Elicit emotion with landing pages and you’ve already won your leads over.

“It’s just emotion that’s taken me over. Tied up in sorrow, lost in my soul” – The Bee Gees

Emotions are the building blocks of the human experience. More than anything else, emotion moves the needle in every non-reactive decision that we make. The goal of your landing page is to connect with people and guide them to making great decisions.

When potential clients see your landing page, you’ve only got seconds to make an impression that will lead them to wanting to learn more and turning visitors into leads. Understanding how to craft definitive emotional resonance quickly is paramount in order to illicit emotion with landing pages.

Phase 1: Strength Over Pleasure – All Emotions Are Good Emotions

If the news is any indication, it’s not the positivity or negativity of the emotions that matter, it’s the strength. Feeling strongly about something makes us more likely to act. Action is the stuff sales are made of. There are no bad emotions or good emotions. At their core, they’re just physical information to help us make decisions.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik distilled human feeling into into 8 basic emotions on the Wheel of Emotion.

Sadness

Joy

Optimism

Surprise

Fear

Anger

Disgust

Trust

While there are is much more detail on the wheel, and several schools of thought on human emotion, this is a good place to start for thinking emotionally about your landing page. Remember that it’s the stronger emotion that will get the best results. It’s integral to be clear about the emotions that would be best featured on your landing page.

Phase 2: Know Your Product, Know Your Audience

All products and services are not created equal. You could even say that all products don’t feel the same. In order to craft a masterful landing page to entice your audience, first understand which emotion connects properly. Every business is formed with a drive to solve a problem. Every problem comes attached to a particular emotion. By matching the product with the problem and accompanying emotion, you can build a landing page brings people in for the right reasons. Here are a few examples:

Product	Emotions
Candy	Joy
Security	Trust
Funeral Services	Sadness
Armed Service	Optimism, Trust
Horror Movie	Surprise, Fear, Disgust
Martial Arts Course	Fear, Anger, Optimism
Surgeon	Fear, Trust, Optimism

By seeing your landing page through an emotional lens, you can use the right sort of content to build on what the promise of the emotion your product can alleviate or enhance. While everyone feels fearful about hiring a surgeon, it’s clearly better than the alternative. Make sure your audience understands that.  

Phase 3: Emotion, Like Hell, Is Other People

Just like the actual universe, the internet is expanding faster and faster every day. That means you only have nanoseconds to create a connection that resonates. Naturally, the simplest way to do this is with the use of images, but when speaking emotionally, the best images are images that contain people.

While strong words and sad animals have caused many an emotional response, the truth is that viewing other people allows us to empathize more completely. We understand their body language and can care about a person in a picture as if what is happening to them were happening to us. A landing page, isn’t meant to be seen for long, so much as have an impact in a short amount of time. Using the right people for the job goes a long way. So listen to the Bee Gees and let emotion take over your landing page creation.