Last updated on August 7th, 2024 at 07:22 am
You already know that landing pages can help you grow your business. But what landing page goals should you be setting?
Today we will discuss three landing page goals that you should consider.
What is the Purpose of Landing Pages?
A landing page is a web page that is designed with a specific conversion goal in mind.
In theory, that conversion goal can be anything, from getting someone’s email address to getting them to follow you on social media to getting them to share a particular piece of content with their social media followers.
In practice, however, the vast majority of landing pages are designed to convert potential customers into leads by getting them to provide their contact details.
In fact, a typical landing page that asks for the potential customer’s email address in exchange for a lead magnet serves as a lead generation funnel.
And once the potential customer gives you their email address, they become a lead and enter your sales funnel.
This means that the primary purpose of landing pages is lead generation.
The #1 Landing Page Rule that You Must Follow
There’s a simple landing page rule that you must follow if you want to create a landing page that converts:
Your landing page should have only one conversion goal.
What specific action do you want the visitor to take?
Make sure that your landing page is solely focused on getting them to do that.
Ideally, the only clickable elements on your landing page should be the call-to-action buttons, there shouldn’t be anything else that could distract the visitor.
This means no navigation bar, no links to your social media profiles, no links to your latest blog posts, etc.
Of course, that’s not always possible, especially if you are using a landing page as your homepage and therefore need a navigation bar. Still, you should minimize distractions.
The reason for this is that the more options you present to someone, the more confused they are going to be.
And as the old copywriter saying goes, “A confused mind always says no”.
So make sure that your landing page has a single conversion goal.
That way, it’s a simple yes or no decision, either the visitor wants to take that action or they don’t.
Say, if you are offering a lead magnet in exchange for their email address, they either want it or they don’t.
This is the most important conversion rate optimization principle of them all!
3 Landing Page Goal Examples
Okay, so now that you know that a landing page should only have one goal, what goal should you choose?
Example One: Get the Potential Customer’s Email Address
We have already discussed the fact that the primary purpose of landing pages is to convert potential customers into leads.
Typically, that’s done by offering a lead magnet in exchange for the visitor’s contact details, usually their email address.
In that case, the conversion goal should be to persuade the visitor to provide their email address by submitting it via the opt-in form.
Example Two: Get the Potential Customer to Sign Up for a Free Trial
Another way to convert visitors into leads is to offer them a free trial of your product or service because that also allows you to obtain their contact details.
In this case, the conversion goal should be to get the visitor to sign up for the free trial.
Note that a lead that signed up for a free trial will likely be of higher quality than a lead that subscribed to your email list.
That’s especially true if your free trial requires providing not just the contact details but also the credit card information.
Just keep in mind that there tends to be a trade-off between lead quality and lead quantity.
The more friction you add to the process, the fewer potential customers will convert into leads, but the quality of those leads will be higher.
This means that a free trial landing page will likely have a lower conversion rate than a lead magnet landing page but will generate higher-quality leads.
Example Three: Get the Potential Customer to Fill Out a Survey
You can also use landing pages for purposes other than lead generation.
For example, if you want to conduct a survey, you can create a landing page for it and then drive traffic to it.
In that case, the conversion goal would be to get the potential customer to start filling out the survey.
This can help you learn more about your target audience – you could survey potential customers, existing customers, or even ex-customers who stopped using your product or service.
When it comes to survey landing pages, you can expect a low conversion rate, since you are basically asking for a favor.
That being said, you might be able to increase the conversion rate if you offer people some sort of incentive to complete the survey, such as a free product or a discount.
How to Create a Landing Page that Converts
Okay, so now that you have chosen a conversion goal, how can you create a landing page that converts?
1. Offer a Super Valuable Lead Magnet
Your lead magnet is the most important factor when it comes to the conversion rate of your landing page.
The days when you could build an email list with a low-effort lead magnet are long gone – people won’t give you their email addresses unless you offer them something super valuable in return.
That’s why the key to designing an effective lead magnet is to create something that your dream customers desperately want and then give it to them for free!
2. Use a Proven Landing Page Template
We don’t recommend creating a landing page from scratch if you don’t have any previous landing page design experience. Why?
Because online marketers have been relentlessly optimizing landing pages for more than two decades now.
At this point, it’s pretty clear what works and what doesn’t, which is why it’s important to ensure that your landing page follows best practices.
And the easiest way to do that is to use a proven, high-converting landing page template.
Our software, ClickFunnels, includes a library of landing page templates for pretty much every use case imaginable.
So why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can simply do what works?
3. Make Sure that the Headline Conveys the Value of Your Offer
When someone decides to check out your landing page, the odds are that they are extremely distracted.
They might be chatting with friends on a messaging app, listening to a podcast, and reading a blog article all at the same time, with 20 tabs open in their browser.
This means that you only have a few seconds to grab their attention before they get distracted and leave your landing page. But how can you do that?
That is the purpose of your landing page headline. You want to clearly convey the value of your offer so that the visitor would want to read the rest of your landing page copy to learn more.
How will your offer make their life better?
Emphasize that in your headline!
4. Display Social Proof on Your Landing Page
Social proof is a psychological principle that says that when people are unsure of what to do, they look at what others do in order to determine the right course of action.
In the business context, this means that when potential customers don’t know whether to trust you, they will seek indications that other people trust you.
There are two types of social proof:
- Direct social proof that relates to the offer in question – Can you get a testimonial from someone who has benefitted from your lead magnet?
- Indirect social proof that relates to you as an individual if you have a personal brand or to your business if you have a company brand – This includes relevant credentials, accomplishments, awards, media features, etc.
We recommend adding social proof to your landing page because that should help increase its conversion rate.
5. A/B Test Your Landing Page
Don’t waste time trying to make your landing page perfect right from the get-go.
It’s much better to create it as quickly as you can, start driving traffic to it and establish the baseline conversion rate, and then optimize it with A/B testing.
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a conversion rate optimization method that works like this:
- You create two variants of the same page: variant A and variant B – There should be only one difference between them (e.g. the headline). That’s the element that you are testing.
- You split your traffic into two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B.
- You let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, then analyze the results and keep the winning variant.
When people talk about A/B testing, they typically focus on the big wins, but these tend to be few and far between.
Realistically, most A/B tests won’t lead to anything and when you see increases in the conversion rate, they will likely be minor.
However, those minor increases add up over time, which can have a significant impact on your bottom line.
So trust the process and keep optimizing your landing page.
You’ll see results eventually!
Build Landing Pages that CONVERT With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to create landing pages that convert:
- Proven landing page templates
- Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates
- A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your landing pages
What’s best is that we have a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk.
So why not start building your landing page today?