The 4 Critical Steps to Landing Page Optimization

Your landing page has one job—turn visitors into consumers.

Whether they’re becoming consumers of your newsletter, membership, or products, it all starts with your landing page.

Convincing visitors to let you into their inbox or pull out their wallets is hard. In fact, the average landing page only has a 2.35% conversion rate.

So how do you set your landing page up for success in this saturated advertising world?

Optimization.

Optimizing your landing page is the only way that you are going to stand a chance at making the sale.

There are 4 parts of a landing page that are going to increase your conversions: offer, form, trust, and visual hierarchy.

We cover this in-depth in our 15-Point Landing Page Audit, but here’s a brief look into how you can optimize these 4 areas of your landing page.

#1: Offer

Your offer is the core part of your landing page. Without a good offer, even the prettiest landing page can’t make a visitor turn into a subscriber or buyer. When figuring out your offer, there are 2 elements of your landing page to focus on:

1. Headline
2. Call to action

Dollar Shave Club’s landing page has an offer for a free Starter Kit, but before introducing their offer, they have a tightly-written headline that answers a visitor’s biggest question: What does this product do for me?

Dollar Shave Club’s Starter Kit makes its customers “look, feel and smell better,” as can be seen in their headline. Their call to action is to get “Get Started” with a free Starter Kit.

With DSC being a well-known brand, they don’t have to emphasize building brand awareness or social proof. What they need to do is get brand-aware visitors to make their first purchase so that they can increase their LTV (lifetime customer value).

Slack is just as on top of their landing page game. They know their prospects’ biggest objection to buying Slack is not having used the platform to see that it’s what they’re looking for. So, here’s what Slack did.

They created their above-the-fold content (all content that appears before the visitor scrolls down the page) to do 2 things:

1. Headline: Prove to the customer that whatever work they do, their goal of seamless team communication can be done in Slack
2. Call to action: Mitigate the risk of signing up for Slack by giving away a free trial week

#2: Form

A form is either on the landing page, like with Slack’s work email form, or found after clicking the call to action (this is where Dollar Shave Club has their form).

The form is one of the most overlooked areas of a landing page, but today, you’re going to figure out how to make your form as user-friendly as possible, depending on your product.

Remember, asking somebody to fill out your form is asking for their time, and if they’re about to buy a product, you’re also asking for their money.

Forms need to be seamless and contingent upon the offer’s perceived value.

For example, if we’re signing up Dollar Shave Club’s free Starter Kit, we don’t want to fill out more than the bare necessities of contact and payment information because this is a small product that is worth under $20. Adding too many blocks for a low-tier product is asking for a time commitment that isn’t contingent on the product’s value.

Dollar Shave Club’s first form looks like this:

And their second looks like this:

Both forms are consistent with what consumers are used to filling out for low-tier products.

On the other hand, for a higher-tier product adding more form blocks is actually a good thing. For example, DigitalMarketer’s Lab ELITE Membership form looks like this:

When you click on the Yes or No options for the bottom questions, “Are you humble enough to ask for help when you need it?” and “Are you willing to offer help to your fellow members when they ask?”, a text block appears under each question.

These blocks are contingent upon the value of DigitalMarketer Lab ELITE Membership. This membership isn’t for brand new entrepreneurs; it’s for established entrepreneurs and marketing pros that are ready to level up. There’s a lot of value in this membership, and because of it, we need to vet who comes through the door.

Now, here’s a trick of the trade. Are you wondering why the text blocks in DM’s Lab ELITE Membership form didn’t show up on the initial form page?

It’s because we don’t want to overwhelm prospects. We want to ask them for more information after they’ve already put a small-­time commitment in by entering contact information.

#3: Trust

Trust is critical to an online purchase. When we have to count on a landing page to do the talking for us, we need to make sure that it’s inviting, consistent, and intuitive.

Here’s how to improve the trust factor of your landing page:

1. Design
2. Relevant Trust Icons
3. Authentic Testimonials
4. Clear Privacy Policies

Design needs to be smooth and revolved around a single idea. Don’t make the top of your landing page one color palette and the following part another. You want visitors to feel like they are in your virtual store. Just like your entire brick-and-mortar store would be branded for your business, your landing page needs a consistent design flow. Make sure your fonts are consistent and your images are authentic.

FabFitFun uses trust icons to improve their trust factor. They have trust icons for the publications that have featured their monthly subscription box in the above-the-fold content of their landing page.

Casper, a mattress company, uses a slider with happy customer testimonials. They also take it a step further by adding the customer’s name, a photo, AND their social media name. What does this do? It personalized the testimonial, making it more than a stranger’s recommendation, but a real person who you can actually connect with (if you want).

NomadList.com, a membership website for digital nomads that ranks cities by how remote-friendly they are, added a trust factor to their landing page by showing members who are “Near You” and “Traveling” on the right side widget.

How does this improve trust? It shows the NomadList community near you and the nomads who are doing what you do regularly as a digital nomad, traveling. What do all of these nomads have in common? They’re members of NomadList.

These icons can be used as testimonials if they are consistent with your landing pages content.

The last trust factor to add to your landing page is a privacy policy. With rising regulations, like GDPR, it’s crucial to make sure that you have policies displayed to your visitors. This includes a popup box explaining your website’s use of cookies and a Terms & Service document for visitors who buy a product or sign up for your newsletter.

Here’s MailChimp’s “Use of Cookies” disclosure:

#4: Visuals

The final area of your landing page to optimize are the visuals. We call this the Visual Hierarchy in our 15-Point Landing Page Audit.

Did you know that visuals can guide the eye to high priority sections of your landing page?

Sun Basket does. They designed their call to action button to land in the quiet space of the visual it overlays. See how the “Build Your Basket” button is in the middle of the 3 plates?

Their landing page guides the eye to the highest priority section, their call to action button. Sun Basket then hits on the second most important part of visual hierarchy: a singular theme. Notice how the photo above and the photo below both have consistent tones?

If shown both photos, the average consumer would likely be able to connect the two to Sun Basket. All fonts, colors, imagery, and copy need to complement each other throughout the entire landing page, and purchase process.

Remember: images should never compete with your call to action, they should support it (like Sun Basket’s header photo does).

Oatly, an oat milk company, also does a great job of creating consistency throughout their landing page. Regardless of where you are on the page, you know that you are on Oatly’s website.

Here’s Oatly’s above-the-fold content:

And here’s Oatly’s below-the-fold content:

If there’s anything you take away from this article, it should be this: your landing page’s only job is to turn visitors into consumers. If your conversion rate is under 2.35%, use these landing page optimization tips to upgrade your page and land more customers.