Many eCommerce entrepreneurs prepare for their first digital ad campaign by teaching themselves everything they need to know about digital ad copy. They believe that penning a winning ‘call to action’ (or CTA) in their digital ad is all that they need to create passionate customers or clients online. However, there is still an often forgotten or overlooked step between a device user engaging with your ad and converting from a site visitor into a customer: your landing page.
One of the essential elements of any digital marketing campaign is a well-designed landing page (also referred to as a ‘click-through page’), which ferries device users from your digital ads through to your website. Landing pages are generally characterized by their confident, to-the-point design and their ability to communicate a clear message to that page’s visitor. This message is supposed to be a continuation of the call to action found in your digital ad.
Throughout my years of working with an eCommerce SEO company, the main issue I’ve observed that has kept business owners from growing their profits is simply a landing page that fails to convert.
So, how do you ascertain whether or not your landing page is doing justice to your winning digital ad campaign? Read on to unearth the secrets to creating a compelling landing page CTA.
Keep your CTA short and direct.
If you’ve had a hand at developing digital ads for your marketing campaign, then chances are you already know a thing or two about creating a compelling CTA. The best CTAs are ones that utilize an authoritative voice, start with an imperative verb (i.e., shop, book, click, etc.), and communicate a sense of urgency to your site visitors. Practicing these principles comes in particularly handy when you’re penning a CTA for a sale or other limited-time offer.
Creating a CTA for an ongoing campaign tends to stump many eCommerce business owners and marketers alike. For example, if you’re looking to build a landing page that’s likely to become long-term, establish a page on your company’s website. However, for landing pages that are likely to be used over an extensive period, you’ll want to ensure that the tone of your CTA is personalized to suit the unique voice of your brand. CTAs generally tend to be more effective when personalized, as your site visitor will get a sense that they’re interacting with your business rather than with a website.
Use interactive CTA buttons.
Even if you’ve managed to pen some powerful CTAs, plain text can only take you so far in the digital sphere. More often than not, site visitors will easily scroll past web copy to search for interactive elements on your landing page. That’s precisely why an increasing amount of eCommerce websites are using CTA buttons over CTA titles or header text.
Alongside CTA buttons naturally offering your site visitors a more interactive experience when engaging with your landing page, these buttons will also help your CTA stand out from the other content on your landing page, making it highly clear to site visitors what the purpose of this web page is, and what steps they’ll need to take next on this user journey. Additionally, having CTAs placed on clickable buttons will allow you to place multiple distinct yet categorically similar CTAs on the same landing page, allowing your site to offer highly customized and detailed user experiences.
Be sure to conduct thorough user testing before launching any landing page, especially if that landing page has multiple CTA buttons. For example, you can use user stories to ascertain whether the layout of CTA buttons on your landing page is in an optimal arrangement or whether your landing page must be revisited and redesigned.
Provide your audience with real value
Another major element of boosting the conversion rates of your landing pages is simply ensuring that your landing pages are offering your site visitors enough genuine value for them to consider performing the actions you desire them to. For example, let’s say you were looking to develop a landing page specifically designed to prompt site visitors to provide their email addresses. Naturally, a CTA that plainly states ‘Join our emailing list now!’ isn’t likely to sway many site visitors, in part because signing up to email lists means potentially subjecting yourself to a lifetime of inbox spam.
However, suppose that the landing page also promised site visitors a discount code or other special offer to provide their email address. In that case, they’d be more likely to fulfill the desired action and provide their contact info. This same principle of providing your site visitors with discernible value can be utilized as a method of boosting conversion rates on a wide range of landing pages.
Review, redesign, and optimize
Hopefully, your landing page content should now be powerful enough to convert all of your fresh site visitors into passionate customers, but of course, converting is generally easier said than done. Site visitors may choose to support your digital business for many reasons aside from the tone and feel of your brand and wider web presence.
After all, engaging with any digital content is largely a visual experience, even if your site visitor reads words on a screen. As a result, everything from the length of your sentences to how your paragraphs are arranged can impact how engaging (or disengaging) your site may be. For this reason, you must review and edit your site’s copy regularly. Doing so will also ensure that your content stays relevant or topical, vital to maintaining a fresh organizational tone.
There’s also a lot to be said about color psychology in web design and the impact that using specific color schemes can hold on your site’s overall conversion rates. Just as warm color schemes reflect strong and upbeat emotions, cool color schemes can represent peace and serenity. These basic color principles, alongside other more intricate elements in color psychology, can be used to support your landing page’s ability to convert.
Alongside editing your content and redesigning your landing page, taking time to ensure that your landing page is well-optimized to appear on search engines, may help to boost your site’s organic traffic alongside all the paid search traffic filtering in through your digital ads. Be sure to add a healthy selection of metatags to all the text and images on your landing page, as well as write a succinct meta description to ensure that your landing page has a high likelihood of ranking on search engine results pages.
Brainstorm and collaborate
Just as we mentioned earlier, design can be just as important as SEO when developing a killer landing page. Your landing page’s layout or design scheme should be just as dynamic and engaging as your CTA. If you find that your landing page feels personally flat and uninteresting, then there’s a definite need for redesign at the very least.
Of course, suppose you’ve been building your landing pages independently. In that case, it’s natural to feel like you’re too close to these elements of your wider digital campaign to look at your landing pages objectively. If this is the case, workshopping the landing pages with your wider organization or even with a focus group may be beneficial.
However, if you are working in a team of developers, periodically brainstorming ideas surrounding how best your landing page can be better designed and optimized may also help yield a myriad of ideas that you may not have been able to come up with on your own. This is the power of collaboration!
As you can see, the perfect CTA can only ever take you so far, especially in digital marketing. So the medium used to relay your message should be optimized to support your CTA’s wider mission: to turn site visitors into dedicated customers. So long as you keep this mission in mind throughout your landing page optimization process, you’ll likely find yourself with some landing pages that convert.
