Building an Actionable Landing Page - Guest Blog by Annie Cooley

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Today Annie Cooley with Swiftpage joins us to share her insights on elements we should consider when building an actionable landing page.  Annie, take it away!

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Building an Actionable Landing Page

By Annie Cooley, Swiftpage

A few weeks ago, Swiftpage had the pleasure of sitting down with Location3 Media’s design and SEO experts Ryan Geiger and Tarla Cummings as part of our Thought Leader Series.  The main focus of the interview was to discuss the basics of design for emails, web sites and landing pages.

We spend a lot of time crafting beautiful and SEO-friendly web sites.  Email campaigns are well thought out and distributed.  So why shouldn’t we take the time to do the same for landing pages?

Landing pages are crucial when you want your target audience to focus on a very specific message.  People land on these pages via ads, actionable email campaigns or direct mail pieces.  They are the middle step of closing the sale, gaining a new lead’s contact information or inviting people to attend your event.

Elements we should consider:

The interest factor
You have kept your recipient’s interest long enough to click through to your landing page.  How are you going to keep that going?  Consistent yet fresh design and content is crucial.  Make sure it looks similar to the email campaign or direct mail piece that caused them to arrive here, but offer them something more.

Thought provoking headlines
The headlines or titles of your landing page are one of the greatest ways to compel your readers.  They are the bold text that prefaces the section or paragraph below it.  In one phrase they let the reader know if it is worth reading on.

The consumer touch point
The single most important part of a landing page is the call to action.  You have kept their interest long enough.  Now, what’s going to make them accept your offer?   Compelling content and design are a nudge in the right direction, but where is your call to action located?  Make sure it has the prime real estate on the page.  This is not necessarily big, bold and in the center but rather it is where the content is pointing to or where the eye naturally moves to.

Go ahead and spend some time on your next landing page and see what results are produced.