Today, more and more companies are starting to recognize the value of top-class customer experience. Without a doubt, offering consumers a smooth, convenient, and straightforward interaction with your product, service, or website has never been more important. In fact, it’s becoming a key brand differentiator, overshadowing price, and product.
For this reason, creating a high-quality, consumer-focused landing page is vital. The design and content of your landing page are basically what will define the consumers’ first in-depth contact with your brand or product. So leaving a good first impression is as crucial as ever, and usually, you’ll have very little time to do that and to attract the customers’ attention.
That’s why, a great landing page that will encourage users to convert has to be captivating but not bombastic, informative but not dull, beautiful but not overly pompous. Every detail needs to be designed with the consumers in mind. Remember, being customer-centric is good not just for the consumers – it can do wonders for your conversions and sales, and it can be very beneficial for your business in the long run. Let’s see how this works in more detail.
Personalized landing pages address users’ specific needs
Personalization is the beginning and the end of any high-converting consumer-focused strategy. Fewer and fewer consumers are falling for generic offers and promises. That’s why you need to not just adapt your content and design to your target group, but you also ought to create different landing pages for different segments of this group.
The more you’re able to customize these landing pages to fit each and every particular user, the better they’ll perform.
You need to speak their language and address their pain points – as a group and, more importantly, as individuals. Luckily, today it’s quite simple to collect valuable data about each user and use it to your advantage in this respect.
A great example of how to utilize personalization in your landing pages and increase conversions is Tokeo. Tokeo was a Polish service for connecting companies and individuals with different kinds of expert advisors. Their initial strategy was to show the same landing page to all users coming to their website, and the results were fair but unimpressive.
Source: landingi.com
However, once they made 11+ different landing pages, one for each kind of advisor (for instance, doctors, teachers, or digital marketers), the conversion rate skyrocketed. The fact that they were targeting the right audience with the right type of expert advisor brought the exact right people to the exact right pages. The result? Every page performed better than the original landing page, sometimes even by a margin of 700%.
Creating content that serves the consumer
We’ve already seen that content needs to be as personalized as possible, and the specific rules that you should follow in order to make it personalized will depend on who you’re addressing. Nevertheless, there are some general guidelines that you ought to have in mind in order to create genuinely consumer-focused content.
First of all, you need to be clear, honest, concrete, and on-point. Try emphasizing how exactly your product will benefit the consumers, instead of just explaining why you’re so awesome. Research your target group, find their most common fears and problems, and emphasize the features of your product that can solve these problems. Remember, they’re never going to convert or buy your product just because you are amazing, but because they need the product to resolve their issues.
Moreover, you need to explain what your product is used for and how it’s used, all while providing enough context and real-world examples. But be careful not to bore the visitors – be concise and tell as many things as you can in as few words as possible.
All in all, writing consumer-focused content means writing about the consumers, and not about yourself. The only thing you should point out about your company or product is how you’re different from your competitors and what you (and only you) can bring to the table. Again, only in the context of what matters to your customers and prospects.
Take a look at this landing page from Amerisleep, a company offering a number of different memory foam mattresses. Apart from a detailed explanation about what memory foam is and how it can help their customers, they’re also pointing out how their product differs from traditional memory foam mattresses and why it stands out. Finally, there’s a FAQ section, which offers concise and straightforward answers to consumers’ most common questions.
Source: amerisleep.com
A sloppy design drives users away
Flawless UX is the cornerstone of solid customer experience. And of course, the quality of the UX often comes down to the quality of the design and the competence of your coders and designers.
Bad design can lead to all sorts of issues that will chase users away. Slow page loading, an overabundance of unnecessary design elements that overwhelm users, lack of mobile responsiveness, absence of directional cues, as well as a confusing layout or navigation certainly won’t do any good for your conversion rates. Namely, 45% of consumers are less likely to make a purchase on a slow eCommerce website, and as much as 36% of them are less likely to ever return to the website.
Furthermore, you should definitely try adding images to your landing page, since 40% of people respond better to visual information than to text. Avoid stock photos or unrelated generic photos, instead use visuals that show your product in context.
In order to avoid confusion and to keep the potential customer interested, the images you use should be able to demonstrate what your product is and how it is used even without any help of written text.
Sometimes, all kinds of tiny design details can make a world of a difference. For instance, the position, design, and color of CTA button(s) can have a great impact on your conversion rates. A good example to look at is the homepage of Crazy Egg, a popular website optimization software. The landing page doesn’t merely come down to just “Go!” or “Buy!” but rather gives specific details about what happens if you click the CTA button and a small directional cue (a person pointing a finger at the CTA button) that provides important additional emphasis.
Customer-centric approach boosts trust
There’s a colossal number of online businesses popping up in the online realm claiming that they’re the best in industry and that the prices they offer are without a doubt the best. People rarely believe any of this anymore, so you’ll have to help them decide whether you’re more credible than the others.
The best way to do it is to be concrete, detailed, and open. This means no fluff and no empty commonplace promises. For this, you will need a catchy headline to captivate the users, but that doesn’t mean you should put form before essence. It’s ok to go for a somewhat seducing headline if you still manage to convey useful, relevant, and accurate information to customers and prospects through that headline. One thing you should keep in mind is that adding social proof and testimonials can also help you sound more trustworthy.
Another thing that builds credibility is eliminating customer risk by offering refunds and free trials. This way, you’re showing you care about their experience as much as you care about your profit. And remember, whatever you do, try to be authentic and sound like an actual human, rather than a lifeless machine rambling meaningless advertising phrases.
A landing page from ClaimCompass, a legal firm that helps people get compensated for delayed flights, has a conversion rate of over 30% (source). You may expect people to be driven away by monotonous legal explanations of how the process works, but it’s actually not the case.
Source: claimcompass.eu
If you don’t want to get too deep into things and just want instant legal assistance, you can do that. But if you’re unsure whether someone is trying to trick you by baiting you with the promise of free money, you can read the full explanation, backed by social proof, and decide for yourself. This sort of transparency is of huge importance if you want your business to seem trustworthy and reliable.
Final thoughts
Making the lives of your customers easier and more pleasant will result in benefits for your company as well. Creating landing pages that are suitable, understandable, and helpful to your target groups and individual users is the only way you can convince them to convert.
You can be sure that building a truly consumer-focused landing page won’t be a waste of time and resources but a great opportunity to leave a good first impression and propel some of your prospects down the sales funnel – something you don’t want to miss out on.