4 Best Practices For Effective Landing Pages in 2015

Technology evolves at an extremely fast rate. Over the last seven years, we've seen the introduction of smartphones, responsive design, personalization, and other similar technologies that have had a major impact on how marketers interact with our prospects and customers. But this evolution has also changed your visitor's expectations of their experience with your website.

With this evolution of visitor behavior, technology, and changes in marketing, our landing pages need to stay up-to-date to continue to attract and convert visitors. Today, we'll dive into four best practices to create the most effective landing pages in 2015, and show you how to implement these best practices within HubSpot.

1. Target a specific audience

Personalization is about a lot more than using someone's name in an email, or showing them related content. It's about establishing a connection with that individual that shows you relate to them as a human. Great landing pages are able to make this connection and require a mix of technology, targeting, and remarkable marketing. Let's go through an example of how you can use an existing contact list to personalize your landing page.

How to do this within HubSpot:

Step 1: Go into your Landing Page and click the 'Make Smart' option, as shown below.

Step 2: Choose 'Contact List Membership' to personalize content on your page to a segment of your visitors within an existing list.

Step 3: Choose the contact list you would like to display personalized content to.

Step 4: Create content for that specific segment. In the highlighted selection above, I chose "Viewed any Pages" as this segment is likely already somewhat familiar with your business and, as a result, should see different messaging. Instead of showing them an offer to download an ebook, consider showing them a message and Call-to-Action (CTA) that moves them further down the funnel, such as a trial request or free consultation. This simple example of using Smart Content can help you create relevant experiences that connect with people, and also increase sales.

2. Evolve with your visitor's needs

Visitors to your website are not one-size-fits-all, and their needs evolve over time. Your landing pages should evolve with them and serve them throughout that evolution. Using Smart Content, you can create specific information within the page that matches visitors in a lifecycle stage and serves them unique content. This ability to serve specific, targeted content by lifecycle stage allows your website to constantly serve the most relevant information to the visitor, every time they land on your site.

How to do this within HubSpot:

Step 1: Go into your Landing Page and click the 'Make Smart' option, as shown in the best-practice above.

Step 2: Choose 'Lifecycle Stage' to personalize your content for a specific segment of your visitors.

Step 3: Choose the lifecycle stage you would like to create separate content for and click 'Create Smart rule' as shown below. 

Step 4: Create the unique content for the lifecycle stage you have selected that is relevant to that visitor at their stage in the buyer's journey. Multiple rules can be created for each landing page to accommodate for each lifecycle stage of every visitor to your page.

Note: This is a feature of HubSpot Professional and Enterprise, and Basic customers can try it free for 30 days. 

3. Include a clear and relevant CTA

High-converting landing pages contain a strong CTA that makes it clear to the visitor what the next step is, and what to expect by taking that step. If you have more than one CTA on your landing page, consider removing others to have a straightforward path to conversion.

However, containing a strong, well-designed CTA is only the first step. Like the landing page content itself, your CTA should be relevant to the visitor on your landing page. In fact, in our own study of HubSpot data on 93,000 CTAs, we found that targeted CTAs perform 42% better than generic counterparts. 

You can create impactful, and relevant Calls-to-Action using Smart CTAs within HubSpot with these steps:

Step 1: Navigate to Content > Calls-to-Action within your HubSpot account

Step 2: Create a Smart CTA, as shown below. 

Step 3: Create the default CTA content to display to all visitors.

Step 4: Choose the contact list or lifecycle stage to show the targeted CTA to, and then create the targeted CTA content. Below is an example of a completed targeted CTA and default CTA.

4. Optimize for visitors from different devices

As Internet traffic continues to skyrocket it's crucial to consider the experience visitors see on mobile devices. In fact, according to Google, 52% of people have said that a bad mobile experience make them less likely to engage with a company. Creating mobile-optimized pages is easy using HubSpot, as each new landing page is built using responsive design that adapts to visitors from any device. 

Going a step further, you can also personalize the content shown to visitors coming from specific devices to truly maximize their experience.

Let's walk through an example of how to do this in HubSpot:

Step 1: Go into Landing Pages and choose 'Make Smart' option.