or you’re looking to share some information with the team, check out my other videos all about building your ecommerce brand.

Now, we’ve got a great video over here all about scaling your ecommerce store for an effective ecommerce strategy. So take a look at that, it’s a really valuable video. Alternatively, there’s an equally good video over here all about using email marketing to scale your ecommerce store, and the 12 emails that you really should be implementing right now. So take a look at those.

If you like this video, click the subscribe button, hit the bell as well, and you’ll be notified every Thursday when I release a new video.”

More To Explore

Scroll to Top