If you’re spending a significant proportion of your budget on paid search and direct response ads, then here’s a question worth asking yourself – when did you last spend as much time on your landing pages as you did on your main website?
If the answer is “not recently” or “honestly, never”, you’re not alone! Most financial services marketers pour huge amounts of resource into building slick, multi-page websites with polished copy, on-brand visuals and carefully considered navigation. And that work isn’t wasted, but if you’re running a direct response campaign, your website isn’t really the thing doing the heavy lifting. Your landing pages are.
The website is the shop window. The landing page is the checkout.
Think about how your prospects actually behave when they respond to a direct response ad. If they haven’t heard of you before they might give your website a quick look to check you exist, glance at the homepage, maybe flick through your credentials, then they’ll decide whether to take action. But usually all DR action happens on a landing page and yet, the effort that goes into a landing page versus a full website is often wildly disproportionate.
The website gets months of stakeholder input, brand workshops and UX reviews. The landing page gets bolted on at the end of a campaign build, usually under time pressure.
If you’re serious about direct response, that needs to flip. Your landing pages need to work as hard as possible to convert your media spend into profit.
What actually makes a landing page convert?
There are a few principles that separate the landing pages that work from the ones that quietly drain your media budget;
- One goal. One page.
This sounds obvious, but it’s worth repeating. A high-converting direct response landing page does one thing. It’s not trying to educate, entertain and convert at the same time. Every element on the page, every line of copy, every design decision, should point the user towards a single action. That means no extra navigation to “related articles” or links to your “About Us” page – the moment you give someone a reason to wander, they will.
- The UX has to be frictionless
For financial services specifically, the goal isn’t just to get someone to fill in a form, often it’s to get them on the phone, fast.
Research consistently shows that speed-to-call is one of the biggest drivers of conversion in financial services lead generation. If you’re running an advice or lead gen model, calling a prospect within 5 minutes of form submission will lead to 8x greater conversion than anytime afterwards. Your landing page UX needs to support that.
That means the journey from landing to form completion has to be as easy as possible. If the user has to think about what to do next, you’ve already lost ground.
- Ditch the traditional form
Generic tabular forms are the death of conversion. The moment a prospect sees a traditional form with ten fields and a submit button, the whole experience starts to feel like admin. (Research back this up, a study found that shortening forms from 11 fields to just 4 produced a 120% increase in conversions).
The best landing pages in financial services right now make the interaction feel almost conversational. A question, an answer, a next step. Think of it like a good discovery call condensed into a webpage: the prospect moves through a logical sequence without ever feeling like they’re doing admin. That is one of the simplest and highest-impact changes you can make to a direct response landing page. Take these simple, engaging form examples;
- Write for the reader, not the risk team
Financial services copy has a tendency to hedge, we all know the amount of compliance we need to consider! But compliance-safe doesn’t have to mean vague.
A direct response headline needs to address a real pain point your prospect has, and make a clear promise about what they’ll get by taking action. Benefit-led, not feature-led. “Find out how much your pension could be worth” lands harder than “Pension review service available”. Your headline should answer the visitor’s question, “What’s in it for me?” within five seconds. If someone unfamiliar with your product can’t explain your offer after reading your headline, you have clarity problems that no amount of traffic will solve. It’s exactly this principle that shaped our approach for Shire Leasing – a benefit-led landing page with a simple, frictionless form designed to make the value immediately obvious. Here are some examples of FS brands doing this well;
Keep the copy short. Keep the bullets punchy. Every sentence should be earning its place on the page. A quick word on CTAs as well: Landing pages should have a single, consistent CTA repeated strategically: prominently near the hero section, and use specific language (e.g., “Get My Free Quote”) rather than generic terms.
- Think about visual hierarchy from your customer’s POV
Visual hierarchy is how people decide whether to trust you. When a page feels easy to follow, it feels safe (and safe converts). Keep your language as clear as your layout: short sentences (15–20 words), active voice, and an easy jargon-free reading level.
Then cut distractions. Navigation links, competing messages, visual noise. Use type contrast to signal importance, and guide the eye from headline to CTA with layout, colour, and scale so the next step feels obvious.
- Social proof matters
Your FS landing page needs to establish credibility quickly, because your prospect is making a decision about handing over personal financial information to someone they may never have heard of before. Testimonials, client counts, recognisable logos, star ratings from review platforms, regulatory credentials all provide reassurance. Display them on the page where the user can see them before they decide whether to act.
- Speed and mobile are non-negotiable
If your landing page takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile, a significant proportion of your traffic will leave before they’ve read a word. Most of your paid traffic is coming from mobile, so if your landing page doesn’t work perfectly on a phone, you’re losing frustrated customers. Software tools like SEMrush can easily identify slow pages for your team to fix.
- Lastly …. test, test, and test again!
No landing page is ever finished. The best-performing pages you’ll ever run are the ones that have been through multiple rounds of testing. Different headlines, different CTAs, different form approaches, different layouts, limiting you’re a/B tests to one single element per month.
Final thoughts
Landing pages are one of those things that everyone knows matter and almost nobody gives enough attention to. If your direct response campaigns are underperforming, the problem is rarely the targeting or the ad creative. More often than not, it’s what happens after the click. One clear goal, frictionless UX, conversational forms, trustworthy copy and fast load times. Get those things working together and it will change how you think about campaign planning altogether.
If you’d like to talk through what that could look like for your business, we’re always up for a chat – get in touch with Moreish Marketing here.