Just a few years ago, selling something over the Internet was difficult. Today, however, marketers have a huge arsenal of technologies and technology tools at their disposal. Landing is one of them. It is an effective and therefore widespread way to distribute your goods and services with a small initial investment. It is a landing or landing page, the purpose of which is to push the visitor to make the next step in the sales funnel.

Developing a landing page is that in this case, every detail is important. Reducing the effectiveness of the page can even the wrong button color, too small or too large print, incorrectly worded call to action, and so on.

To take into account all the nuances and provide the customer with a page that will convert visitors into customers or subscribers, requires the coordinated work of a team of copywriters, designers, layout designers, and marketers. To ensure that this requirement can only be met by formalizing the process, and dividing it into stages. On how to create effective landing pages and will talk in this material.

Prototyping a landing page

It should be understood that the landing page – is primarily a sales page. Its effectiveness can always be calculated in monetary terms. Its purpose is to sell or attract potential customers to make a deal in the future. That’s why a thorough analysis is carried out at the prototyping stage:

1. company’s product;
2. target audience;
3. level of competition;
4. seasonality of the market and not only.

This requires the participation of the customer. Only he can provide information that will help make the right conclusions in a short time and without unnecessary increases in the project budget. Also, the customer provides the logo of the company and basic information about its activities.

Writing sales text

Let’s make an analogy with a restaurant. Any decent catering establishment has a chef. He practically does not cook, but he is a carrier and author of ideas about what a dish should be in terms of taste, serving, cost, and cooking time.

When developing a front page, the role of chef takes on the role of copywriter – the author of the text, which will be placed on the page. This is the most important element of the landing page because it brings to the reader the bulk of important commercial information to make the desired decision.

Copywriter: 

• writes the text;
• designs the arrangement of secondary graphic elements;
• forms the overall logic of the page.

The result of his work should be a prototype – a schematic representation of the future website, which gives a clear idea of how it will look like, work, and sell. The optimal design for familiarity with all the information given is chosen by the designer.

However, before the transfer of the prototype to him in the development, the result of the copywriter should be agreed with the client. This is important since at this stage the time and financial cost of making changes are minimal.

Design and layout

Continuing the analogy with the restaurant, we can say that the design of the landing page – decorating the hall, which should create a favorable atmosphere for eating. And in the case of catering, and the case of developing a landing page must be repelled from the peculiarities of the target audience.

The designer must understand the preferences of customers of the client company, their lifestyle, related interests, patterns of behavior, and not only. All this will help select the appropriate color palette, and illustrations, highlight the most important blocks and shade additional information.

After the design is completed, there is another round of approvals with the client. However, there are usually no made global changes: most often asked to change or edit the illustrations, swap the place blocks, etc.

Then, depending on the complexity of the landing page, the work involves a frontend-developer or layout. These specialists have the same task: to convert the layout provided by the designer into HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. There are three criteria for the quality of their work:

• code compliance with standards;
• website loading speed;
• the same display of the page in different browsers and on different devices.

Once the layout stage is complete, the website is unloaded to a test or real hosting to continue working on it.

Connecting analytics counters

The main criterion for quality is the conversion rate of visitors into buyers or subscribers. For the customer to be able to quickly track this indicator, analyze it and optimize it, analytics counters are connected to the site. A good practice is to use the services of Google for this purpose.

Google Analytics is a powerful analytical tool by which you can thoroughly study the visitors to the site and their behavior on it. However, it is not perfect. For example, if the task is to understand at what stage of familiarization with the page users most often leave it, Google Analytics will not help.

Operation testing

When the landing page has already been uploaded to the customer’s hosting, it is connected to the analytics services and made all the necessary settings, it remains only to test its work in real conditions. The extent of this stage depends on the functionality of the page. Three main factors must be checked.

1. Display Correctness. The website should look the same in all popular browsers on monitors with different resolutions. If it is adaptive and should display correctly on mobile devices, its display and functionality are checked with smartphones and tablets with different screen sizes.
2. The functionality of contact forms. User-accessible data entry fields should work correctly and securely. At the same time sent requests should reach the customer quickly.
3. Correct operation of data uploading to the CRM. If the landing page is integrated with the CRM used by the company, several test orders are executed with different parameters to check whether the data exchange works correctly.
   

The participation of the owner at this stage is extremely useful. First, he can discover errors and inconsistencies that have eluded the developers. Second, he can look at the site through the eyes of his customers and suggest possible testing scenarios.

What to do next

Developing a landing page is only the first phase of its life cycle. After that, it is necessary to advertise the landing page, attract potential clients to it, and process incoming requests from it. It is equally important to monitor conversion rates and make adjustments to the structure and content of the page as it declines.