Developing a website that effectively generates sales for our entrepreneurship in an efficient way, that is to say, generating higher revenues in relation to the inverted amount, is not an easy task from any point of view; much less nowadays, when the competence is highly complex.
Though there’s no one magic and unique formula to implement a 100% perfect landing page, there are certain guidelines that we can take into account from scratch to reach excellent results.
Below I share 5 pieces of advice that we have learnt over time, after 5 years of entrepreneurship with our start-up developing more than 30 different landing pages to generate online sales.
How to Design an Effective Landing Page
1) Focusing on one value proposition
As a starting point, we first need to understand that for each landing page there must be just one value proposition to transmit to the client. We can’t share everything our company offers in just one web page. The client will definitely not understand anything.
A concrete example of what SHOULD NOT be done:
As it can be observed in the red box, the most important items to organize and consult about the trip get the smallest amount of space. All additional context or advertising around it is just a distraction that brings with it the loss of the client.
Users can only focus on one objective per time span. Consequently, the first lesson that we learnt was to design every sales website with just one final and concrete objective separately.
Let’s analyze https://www.airbnb.mx/ what MUST be done:
In this case, in a direct way and without distracting the user, we show our value proposition in the center of the page, totally isolated.
Important: the more items we eliminate from our landing page, the better our conversion will be. Keeping the search for a destiny simple and direct is our main goal in front of the eyes of the potential client.
2) The Greatest Mistake: be willing to save money on the design
The second mistake that we made was to be willing to save money on the design. As in every project, it’s essential that we are careful with expenses. Unfortunately, when working online, economizing on the design of your website is a big mistake; therefore, we should try to avoid making it.
The seriousness, security, transparency and confidence that the client sees in the first instance are reflected in the design of our website. This is because the design has the responsibility of transmitting the quality of our job to the end user.
The better and more professional our design looks, the better the conversion of the clients into sales, and revenues will be for our online trip entrepreneurship.
Let’s compare this untidy design, with no coordinated structure:
In the previous item we can even see that an image was taken from a photo repository. Another lesson that we learnt is that each image that we use, and even more so on travel sites, must be of real and concrete people and users of our web entrepreneurship who travel.
Let’s see a real example with real images and a harmonious design that transmits reliability.
3) Always use security in our favor
Something else we can use and must take advantage of in our favor, is to implement logos and security systems for the clients when closing the sale.
Nobody will use their credit card unless they are totally sure that the website has all the precautions to keep their information private.
VeriSign, Symantec, TrustE and many other logos are known by clients who place their security and confidence in them at key moments.
Important: This security information must be transmitted in a clear and precise way. Nothing should be left unexplained. Each client is a different world; this is why we should compensate for that lack of security with commitment.
4) Our clients can help us too
When improving our landing page to generate more and higher sales, we shouldn’t forget our current clients.
The confidence that current users who have used the service can generate over others that are “considering” to test it is key.
We once shared the comments of other people who had used our service in the past and it generated a 26% sales increase! It was impressive, we had never seen anything with that potential.
An important point in this tactic is to use the complete name and surname (much better if we can include a reference) since the users will want to know that the people who wrote them are real and reliable and not anonymous.
It will be a hard way at first; getting a comment is not easy. People are busy, but if we get to motivate them we can grow rapidly and turn this process of qualifying a trip or a place into an organic and natural one. We motivated people with an additional discount for leaving their opinion.
5) Acknowledgement of mass media
And to conclude, the last lesson we learnt was sharing in our sales website the acknowledgement of mass media (TV, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc.).
This is another way of transmitting confidence, commitment and transparency to encourage other users to use our website, to give them the confidence that we will perform a great job for them.
Although you may think this is a hard job and that only big companies can get this press acknowledgement; the truth is that such effort brings its rewards.
Growing in such a competitive environment is not easy, but one firm step at a time makes it possible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, each of the previous items are like climbing a staircase; the more we implement, the better positioned over the rest we will be. The more optimized we are over the competition, the better results we will obtain from users.
We must learn that each detail in a landing page is important to generate a new client in an efficient way. More doesn’t mean better.
If our landing page was a letter, we should learn from what the famous “Blaise Pascal” said:
I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.