Over the past few weeks, we’ve reviewed some of the fundamental features of an effective landing page. An effective landing page needs to do (at least) four things. The first three are:

1) Identify a User’s Problem: The first thing a landing page needs to do is identify a user’s problem, making it clear that your page is relevant to what they were searching for.
2) Offer to Solve It: Once you’ve identified a problem, offer to solve it by describing what product or service you can provide.
3) Provide Trustworthy Support: To back up the claims about your offering, provide trustworthy support, from industry awards to customer case studies.

If you’ve done all of that, there’s a good chance that a user who lands on your page will be ready to take the next step and convert. Losing a user at any other stage at the process is justifiable: they might be looking to solve a different problem than the one you’ve identified; your offer might be out of their price range; or they might just be the type who aren’t going to be convinced to turn away from a recognizable brand name (for instance) no matter how compelling the support you’ve amassed in favor of your product.

However, there is no good reason to lose a user in the middle of the conversion process. Moreover, there’s really only one way to do so: making the conversion process to complicated. Which leads to perhaps the most important rule of landing page design: make the conversion process as simple as possible.

(In the majority of cases, the page where a user executes a conversion will not be the same page that they land on when they first click on one of your ads. Nonetheless, the same principal holds: keep it simple.)

For our purposes, it will be easiest to distinguish between three different kinds of conversions: calls and forms.

Calls
If your goal is to get a user to view a particular page, there’s a good chance that page has a phone number on it. Make it as prominent as possible and, for good measure, include it on any other pages that a user is likely to see.

As mobile browsers become more popular, there’s another consideration to keep in mind. A large image displaying your phone number may be a clear way to display it, but it’s not the ideal solution for a mobile user. If a user lands on your page through an iPhone or Blackberry browser, they can click on a phone number and make a call, but only if that number is text. Even if you have a large image displaying your phone number, be sure to include a prominent textual representation as well. This will make things significantly easier for the growing base of mobile users.

Forms
Whether the form on your Web site captures a lead or completes a purchase, you should strive to make it as hassle-free as possible. This means making two crucial decisions every time you add a field: Is this field necessary? and Does it need to be mandatory?

In some cases, such as “Email” or “First Name,” the answer is simple. Of course you need basic contact information, and those fields should be mandatory.

In other cases, like “Company Name,” the answer is less clear. You could certainly execute an order without it, but it’s a valuable bit of information to know. It may be worth keeping the field on the form, but perhaps it should be optional.

And what about “Age,” “Industry” or “How did you hear about us?” In every case, you’re collecting valuable information that will help you do business more effectively. But, you’re also adding an extra step that might lead a user to change their mind. (Speaking as a customer: More than a few times, I’ve given up somewhere in the middle of a mandatory survey asking for demographic information and suchlike.) Is it worth the risk? Only you know your business well enough to say.

(By the way, is our sign up process as simple as possible? Check out our Free Sign Up form and let me know.)

So far, we’ve considered landing page design while making an assumption which is most likely false: that users will go straight through your conversion process, without any detours. The truth is that many, if not most, users will make at least one detour before they convert. The destination of that detour? Your homepage. Next week, we’ll discuss how to incorporate your homepage into your overall landing page strategy.

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