Landing page is a very important part of website marketing. A bad landing page can result in no or few sales, whereas a good and a tested landing page can dramatically improve the conversion rate of a site.

However if you are just starting and have little experience in designing landing pages for lead generation, it might be a good idea to research this topic before telling your designers to design your landing page.

You will get thousands of tips to design landing pages however there are some basic methods that have been tested time and again and have proved to be working. The following pointers can be a starting point for designing your landing page.

Read and try, they should work:

1. The “Call to Action” should be as near and clear on the page as possible.

For example. If the “Call to Action” is a form that needs to be filled by the visitor then let the landing page have the form itself. There is NO need for an extra “Click Here” button for the visitor to reach the call to action page. Some may be too lazy to click. How many times we have seen that the page has a button “Click Here To Apply Now” which takes the visitor to the form after clicking. By creating a middle page you are only increasing the distance between the visitor and the Call to Action. Taking visitors directly to call to action page almost always improves conversion.

2. If possible keep the call to action portion in the above-the-fold of the page. Above-the-fold portion of the page is the top visible portion of the page in a computer screen.

3. REMOVE the unnecessary navigations from call to action page. If you can’t remove, then shift them to the bottom of the page. The idea is the visitor does not see any other link to click on top and while filling the form. Some may just click while half way filling the form and go away never to come back and fill the form.

4. White background with Black text works best.

5. Sense of urgency works well too. For example you can create a time-ticker. If you buy before Midnight (date) then you get a 10% discount. Please make sure that this actually works else there may be credibility issues with your site. This can be done easily done through JavaScript using cookies.

6. REMOVE fields that are not required. For example many websites keep this field: Alternate Email, Alternate Phone etc. When you don’t need it why keep it? It will make the form look shorter and more people may end up filling the order form.

7. Let the form be as small as possible and in ONLY ONE PAGE. Half way while filling the form if there is “Click here to continue” – many will just not click and leave the form unfilled.

Please understand that these are only some basic tips to keep in mind while designing a landing page. While these have worked for many webmasters there in no guarantee that it will work on your site too. Therefore it is very important to test what is working and what is not and keep a record of that.

It is also important that you gather enough data before concluding any result – this is known as statistically significant result. One way to get a statistically significant result is to make sure every page has had at least 100 call-to-action completed.

Thus if version A required 1000 visitors for completing 100 call-to-actions and version B required 1200 for completing 100 call-to-actions, it means version A is better than version B.

Fortunately Google Website Optimizer will help you to test your landing pages. Its easy and free. Why don’t you start today?