LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION
Landing Page can be a stand alone page, with limited navigation that is focused on a specific conversion goal.
It can also be an entrance page, i.e the first page users get to when landing on your website, home page or any other page of a website.
This article is about landing page optimization which is essentially about enhancing the experience of a user on a page so that they can take the desired action.
Behavior psychology has a lot to do with landing page optimization strategies. Thinking, fast and slow by Nobel prize-winning Daniel Kahneman is the fundamental book that is referenced since the first videos of the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini degree Course.
An effective Landing Page
It is supposed to shorten the journey from click to conversion.
E.g. When a user lands on the homepage of your website and they have to go through eight layers of navigation to understand what your ad was talking about, it is a very bad landing page. A better landing page should follow up on the promises made in the ad source, speaks to user motivation, and it addresses barriers. Landing page should be answering important questions and creating clarity. A landing page is focused on a specific goal, and it’s focused on getting you there as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Landing page copywriting
Great landing page copywriting delivers on the following fundamental elements:
- Shortens journey from click to conversion
- Follows up on “promises” made an ad source
- Speaks to user motivation and addresses barriers
- Answers important questions & creates clarity
- Creates a clear path to the conversion goal
This simple approach simply kickstarts the writing process. We need to understand how to use information hierarchy, prioritize elements, and structure your copy:
- Headline: Message match. Capture attention. Trigger dopamine.
- Benefits/features: Present important information. Emphasize the value of your offer. Trigger dopamine.
- Credibility: Make the content trustworthy. Answer questions. Mitigate cortisol.
- Expectation manager: Ensure users know what to expect. Mitigate ambiguity. Avoid disappointment / negative reward prediction errors.
- Call-to-action Make users click.
Landing page design
When it comes to landing page design, what comes first? Design or copy?
COPY.
The reason is that having a design that is limiting the message the copy needs to deliver can hurt conversions.
Before diving into copy and design we need to understand some of the fundamentals of consumer psychology which will help us in designing high converting landing pages with better user experiences.
Basic aspects of psychology and neuroscience helps you understand how people make decisions and why. We want to learn how to use cognitive biases to guide the user through the landing page experience in a clear and logical way. The landing page optimization course in the CXL Institutes’ Growth Marketing Minidegree teaches us concepts based on the work of Daniel Kahneman and Brian Cugelman.
The idea is that humans have two fundamentally different modes of thinking or ways of processing the information.So the big difference between the two is that the one is basically based on intuitive thinking or fast thinking and the other is based on analytical thinking or the slower way of thinking.
Then there are three concepts introduced in the course- priming, framing and WYSIATI.
Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus. So for example, on the Unbounce website all the marketing, even on the pricing page, talked about a 30-day free trial and starting my trial. But what happens when you get to this step and you click the button,well, you basically have to fill out all the credit card information. So that’s just an extra thing you weren’t expecting. They’re not going to pay upfront right now, but we were asking for the credit card information upfront, but the problem here is we were priming them on every single step leading up to this one, they expect to be able to sign up for free and start a trial, which is not the case actually. This is the whole free example of how priming can backfire.
Framing is basically the idea that the way you deliver a message has a direct impact on how it is perceived. So for example, if I say, “Tonight we’re having cold, dead fish with old seaweed.” On the other hand I say,”Tonight we’re having delicious sushi with wakame salad. “Two very, very different images you get in your head,and two very different ways of presenting the same thing.
WYSIATI basically stipulates that our reality is what we have in front of us. Our brains like to tell stories. It likes interpreting things, and involuntarily you can’t help but put the pieces together. The gaps in the story are filled automatically out with whatever is logical to you based on who you are and what your prior experience is.
When we are speaking about the laptop cover, for the marketers it might be absolutely logical and clear that laptop cover means laptop insurance. But it’s not logical for anyone else, for their audience.Their audience is in WYSIATI mode. All that they have to make their decision is what they saw on the page,and to them, it wasn’t insurance, it was a cover.
Sure, there is a lot more to understand the basics of designing high-converting landing pages. Here are the 6 most important landing page design elements to focus on:
- Headline
- Images / Video
- Features / Benefits
- Credibility
- Expectation Manager
- Call-to-Action
Product Messaging
The copy might be the most important part of your website, so it makes sense to conduct a conversion-focused teardown with a method around it.
The best part of the product messaging chapter in the “Conversion” module is that each lesson has a resource, usually in the form of a Gsheet.
In the world of copywriting, this might be weird, but the way Momoko Price goes over the technicalities of sales copywriting makes it one of the best courses on this topic I’ve seen.
There is so much information in the videos it is better to just recommend this course. So, if you want to improve your messaging strategy through customer research and analysis I definitely recommend the Sales Copywriting and Product Messaging course by Momoko Price.
Wireframing
Wireframing is creating a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a page.
This is the point where we’re conceptualizing the page. At this stage, we’re trying to figure out the structure and not bother too much with specific color or specific images or specific videos. There are many different ways of doing it. You can whiteboard it, you can do it on a piece of paper, you can use software, Balsamiq.
