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.
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.
Tap to the human imagination: It’s merely impossible to educate visitors about your product in one or two sentences. Your background and images need to trigger the emotions of exploration and curiosity, which will get them to continue. Look at the apple web site, they always present their product they way you already feel you use it.
Write to emphasize the benefit.: As the visitor, I’m not going to read much. You are not Stephen King, I’m not in the library. Your writing should be minimal. It should project the benefit a visitor will get. Choose the fonts and colors, which are really easy to read.
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:
Social Proof: If your brand is not yet recognizable by many, try to establish social proof. Show the commitment others made towards your product through previous business relationships.
Present established business: Your landing page needs to reflect the strength of the business behind it. Visitors won’t be willing to invest their precious time and attention looking at the products by the unknown folks.
You need to post information about your business: * Brand * Business name * Address * Phone number * Contact email
*Tip: When posting your contact(phone / email) information, post it as an image, not as text. Post it as text and expect calls from vendors, who used robots to scrape sites like yours.
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.
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:
Think eye flow: People mentally follow natural order of reading. Allocate right and top portions of your screen to educate and left and bottom parts to commit.
Grab attention Your main action link or sign-up form needs to have bright points, which grab the attention.
Feedback Make sure that the button or form has visual feedback in place, which demonstrates that this is where the action needs to be performed. It needs to feel inviting and responsive.
Ask only for what you need
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