We recently showed you how to launch a successful email marketing campaign. If you want to promote a service or a product successfully, the CTA button in your emails should lead to a good landing page. Even if you send a great email that generates a lot of traffic to your site, it will be in vain if you don‘t have a compelling landing page that will convert the clicks into actual sales.

Why do you need a landing page?

Having a landing page can help you to increase your sales. Such a page usually targets a certain group of people using a specific set of keywords. Promoting your product to the right people can boost your sales. Landing pages can also give your website an SEO boost as they are usually keyword-rich and attract a lot of traffic.

A landing page will help potential customers go straight from your email to subscribing/buying, without any distractions on the way. We have compiled a list of a few things you should keep in mind when you build your landing page.

It should not be your home page

The idea of the landing page is to sell a single product or a service you offer, so you should build a separate page and you should not link your marketing emails to the site homepage. If you want to promote two or more products, then it will be a good idea to create a separate landing page for each one. This way, people will focus only on what you have to offer.

Add a good headline

You did a great job with your marketing campaign and you got good traffic to your landing page. You should make people stay on the page by adding a catchy headline that will make them read on. Make sure the headline stands out, but don‘t use flashing letters or any visual effect that people may find annoying.

Add a good description

People should know what you are trying to sell. Point out all the advantages of your product, but avoid cliches. Use short and clear sentences. This way, people will not get the feeling that you are trying to trick them by using long and ambiguous phrases. Make sure that you include good keywords for SEO purposes. The right words will give your website a boost in search engine results and will improve the visibility of any paid ad campaign that you may have, which targets specific keywords.

Use media

You should promote your product and list all its advantages, but avoid adding a wall of text that will discourage your potential customers from reading. Sometimes a short animation or a video can tell much more than a few paragraphs of text. It will be faster and easier for people to see what you offer as visual perception is usually better than reading comprehension, especially if people have other things to do and they have clicked on your marketing link among other chores. Of course, a blank page with a video on it can be as discouraging as a wall of text, so try to find the right balance between text and media depending on the particular product/service you want to sell.

Hide any unnecessary navigation

Once visitors end up on your landing page, they should stay there and they should not be distracted by menus with links to other pages. This is why, we recommend that you leave only a link to your homepage (and this may be just the logo leading there, not even a separate link) and hide any other navigation on the site. This way, people will not be tempted to explore links, leaving the landing page without signing up or buying anything.

Add testimonials or badges

People will appreciate seeing what existing customers think about your product. If you have regular customers, ask them if they can write a short testimonial and then add it on your landing page. Ask them if you can also use their picture as testimonials will look far more trustworthy. Do not add fake testimonials as they will likely discourage any potential customer that recognizes they are not genuine.

If you don‘t have testimonials, but some local or national media published an article or broadcasted a show about your product, you should surely add it. People tend to trust a product/service more if they see an article about it in the local newspaper, for example.

Keep the page simple

Some text, one or two videos and a subscription form are everything you usually need on your landing page. You should spend some time designing the page to make sure it looks good. If you add too much information, or if you do not arrange that information properly, you risk losing customers as seeing too much content can be frustrating, especially if it is spread across the page. Do not add any content that is not relevant to your product. Of course, displaying ads are a big no-no.

Match the topic of your email

The landing page you build should be about the same product/service as the email you have sent. Avoid leading people to a page that has nothing to do with what you were trying to sell in your email. If the landing page is about something different and this happens more than once i.e. it was not by mistake, it is likely that people will simply stop opening your emails or clicking the links in them. You risk making them think that you try to trick them into buying a product that is different from the one they got interested in. Doing such a thing intentionally is utterly wrong and it can hurt your online business in the long run.

Offer some value

Landing pages are not meant to be purely informational pages. You should offer some value to your potential customers to give them an incentive to sign up or to order. You can offer a free trial of your service or send people a small test product depending on what you offer. If anybody wants to order directly, they can always do so. The idea here is to give potential customers something small and in return it is likely that you will get more sales.

Add sharing buttons

If your landing page is good enough and people like what you offer, they may want to share it on social media or in an instant messaging application. They will be more likely to share if they have that option right on the page so that they don‘t have to copy the link, look for the application they want, and paste the link in it. A sharing will make things much easier.

Ask only for what you really need

If you have a subscription form, ask people to enter only the information you really need. For a newsletter, for example, you need only the email address to send messages to, and the person‘s first name so that you can personalize the messages. If you ask people to enter a street address or any other additional information, they will most likely skip the subscription form completely. Of course, if you plan on sending them a free product or you actually need more details, you can ask your potential customers to enter that information as long as it is relevant.

How to build the page

You can use more or less any web design software to build your landing page, although some are easier to use than others. In this article, we focus on a couple of tools – our Website Builder, as it is an application that we offer with all our shared hosting packages, and WordPress, as this is the most popular content management system on the market.

Our Website Builder

The tool is very easy to use, so you can build a landing page with a few clicks using a very intuitive interface. We have listed some things above that we believe are necessary for your page, and here you can find out how to add/do them:

• Add a new page. You can do this from the Content button -> Add a new subpage. You can select a new blank page and add the rest of the content manually, or select “Show More Options” and then select Landing Page. The latter will be created with two small text blocks and one large image to give you a start, but you will still have to add some more content manually.

• Edit the headline. Click on it to see the editable options. You can choose the font, size and color with a couple of clicks.

• Add/edit a description. Similar to the headline, you just have to click on a text box to start editing it. To add more text boxes, go to Content -> Contents, where you can see the different layouts.

• Insert audio or video files. To add an audio file, go to Content -> Apps -> Audio player. You can then upload the file, add a thumbnail, etc. To add a video, you should upload it to a video streaming platform like YouTube and embed it. This way, you will not have to worry about player compatibility with different browsers, speed and bandwidth. Embed the video from Content -> Apps -> Video.

• Add testimonials or badges. You can use either one of these two options here. You will find both in section Content -> Testimonials. The first one allows you to add testimonials with different layouts – with or without a picture. Depending on the landing page you want to build, you can add one large block or a few smaller ones. The second option is called "Trusted by”. As the name suggests, you can add such a block if you want to list newspapers, magazines and TV stations, selecting an image and a layout for each entry.

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• Add sharing buttons. You can easily add such a section on your landing page from Content -> Social Media. You will see a “Share” block that will allow the landing page visitors to share the content using their favorite social media or a number of other web platforms and instant messengers.

• Build a contact form. You can add a contact form from the Content section of our Website Builder -> Apps -> Form Builder. If you need Name, Email and Message boxes, there is nothing else you have to do but to insert the form. If you want to add more boxes, a drop-down menu or radio buttons, then you can edit the module and build a contact form of your own.

Our Website Builder will allow you to build a great landing page with no previous experience or programming skills. You should only add the modules/sections above and you will be all set.

WordPress

If you use WordPress, you will find some blocks in its default Block editor that are similar to the modules of our Website Builder. For some functions, however, you will have to add a plugin as they are not supported by the application by default. You will also find a number of landing page plugins in the WordPress repository that can save you some time, but similar to the Landing page that our Website Builder creates, you will have to edit the content manually.

• Start by adding a new page from the dashboard -> Pages -> New. You can enter the title right away, while for the text, images or media files you can click on the “+” sign and select the block you need. For the functions that are not a part of WordPress by default, we cannot recommend one plugin over another, so we have listed a few suggestions, which you can check out:

• Contact form. WordPress doesn‘t come with one by default, so you will definitely need a plugin. For a standard contact form, one of the most popular plugins is Contact Form 7 as it is simple, but powerful. Alternatives that allow you to create different forms as well are WPForms and Ninja forms. Their advantage over Contact Form 7 is that you can create surveys, registration forms or subscription forms as well, but they are not as easy to use.

• Social media. To add a sharing functionality on your site, you can use a plugin like Sassy Social Share, AddToAny Share Buttons or Grow Social. They have different features like animated icons, different layouts, sharing counters, etc.

• Testimonials. If you want to use a separate plugin, the more popular ones are Strong Testimonials and Testimonial. They allow you to collect testimonials on the site and create responsive sliders that you can edit. Alternatively, you can add testimonials by adding a simple WordPress text block and inserting an image in it.

• Landing page. You can use a plugin for a pre-made landing page, although you will still have to make some adjustments manually. A few examples of such plugins are SeedProd, Landing Page Builder and WPOnepager. The plugins come with templates (free and paid) and different widgets that will help you to build a great landing page. If you like any of the paid templates that are a part of the plugins, you can purchase it, but if you spend some time, you should be able to create the same or similar layout using the standard WordPress blocks and free plugins.

Wrap Up

Having a great landing page is a necessity for any email campaign. We discussed what it takes to launch a successful email campaign and now we look at the things you should have on the page to increase your chance of converting the hits into sales. Using our Website Builder or another tool, it will take you just a few easy steps to create an appealing landing page that can increase your ROI significantly.

By using the free ICDSoft Website Builder, you can quickly build a landing page, without investing in additional plugins, modules and themes. It is a complete all-in-one package for rapid website development.