Land more customers.

1 February 2019

The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Landing Page Design

Giving your landing pages the Conversion-Centered Design (CCD) treatment is like asking a genie for wishes – it’s a fool-proof strategy to get exactly what you desire from prospects. 

Want to learn more? You’ve come to the right place. Keep reading to discover:

• The magic behind CCD
• The seven principles to make it happen 

 

Okay, let’s get you converting customers en masse. 

 

What’s so great about conversion-centered design?

Since you asked so nicely, CCD empowers you to design enticing experiences that encourage visitors to complete a specific action, such as signing up to an event or downloading an ebook.  

This is achieved through persuasive design, copywriting and psychological triggers, making your marketing campaigns as irresistible as Oreo cookie pancakes. 

 

It works like this:

Let’s say you’ve launched a campaign to get people to download your new ebook.

To achieve this goal, you create a Facebook ad containing a link to a landing page on your website.

Once a user clicks on the link, they’re persuaded through a variety of psychological and design principles (which we’ll explain in a sec) to complete a contact form and unlock your content. 

The theory is as simple as that. 

CCD serves landing pages infinitely better than normal web pages because landing pages are created for one specific purpose – to convert. Landing pages contain zero distractions: they’re optimised to fulfil one goal and one goal only. 

But how do you nail CCD in the first place?

 

The 7 principles of conversion-centered design

Anyone can pull off conversion-centred design. You simply need to understand the seven principles and apply them to your landing page design. Let’s take a look at each step in the order your visitors will enter and exit the campaign experience you craft. 

FYI, we’ll be analysing each principle in greater detail in our upcoming blogs.

 

1. Attention

Your hyper-targeted ad, email or social content is the lure at the end of your fishing rod. Once a visitor takes a nibble, they’ll be pulled to your landing page. Now you’ve got their attention, your next job it to hold it. This is where getting a good attention ratio comes into play. You need to eliminate as many distractions as possible to drive visitors to complete a single action. 

In our next blog, we’ll go over tips and tricks to master attention-driven design for your traffic source (emails, ads) and landing page.

 

2. Context

Imagine if you ordered a garlic and cheese stuffed-crust pizza. Once delivered, you open the box only to discover there’s no stuffed crust. In fact, the entire pizza is missing because the delivery guy got hungry on his way over. You’d feel betrayed, right?

To ensure your visitors don’t experience the same disappointment, your above-the-fold landing page experience (i.e. the bit the viewer first sees upon coming to your landing page) must deliver on the promise you make in your email or ad. So whatever message convinced them to click the ad must be the first thing they see when they hit your page. 

This reinforces your message and reassures the viewer that you’ve not mis-sold them an empty pizza box instead of a piping-hot cheese pizza.

You’ll learn how to build a contextual bond with your campaign’s source so visitors’ clicks aren’t wasted in our upcoming overview of this section.

 

3. Clarity

At this stage, your copy is the king piece. You want to write words that jump out of the page and get straight to the point. Your copy needs to communicate as clearly as an air traffic controller to a pilot so there’s no confusion about the value proposition of your campaign. If your content is murky or superfluous, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your design is conversion-centered, the process will fall apart.

 

4. Congruence

The design of your landing page is looking suave. Every element fits together and aligns with your campaign goal. But then your eyes wander to the bottom left corner and you spot some negative space for a ‘Follow Us on Twitter’ call-to-action. 

Do you A) add in the social media share button or B) let that space rock its negativity? 

Choose A)? Then, sorry, you just failed the congruence test. A social media sharing button at this point in the buyer journey is an unnecessary distraction that contradicts CCD. 

Always go with B) if it means everything works in harmony with your overall goal. There shouldn’t be a single element on your landing page that diverts your visitor’s attention to another action.

 

5. Credibility

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair”, says Amy Rees Anderson, managing partner of REES Capital. She’s not wrong. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into your campaign’s ad and landing page. All it takes is one eyebrow-raising element for your visitors to question your authenticity. 

Credibility crushers could be stock photos, content that overpromises (“We’ll increase your sales by 1000% in three days!”), dodgy graphics or reviews that reek of desperation. Avoid including these damaging components to convince prospects to trust and believe in you. 

 

6. Closing

Your call to action (CTA) is the last step in the campaign conversion process – and arguably the most important. It’s where you capture leads by getting visitors to fill in your contact form. Once their details are secure in your database, you can nurture them until conversion. 

In terms of design, your CTA needs to inspire visitors to make that all-important click. Graphics and copy need to work together to persuade powerfully. We’ll go over the defining features of a CCD-driven CTA in a forthcoming blog.

 

7. Continuance

And you thought closing was the end of the line. Not so, because CCD can be used to take your converted leads to the next stage in your campaign. This is especially effective if your campaign has evergreen potential. For example, if your original goal was to get visitors to register for an event, once the promotion is over you could replace the registration form with gated content. 

Done well, continuance creates a post-conversion experience that delivers even more value to your leads. In due course, we’ll go over how to use the principle of continuance to help you secure a second conversion.

 

Go get ‘em 

So go on, get out there and give ‘em conversion heaven. After all, those leads won’t convert themselves.

BUT if you feel like you need to understand CCD on a deeper level (which we wholly recommend) stay tuned for our upcoming blog series. First up is attention, the first principle in CCD.