Did you know that 55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website?
As a conversion oriented marketer, you’ll need to grab the attention of your visitors as quickly as possible and encourage them to do what you want on your website-either to subscribe to your list or purchase the product you sell.
And because the human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish 8 seconds capturing your visitors’ attention is difficult and turning them into leads or customers is even harder. This is why creating landing pages must be an essential part of your marketing strategy.
Landing pages remove all distractions from a page and narrow your visitors’ focus to the opt-in forms or call-to-action buttons placed in it. This persuades them to take an action like filling out a lead form or making a purchase.
Creating a WordPress Landing Page
You don’t have to be a designer to create a landing page for your website. You can create landing pages yourself with a WordPress landing page plugin such as Thrive Landing Pages or OptimizePress. As there are many different choices, you’ll need to compare their features and find the right one that fits your need.
In this post, I’ll introduce four WordPress landing page builders and example landing pages built with them. I hope this will inspire you to create a conversion-oriented landing page for your next marketing campaign.
Landing Page Builder #1: OptimizePress
OptimizePress is the most popular landing page builder for self hosted WordPress sites. The product is available as a two core parts, both plugin and theme. Beyond landing pages, you can use it to build membership websites as well.
If you’re looking to create landing pages with a design consistent with the rest of your site, or to build a membership website, using the theme option for your site would be the right choice.
Alternatively, you may use the plugin version if you don’t want to change the entire theme just for the sake of building a few landing pages on your website. Below are two successful landing pages that were created using OptimizePress.
Expert Voice Book
This landing page is designed to build an email list that offers a free ebook written by Kristen White. The landing page uses the latest OptimizePress theme that supports responsive design, as well as a WP Video Lightbox plugin to beautifully embed Vimeo video on the page.
What this page does well: By embedding a convincing video and displaying media company logos at the top, the page establishes the author as an authority.
Apart from explaining the opt-in offer, the page also explains who the author is and includes testimonials as a social proof.
Healthier Fat Loss
This site used the OptimizePress theme to build landing page that promotes their weight loss program.
What this page does well: The landing page briefly explains what the program is and its benefits by using beautiful images. The video is not hosted on a third-party platform like YouTube, so it doesn’t contain a link that takes away readers from the site.
They also use various certification logos beneath the CTA button along with doctors’ endorsement, which gives a sense of security to potential buyers to make a purchase.
Landing Page Builder #2: Thrive Content Builder
Thrive Content Builder lets you create visually impressive content right from the visual editor of your WordPress site without the need of touching a single line of code.
Better yet, it also allows you to pick from more than 150 templates, so you don’t need to create everything from scratch. Let’s take a look at a landing page that was created using this plugin.
EJ Insider
The EJInsider website sells various information products, such as this premium ebook, How To Buy and Sell Websites.
What this page does well: The landing page has followed all the recommended practices for boosting conversion: placing the CTA above-the-fold, removing distractions like external links that may take visitors away from the landing page, and including positive testimonials.
Landing Page Builder #3: LeadPages
LeadPages is a stand-alone landing page builder. Unlike other plugins featured in this post, LeadPages is a hosted solution, so you’ll need to pay a monthly subscription fee for the service.
You can either create a sub-domain or use your own website’s domain for your landing page.
Once you installed the plugin, it connects your WordPress site with LeadPages server so you can easily start creating landing pages right from your WordPress website.
LeadPages is a perfect choice especially if you have a decent advertisement budget for driving traffic to your landing pages. It also enables you to boost your conversion rate by A/B testing your pages.
Loud Rumor
LoudRumor is a marketing agency for fitness studios and gyms. They use LeadPages plugin to create squeeze pages for their Facebook ad campaign.
This is one of the successful squeeze pages by LoudRumor created to promote a list building campaign. Their goal here is to explain the program using a video and encourage visitors to opt-in. Once the CTA button is clicked, an opt-in form will appear as a popup where visitors can submit the details.
What this page does well: The page is distraction free and it attracts highly targeted traffic through a PPC campaign. The page explains their program using the video without bragging too much with text-based content.
Landing Page Builder #4: Landing Page Builder
Landing Page Builder is a free WordPress plugin that lets you create unlimited number of pages. Best of all, you can pick from over 50 templates and it supports mobile responsive design.
UC Baby
This landing page was used for a contest entry. Participants will need to opt-in for entering the contest. Of course, the entry has closed now but still the landing page is live. This landing page is created with the free Landing Page Builder plugin.
What this page does well: This one is a perfect example of how simple a landing page can be to attract user entry. With over 900 entries, the page was a success.
5 Essential Items to Include on Any Lead-Generating WordPress Landing Page
Now that you have the tools for building your WordPress landing page, you need the content to make it convert.
Here are five specific things you need to include to make a landing page that converts. Let’s review.
1. Laser-focused Messaging
Let’s rewind that back: an effective landing page is dedicated. To. One. Thing.
Unlike your Homepage or About Us page, a landing page is like your website’s Special Forces team: one mission, one goal. Everything else is ignored and discarded. Your messaging should be consistent. Find the one thing you want to say and drive it home. Save your associated ideas for other landing pages.
On a sales landing page, your product’s specific features, specs, and details should be the sole subject of that landing page. The information should be clear, direct, and flawless (proofread all your content!). The value to the customer should be crystal, abundantly, almost painfully clear.
Here’s an example from our friends at Constant Contact. The message: 'Powerful email marketing made easy.'
2. Simple Signup
Here’s the cool thing specific to lead-generating landing pages: the customer’s job (their Call-to-Action, or CTA) begins and ends on that page. They’re not being asked to click away to an eCommerce site or an information page. You ask for their info. They fill it in. Done. Page goal completed.
And you don’t even need all of your contacts’ vital statistics all at once. In fact, people may feel less inclined to sign up at all if they’re asked for too much personal info all at once.
This is especially true on a public landing page or pop-up, versus inside a (protected) user account. So only ask for what you really need to generate that lead.
Name and email is a great place to start and works for most follow-ups. Though if you’ve got a region-specific business (real estate, e.g.), you might want to grab their zip code or state of residence. This extra info can help you filter and prioritise the leads that are most likely to convert to customers and/or weed out the ones outside your region or licensed area of practice.
Just remember, the goal on this landing page isn’t necessarily data-mining, it’s generating leads. That’s it. One goal.
3. Tease a Reward
Okay, so they’ve landed on your lead-magnet landing page. People have different responses to signing up for stuff. Some feel the urge to run screaming from anything that even smells like an email list.
Too bad for them, because you’ve got something to give them just for signing up! Maybe it’s a discount code on their first purchase or a bit of valuable industry data (how-to guides, e-books, white papers, etc.). Here’s an example for our ebook on Launching Your Home Business:
Your 'giveaway' could simply be checkboxes that give users control over what kind of emails they’ll get from you. Or even a simple message reassuring them that their info will only be used for good and not sold to third-parties. Honest, authentic customer care can often be a welcome reward, and one that may benefit your brand loyalty down the road.
Whatever perk you decide to offer your leads, make it clear from the jump.
4. What Exit?
Once you have the customer on your page, why make it easy for them to click away? That giant 'X' or 'Back' button in the corner of your page? Shrink it down a little, or get rid of it altogether.
Make it just a little more difficult than usual for your visitors to get away. Don’t worry, you aren’t violating building fire codes here.
Your 'Sign Up' button should be big, bright, and bold, for example. Use vibrant colors and bold typeface for the action you want to promote. Conversely, make the 'no thanks, I’ll pass' copy (or your corner 'X') less conspicuous. Choose a smaller font size in a color that blends in with your background.
Design matters here, ignore the role it plays on your site at your peril.
5. Close with a CTA
So back to the customer journey: They know where they are and what the page is all about. So what’s their role in this story? What will make them the hero so they can hop back in their ship and sail triumphantly back to Ithaca? It’s pretty hard to mess this up, especially on a lead-generating page.
As I mentioned, the CTA (remember that?) on a lead-generating page is a no-brainer: 'Sign Up' or 'Enter Now' or something similar. You’ll want to make your visitor’s directive as intuitive as possible with a clear story, slick design, punchy copy, enticing reward scheme, or all of the above.
Why Choose WordPress for Your Landing Pages
Landing pages are a useful and effective tool for creating targeted, lead-generating campaigns and boosting conversions. They let you deliver your brand, product value, or market position in way that’s quick, stylish, easily consumable.
WordPress, with its plugins, themes, and customization options, gives you limitless options in creating a strong, effective lead-generating landing page. Good luck!
Dev is the founder of WPKube, a popular resource site for WordPress users. His work has been published on TNW, SEJ, HuffPo, and more.