Landing Pages: Build for commitment

Whether we are building a landing page to get people to sign up for a email list, sign a petition or click to learn more, we are really looking for a commitment.

Visitor’s action on the landing page is the reflection of the commitment they make towards the business relationship.

Here is how I see the process of building up to this commitment:

Robert Cialdini, said in his book “Influence”:

If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment. Once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with the stand.

Educate

Before your visitors will do anything, they need to learn your value proposition. Education, by itself, is a challenging task. In the landing page situation, attention span is limited to in seconds.

What can be done to better utilize this attention span and get people to learn?

Are you building a landing page for Google ad, email or YouTube ad campaign? Try to match the words in the ad or email to make the visitor feel like they are in the right place.

Build Trust

Let’s step back. Building trust with your customers is a lifetime process, which can not be done on landing page. You just need to get your visitor to trust you enough to engage further.

Here are a few ways to build trust:

Keep in mind that your social proof and the business information competes with the most important educational information. Most of this information should be on the bottom of the page or below the fold.

Call for Action

Here the rubber hits the road. All previous development ultimately brings to the action, but to perform such action, your visitor learned your value proposition and established trust.

Here are few tips to get to closure:

Final disclosure: I’m not claiming to be an expert in digital marketing or, how it is called now growth hacking. It’s just the act of posting something on-line, leaving it there and getting people to do something without human attention always fascinated me. Essentially, landing page is an electronic sales rep, who works 24/7 for you and does not charge much commission.

Sergey Zelvenskiy 24 December 2012