Landing Pages and The Art of Conversion

When it comes to lead generation, the optimisation of your landing page is vital. To achieve this, in a very practical sense, you must test and change how your page looks to ensure traffic “landing” on your page is likely to go one step further and give you their details. This is - admittedly in an incredibly simplified sketch - one of the key tools to generate leads.

For the purpose of this article, which is about The Art Of Conversion, let’s assume that all extraneous factors are fully optimised. This means all your development and loading times are on point, your offers and value proposition are perfect, and there are no outlying factors that would in some way offset results. Let’s assume everything else is set to a constant, thus the only thing we are looking at is the design of the page itself in an aesthetic sense, and how changes in that design are likely to result in higher or lower rates of conversion.

This article will highlight some key principles within The Art Of Conversion, and at the end we will invite you to learn more directly through the offer of a Free Custom Built Landing Page that has been designed and built in accordance with these principles.

Good Design Does Not Mean A Good Page

To begin with, we must establish a key premise; namely that Design and Conversion Principles are not necessarily the same thing. Certainly, for some, Conversion Principles may be viewed as a subdivision of Design in a broader sense, but when it comes to lead generation let’s set out the following for clarity:

Design and Conversion are not mutually exclusive, but they should be considered as separate disciplines. When creating a landing page you do not need a good designer, you need an expert in The Art Of Conversion.

The reason we make this distinction is that many make the mistake of running beautifully designed pages that are outperformed by less aesthetically appealing pages. Indeed, we’ve seen this so many times that we’ve had to make the distinction between Design and Conversion, simply to try and educate lead generators who are constantly wasting money on agencies and designers and templates that subjectively appeal but never convert.

In simple terms, if you want to boost revenue as a lead generator, you don’t really need to worry about an attractive composition, you need to worry about making sure people landing on your page go one step further and submit their details.

A High Converting Landing Page Is Built Around Psychology

One way of looking at this differently is to start thinking of this as an exercise in psychological study. The choices we make for a landing page should be primarily demanded by the psychological responses they evoke. For example:

Social Validation

This is a huge one - maybe the biggest - but almost nothing will transform results like the addition of social validation above the fold of a landing page. This is obviously fairly basic within lead generation, but when you consider why, it makes sense on a deeper level that should elicit further action.

We know that few things evoke trust in a brand more than the referral / trust of others, but what happens when this clashes with aesthetics? In a traditional Design sense, the specific shade of green in a Trust Pilot widget (for example) may well clash with the blue of a background sea image used, but - and we can’t stress this enough - that clash is entirely overridden by the deep seated psychological impact of a potential lead now knowing other people, just like them, trust your brand. Ultimately, in terms of conversion, this is more important.

This is clearly an arbitrary hypothetical, but the same underlying concept can be applied to virtually every single choice that is made on a landing page. Whether deciding upon a creative or arranging the structure of your form or testing the copy of your CTA, you must adhere to The Art Of Conversion and appeal on a psychological level before you appeal on an aesthetic one.

The Conflict of A Designer

What does this mean for the role of a designer? In short, it means they have to learn a new discipline, adapt their work and abandon some of their purest Design beliefs. Either that, or you get a new designer... one who can convert.

This may seem a little harsh, but when it comes to business, these changes can be the difference between profit and loss. If you’re a lead generator, all you should care about is generating leads: switching your focus to conversion is your fastest way to optimise this.

To be clear, Design and Conversion Principles are not mutually exclusive. There is a point of overlap within the Venn diagram where both disciplines are perfected, and certainly you can create a page that is successful on both counts by operating within this intersection. But, in terms of priority, Conversion must always be given a greater weighting.

The Limitations Of Templates

One option many lead generators use is adopting industry specific templates to generate their landing pages. This is an option that has a certain safeness and reliability to it, for sure. Indeed, many of you will rely upon high converting templates and that is fine. However, there are inherent limitations to your revenue whenever you make this choice. The reason for this is simple:

The optimisation of your lead generation becomes, at a certain point, an exercise in marginal gains. To unlock the full limits of your performance and revenue, you must smash through the glass ceiling of template designs and aim for PURE CONVERSION.

In a practical sense, this means making marginal gains at every point. This means testing, refining, and optimising to a 1%+ increase based solely on the dimensions of your button.

This means split-testing your form structure with a multi-step form set out over 4,5 or 6 pages.. just until you find that winning combination that achieves the highest conversion rates for you.

This means testing a catalogue of hex codes to know exactly which shade catches the eye and delivers your message as quickly as possible, just to get that extra 0.5% conversion increase that will be the difference between generating a lot of leads and generating the highest possible amount of good leads you can achieve.

These are the marginal gains that can never be achieved with a template, but that can skyrocket your performance to a new stratosphere.

Benefit From The Art Of Conversion

In simple terms, we want to build new Databowl users one free landing page that adheres to all the principles we have determined through The Art Of Conversion. This can be with any brand, in any vertical, that suits you. To claim this offer, click here: