Landing Pages are a primary Marketing online tool. Most of the time they are the first visual element that a visitor experiences of your brand. While landing pages are usually designed to be informative, they must also focus on the action expected – completing a form, signing up to a mailing list or purchasing a product, for example.

The biggest challenge faced by the designer is to create a landing page that looks good, but also converts well.

The Mautic marketing automation platform provides the perfect technology platform to convert an anonymous visitor into a potential lead, but the designer is the person who has the power to make that happen.

• Design for the technology platform

Landing pages may be short and to the point, or they may be long-form, engaging the visitor and providing various sources of information to help the visitor come to a decision.

Whether short or long form, navigation plays a critical role in focusing the user on completing the action for which the page is intended. If your visitors will only be spending a few seconds on the page, the design elements must help them to find their way to the relevant information and action points.

As a designer, we try to convey a story through the elements we place on the page, using structure to guide the flow between different chapters in the story, and explaining points which may not be obvious to the reader.

• Design

At Virya Group our focus is on keeping things simple. Our main goal is to create theme which are clean, functional and with minimal distraction.

All our theme designs adhere to research-driven best practices related to landing pages. By dispensing with the fluff and keeping only the essential requirements, we focus on directing visitors’ attention to the appropriate page elements.

In most cases, this will be a call to action such as a button, special offer, lead capture form or video.

It is also important to cater for any eventuality. Each theme we design comes with a library of elements to choose from. This includes design guidance on everything from the weight of fonts to the styling of a table and the dimensions of images on a photo slider.

We try to ensure that we design everything with a focus on the experience of the visitor to the landing page and the flexibility that our end-users might require when customising the ‘off-the-shelf’ or bespoke themes that we provide.

• The Form

No matter what the goal of your campaign is, a great landing page needs to push your visitor to take a specific action and in many cases, this will be through a lead capture form.

The most important element of the landing page; the lead capture form presents a trigger. By this point (thanks to your awesome design work!) visitors are highly motivated to do something (complete the form) and the task now is to make sure that it is super easy, clear, and a nice experience to complete that action.

Sometimes we might add an extra convincer reminding them what they are getting when completing the form, but we always make sure the process is smooth, easy to understand and seamless.

It’s easy to forget the importance of the button on the form – but this is a vital ‘call to action’ – and an opportunity to remind the visitor what they will receive on completing the form.

From the designers perspective a good colour contrast with the background and a careful choice of wording are the two ingredients that will communicate clearly your goal and ensure the conversion takes place. Don’t just leave it at ‘submit’!

• The Language

Here we shift our attention from pixels to people. In Mautic landing pages we want to focus on using a certain language, which builds trust between the brand, product or service and the visitors.

As a designer, we need to think like the potential customers, determining what they need to see and what we want to communicate so that they fully engage with the value proposition on this landing page. We try to keep the language simple, describing why the product or service meets their needs or solves their pain-point, with no use of complex language.

Headers, sub-headers and text are structured to highlight for the reader any important messages.

Well designed Mautic landing pages allow you to communicate your value proposition clearly, without burying the visitor under piles of irrelevant information.

• Mobile First

Mautic landing pages should be designed with mobile in mind – if they are going to be used to target a mobile audience. As this segment is growing rapidly, it is an important factor when preparing visuals for a landing page.

Mobile visitors need to have the same kind of guidance throughout the page, be able to access the same resources, and have the same compulsion to complete the action as their desktop counterparts.

Designing for mobile devices is not simply about moving blocks around to fit a smaller screen, but must focus on a deep awareness of the behaviour differences on mobile as opposed to desktop devices.

• Test

With the growing importance of fast-loading web pages and a need to do everything possible to ensure a conversion when a visitor lands on your page, the overall page size is an important consideration.

Multiple studies have shown that landing pages which take a long time to load result in less conversions.

Optimisation in this regard involves a lot of testing, but also close communication between the designer and the developer to ensure that visuals are delivered in the most efficient way – for example using a single SVG image and applying CSS to select the relevant image, or making sure that the images are rendered and provided in the resolution that is required, rather than in maximum resolution.

Testing does not stop with page speed, however. Full testing should also include running A/B tests to determine the best button placement, applying design knowledge to identify the best colour choice, icons and photos, making sure that the typography is appropriate for the purpose of the page, and of course once the page is developed, ensuring legibility, navigation flows and of course interaction on any device or browser.

When the needs of the visitor are combined with the designer’s qualitative understanding of them, and a thorough understanding of the market, the results can be spectacular.

Are there other elements to landing page design that you include in your process? Please comment below! Thank you again to Betty Chatzisavvidou for allowing us to share this valuable content. For a look at the original post, click here.

This problem isn’t new. For over a decade, marketers have been trying to determine how to make our content stand apart. We’ve written from different perspectives, we’ve wrapped it in creative call-to-actions and tried to engage our audience explaining why our content is more unique and valuable than the other guys. So how do we stand apart? How does our content rise above the rest?

We need to think differently. We need to start being human. Let’s imagine that all the web’s content is represented by a city. What brings that city to life? It’s people. When we think of our hometown, we think in context of our personal relationships and experiences. We don’t think of the data (i.e. population or square miles). We think of the high school we went to and the crushes we had. We think of our first job and how tough the manager was. These stories provide the context for the city.

Principles to Humanize Marketing Automation

If we recognize that storytelling humanizes us and is a vital ingredient to our marketing efforts, how do we incorporate it into our marketing automation processes?

• Become a farmer: Many of the expectations placed on sales and marketing teams is about quantity vs. quality. Skills are often based on the ability to convert or win. These terms immediately describe an “us vs. them” mentality. This is not how we build relationships. In a post written by Sean Jackson, he describes the value of thinking like a farmer vs. a salesperson.
  

  “But the farmer has a major advantage over the hunter. While the hunters must go into new territories each day to stalk their prey, farmers stay in one place, planting new seeds and reaping the fruits of their efforts on the same ground they have toiled over already. In return, the land they till becomes infinitely more valuable because it can consistently reap a harvest without the hits and misses of hunting.”

  You’ve likely heard the phrase lead nurturing? It’s marketing speak for building relationships. It’s staying in one place, listening to your customers and adding value by meeting their needs at each stage of the buying journey. But we can’t accomplish this by trying to “hunt for sales”, this must be done by building trust over time, adding value at each step.

• The power of empathy: Many articles have been written about the power of empathy in business. To think like a customer means that we have walked in their shoes. This goes beyond understanding the buying journey or the customer need. When we have walked in our customers shoes, we connect with them on a personal level. We are far more understanding of their needs when we understand their story. Michael Hinshaw states this about the customer experience:
  

  “Several studies back up the fact that no matter who your customers are (B2B or B2C), there’s a high price to pay for delivering a poor customer experience. The thing is, customer experience is really based on how your customers feel. And one of the best ways to make them feel better about the experience is to listen them, understand their concerns, and deliver empathetic service across multiple touchpoints.”

  So delivering a positive customer experience is more than simply knowing what kind of product they use. It’s having knowledge about how and why they use it. If you sell shampoo, you need to know what kind of hair they have, why they chose the shampoo, then deliver value around the entire experience. What do they need before, during and after they shampoo their hair? This information helps create customer empathy. When we deliver this kind of content via our automation processes, it will show that we have listened and seek to provide real value along the way.

• Getting personal: In his latest book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, Brian Solis outlines the importance of the customer experience. It’s going beyond the data. It’s about getting personal.
  

  “Big data provides great information about customers’ interests, personal and professional networks, location, and many other characteristics. But creating meaningful experiences requires us to get more personal than just mining data. One of my least favorite expressions is, “It’s not personal; it’s only business.”

  This is where the rubber meets the road. Data gives us a limited view of our customers. It shows us open rates, but doesn’t reveal intent. It shows us downloads, but doesn’t indicate purpose. We must take the additional step to “micro-mine” the data. How do we do that? We must be curious. We must gather valuable insights. What are your customers interests, values and opinions? “Data storytellers” (or analysts) have the unique ability to reveal information that do reveal incredibly accurate stories about our audience. Gathering and listening to these stories will help us further humanize our content and create experiences that are meaningful and personal.

The Tactics of Humanization

In order to humanize our marketing automation efforts we must critically look at each interaction during the customer experience as it relates to our communications and determine how we humanize it. Here are a few thoughts to get you started.

• Be Relational: This goes without saying. Create an experience where your customer sees you as a real live person, not a large organization or automated system. Use the proper tags (first name, etc.) from your automation system to relate to your audience. If your customers all have a specific kind of goldfish, then tell them that you are running a special for that kind of goldfish. Speak in an authentic personal tone. Business speak will get you a one way ticket to Irrelevant-ville.
• Segmentation: Another way to humanize our marketing automation is to use one of the most powerful tools in our automation toolbox, segmentation. When we cast a broad net with our marketing and communication, it robs us of our ability to be relevant. Take the time to segment your audience into very specific groups. This will allow you to create communications that are personal and relevant. When we can provide very targeted messages that relate to our customers on a personal level, it will feel human.
• Logical Campaign Flow: This can be tricky. Now that we have this shiny new automation system, it’s tempting to automate our every interaction. But proceed with caution. Remember what it feels like to be the customer. If they don’t answer your email, then sending them another one the next day, is not good relationship building practice. Step back and consider the buying journey. At what steps are decisions being made? When does it make sense to re-engage your audience? Take time to ask some of your existing customers about their journey.
• Consider the Entire Customer Experience: The best way to add value and relate to your customer is to acknowledge them not only before and during the sale, but after it as well. Too often our marketing efforts stop at the cash register. Don’t allow the dollar signs to get in the way of delivering exceptionally personal experience by following up. Are there other areas of the customer experience you can add value to? How did their experience with your product or service go? Were they satisfied?

This is not an easy task. It takes an immense amount of time to walk in the shoes of your customer. From the moment they discover the need, all the way through the moment their need is met, and beyond. But just as any relationship takes time to develop, so does automating your marketing. Marketing Automation is still relatively new. While the systems are vast, there is a simple philosophy that your team should adhere to before generating the campaigns, emails and landing pages that will capture your audience’s attention. It’s the philosophy of making every interaction human.