Your Guide to Quick and Dirty Landing Page Conversion Optimization [Review]

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An effective landing page can turn non-customers into purchasing clients and loyal fans. Learn the tested formula or process to help inform your landing page strategy and achieve your conversion goals.

CRO expert and founder of M/A Consulting, Michael Aagaard teaches Landing Page Optimization at CXL Institute. In this course, he covers the topics of conversions, wireframing, copywriting, and design.

Let’s dive right in.

Multiple Aspects of Landing Page that Influence the Overall User Experience. Photo Courtesy of CXL.

Michael emphasizes that a lot of factors affect the conversion experience. Primarily, there’s the landing page, copy, design, and UX. Then, there’s how the user experience of the landing page based on devices, browser, and operating system. Also, remember to consider the user journey and another layer of psychology: motivation, barriers, concerns, and anxiety.

With the different layers that influence how you would optimize your landing page, Michael advises taking a full-on approach here.

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO LANDING PAGE OPTIMIZATION

1. Conduct Research. Michael shares that understanding the user experience is important. He uses Martech tools like Hotjar heatmaps, screen recordings, and feedback polls to start his research and know the baseline for the landing page performance.

• Heuristic walkthrough. Learn how to conduct a full-funnel walkthrough that focuses on finding the weakest points in the landing page experience.
• Quantitative research specifically asks WHAT and WHERE users exit from the landing page without filling out the form. Google Analytics should be handy for this type of research.
• Qualitative research asks WHY users distrust the landing page because it lacks credibility.

2. Form or Validate Hypotheses.

3. Create Treatment.

4. Conduct an Experiment. Use A/B testing once you’ve done with all your research and created what you think is the best landing page treatment. But Michael does not recommend that you do split testing if there’s not much traffic to your landing page.

5. Analyze Experiment Data. Look at the results of the experiment to answer your questions based on your hypotheses.

6. Conduct Follow-up Experiment. When you’ve done your experiment and you’ve analyzed the data and then based on this, you’re going to do a new treatment or follow-up experiment.

FUNDAMENTALS OF LANDING PAGE COPYWRITING

Michael shares that before he moves on to answering questions, reinforcing motivation, and handling barriers, he starts with wireframing first.

The wireframe or skeletal framework of the page gives you the visual guide when you build the landing page. Use your wireframe to guide your copywriting and to know how much information to put in there.

Information Hierarchy.

Information Hierarchy is important in Landing Page Optimization because it helps you structure the information on the landing page, in a logical and concise manner that resonates with your target audience.

This helps you find the right balance as to what and how much information must be provided on your page.

1. Who are you communicating with?
2. What do you want them to do?
3. Where is the traffic coming from?

Five Most Important Copy Elements

1. Headline. See to it that the message matches your ad/source and headline.
2. Benefits/features. Provide essential information with emphasis on the value of your offer.
3. Credibility. Make the content trustworthy and answer questions or objections.
4. Expectation manager. Make sure users know what to expect to avoid disappointment.
5. Call-to-action. Make users click.

LANDING PAGE DESIGN

The 6 Important Design Elements are the headline, images/video, features/benefits, credibility, expectation managers, and your call-to-action which are the same as your copy elements.

Use your information hierarchy and wireframes as a guideline for your design efforts. What you do is put the design elements in your copy, with the wireframe or design mockup, and make changes.

Visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy provides visual cues to the user for the most important in your page.

The 5 Most Important Aspects of the Visual Hierarchy

Size can make something stand out from the rest. The most important elements get the highest position on the visual hierarchy.

Space. Give a bit more white space gives a positive landing page experience for the users.

Font. Use clean, accessible, easy to read fonts. Find the right balance between design and function. Michael suggests that for a primary headline, use fonts of 32 to 40 pixels, for section headers 20 to 24 pixels, and smaller body copy, 16 to 18 pixels.

Color and Contrast. Do this if you want your user to focus more on certain places on your landing page. For example, for the green landing page, use a contrasting color for your call-to-action button, so the user will be drawn to that CTA.

Direction. Place images in the direction of the copy and of the button.

Form Design

Your form can stand alone and be independent of your landing page. So when building your forms, remember to optimize this for all devices. Add your copy and turn it into a wireframe (mockup) and start revising.

AUDIT LANDING PAGES

When you plan a landing page optimization project, go through the full process which looks like this: research, audit, wireframe, copy, design, implement, test, and optimize.

Begin running some heat maps and setting up some recording.

Building the visual hierarchy, based on your audit. Start fleshing out the wireframe with some visual hierarchy and consider your choices of images, videos, and icons.

Get the buy-in from your stakeholders before you implement, and the landing page goes live. Show it to customer success, the frontline people, who are a good gauge for the target audience; and the sales and marketing teams and whoever else is relevant in the process.

Test and optimize. You can run A/B test with consideration to your sample sizes. If you can’t do A/B test, do compare periods. Run a new test for two weeks and then compare with the two weeks before that.

Make a summary of findings on the target audience — their questions, motivations, with recommendations for framing and priming — on the information and visual hierarchies.

Overall, this gives you some perspective and practical process from the audit to optimization strategy.

The course featured here is part of the mini degree program, Growth Marketing. If you want to learn more about the program, visit CXL Institute. CXL Institute also offers mini degree programs: Conversion Optimization; Customer Acquisition; Data Analytics; Digital Psychology and Persuasion; Growth Marketing; Technical Content Marketing and Technical Marketing. CXL Institute offers digital marketing courses taught by the absolute best practitioners in the world today. Some of the companies that train their teams at CXL: Amazon, Google, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and many more.