Landing pages are must for many websites, yet they’re still not used as often as they should be.

Adding a landing page to your WordPress site could help increase conversions for a new product or increase newsletter signups. With the right design and content, it could become one of your best marketing tools.

Once you understand how to use a landing page, it’s not hard to incorporate it into your site. Use one or use multiple pages to really drive sales to all your products.

Landing Pages Explained

A landing page is designed to make a visitor take some form of action. It could be to visit a specific page, buy a specific product or share content with friends. Whatever the purpose is, the page is basically one large call to action. They’re designed to help encourage your traffic to take action.

The perfect page is a combination of design and content. While you can take care of the content portion, you may prefer to hire a developer or use a special WordPress plugin to help create the page itself. It may only be a single page, but with the right content, a strong call to action and the right design, it can be the most effective page on your site.

Takeaway: If you want to increase email signups, get more subscribers to a membership program or sell more of your latest product, ensure you have a landing page. For best results, hire a developer to take care of the page itself. It’ll look more professional and all you have to do is fill in the content.

Keep It Simple

Many landing pages fail because they push too much at visitors. Pages should be simple. Content is important, but it should be limited to just the essentials. If a page is full of videos, images and paragraphs, visitors will likely move on. Too much clutter and you’ll drive visitors away. Plenty of white space with a few vital elements and you’ve got a winner. The most important aspects to include are:

• Catchy, but descriptive headline – Think promotional
• Two to four short paragraphs explaining the product or offer – These can also be bullet points
• One or more images or a video – Use a slideshow for multiple images and keep videos short
• Testimonials if possible
• Bulleted list summarizing the entire page – Keep it to quick, short sentences
• Sign up or purchase form – Make this obvious so visitors take action

Overall, this is the perfect formula for a landing page. Simple always works best over cluttered.

Takeaway: Keep your content short and to the point. Work with your developer to leave plenty of white space between elements and ensure your message stands out to visitors.

Creating A Landing Page

You have four main options for adding a landing page to your site. You could build it yourself if you know how to build advanced WordPress pages. If you’re not completely comfortable doing it on your own, you could also install a free plugin. The two most popular and easiest to use include WordPress Landing Pages and Parallax Gravity.

The other two options will cost you, but help you build more effective landing pages. Free plugins and tools are useful, but premium tools give you more features and control over the layout. You’ll still need some design knowledge to get the most from these. The final option is to hire someone to do it. Professional developers already know exactly how to design landing pages you’ll be proud to showcase on your site.

Takeaway: Free options are great for designing very basic landing pages. For the best and most effective page, hire someone who understands what visitors want most from a page so you’ll get more conversions as a result.

Placing The Page

How you place the page determines how well visitors respond to it. Consider the following before adding the page to your site:

• Do you want it separate from your main site? You could remove navigation so visitors only see that page or have a separate domain or sub-domain.
• How do you link to it from your site? Many place a banner or link on their homepage or sidebar. The link should be noticeable to be effective.
• How should you target visitors? Some sites use a pop-up on the first page a visitor sees while others only show pop-ups on certain pages or through ads on other sites.

Takeaway: Plan how you want to use the page in advance. Depending on the methods you choose, you may need a developer to implement the page for you.

Conclusion

If you’re not thrilled with your current conversions, adding landing pages could be the solution you’re looking for. Work alongside a developer to plan the best possible page design and strategy for targeting your visitors. Start with just one page to test and you will notice a difference.

Ready to start using a landing page on your WordPress site? Contact StuartMedia today to get started. 

Image: Rob Enslin