How to Design a Powerful Landing Page

Here you are, standing in front of your beautiful landing page, admiring it. You can almost hear yourself humming “It’s raining clicks” …only to soon figure out, they are not. Oops, what went wrong? Turns out, the secrets of a successful and highly converting landing page lay within its name itself. So, the question is:

Length of the page

The first thing to consider when designing a landing page is its length. There are a bunch of great successful examples for both long and short landing pages throughout the web which generate many leads and have a high conversion rate.

So how to decide which way to go for your own landing page? The rule to follow is:

• Go for a short, non-scrolling landing page if your product or offer is simple and predisposes the visitor to take a quick, even intuitive, action.
• Go for a long landing page if the product or service you offer are more complicated and would require some consideration time. In this case, you will raise your conversion rate if you motivate your visitors with additional information about your product or service’s benefits.

You can tell that The Classical Scholar put a lot of thought into designing their long landing page. They beautifully arranged their content above the fold and considerately provided enough additional information about their product’s benefits below. By repeating their CTA button, they unobtrusively prompted their visitors to convert and thus, improved their campaign performance.

 

Attention grabbing headline

The perfectly written headline would:

• immediately nail your visitor’s attention,
• engage them with the content,
• increase their interest,
• and ultimately make them click the CTA button.

Impeccable grammar, strong words and clarity are key factors for creating a powerful headline copy. An effective message is one that makes your visitors associate with it and take action. Here is how Campaign Monitor formulated their headline – descriptive, appealing and prompting action.

Narrow focus

When designing your landing page, have in mind that your one and only goal is to make your audience convert, i.e. click your valuable CTA button. Eliminate any unnecessary links and details which could distract your viewers and make them navigate away from your landing page. All design elements should serve the purpose of converting and lead your viewers toward the CTA section.

Check out how simple and focused Peeq designed their landing page.

Descriptive and clear copy

The copy in your landing page should be as clear and descriptive as possible. Your audience should be able to immediately understand what your product or service is all about. If they don’t, they would most likely bounce back. Perfect grammar is even out of the question. No one would take you seriously if your copy is full of errors.

Focus on the benefits and values your product has to offer. Check out how RightSignature formulated their landing page message. It is clear, descriptive and you instantly understand what happens next when you click the CTA button.

Incentives

An essential element of every landing page is to contain at least one incentive. As humans, we tend to procrastinate any action we don’t consider urgent. The incentive job is to convey sense of urgency, scarcity or other feelings that prompt action right now and for less consideration.

Most landing pages contain implied urgency. This means they use words such as “Now”,“Today”, “Free”, “Limited”, etc. such as the example by Kingsley Judd, given below. In their landing page design they used several incentives to prompt conversions:

• “Download Your Free Brochure Today” in the copy,
• “Amazing Opportunity. Download Your FREE Brochure” above the submission form,
• “Download Now” as a CTA copy,
• “Enter Free Prize Draw” as a the key incentive.

Number of fields

How many fields should our submission form contain? The rule is simple. The more fields you include, the higher the risk that your visitors will abandon your submission form. Don’t ask your leads for any unnecessary information. This could annoy them and make them bounce back.

Check out Circle’s signup form. They asked their visitors to enter only the minimum of information needed to create an account.

Guide your visitors

Add directional cues to visually lead your audience towards your call-to-action section. When people land on your page, they should almost instinctively know what to do next. The structure, color, hierarchy and all elements of your page should be directing them towards the valuable CTA button.

See how doobiebox applied this rule. They used an arrow as a key directional element, pointing at their short submission form. Also, they structured their landing page in such a way to make their form stand out.

Powerful CTA button

The most important element of your landing page is the call-to-action button. Your whole design should be devoted to this single precious element, so make sure everything leads your visitor towards it. Here is what you should know:

• Placement – undoubtedly above the fold. No one would go searching for your CTA section in order to convert. If you have a long landing page, unobtrusively repeat your valuable button at the bottom.
• Design – make it pop. This should be certainly the most eye-grabbing element of your landing page, so make it large and contrasting. Also, surrounding it with enough whitespace would make it stand out better.
• Copy – clear and descriptive. Your visitors should immediately know what happens next when they click the button.

See how Shyp designed their call-to-action button. It is absolutely the most notable element of their design. It is descriptive, contrasting and generously surrounded with whitespace. Indeed, their landing page contains other links, but they are significantly de-emphasized and don’t steal the attention from the CTA.

A/B testing

Even if you design your whole landing page by the book, you should constantly test it for improvements. We are all humans and react differently, sometimes even unpredictably. So, it is nearly impossible to design the highest converting landing page for your specific objective from the first attempt.

The right approach is to continuously conduct A/B testing. Test one element at a time for at least a week in order to receive truthful results. You could try changing the elements’ color, copy, size, position, etc.

See how Gift Rocket’s landing page changed over time:

• the headline became bigger,
• the copy was entirely replaced by a subheadline,
• the CTA button was shrinked,
• a few social proofs emerged.

Give social proof

Along with everything else, your landing page design should convey trust to your audience. The social proof factor is a powerful tool to prompt your visitors to convert. It brings them confidence, trust and minimizes their doubts. So, what can you use for social proof?

• Testimonials – this is a great tool to convey trust. Needless to say, you should always use real customer reviews and thoughts. Here’s an example by Mirado on the left.
• Security symbols and certifications – use symbols which are very important and specific to your product.
• Logos of widely famous companies who use the product – powerful way to establish trust and motivate action. When your visitors recognize even one familiar brand, they instantly become more willing to accept your message and convert. Here is how Recurly took advantage of this insight.

Encapsulation

This is a technique, widely used in landing page designs to emphasize on certain elements, usually the submission form along with the call-to-action button. Why this works? Because this technique creates a visual window which captures the visitor’s eyes and makes them focus. You may have remembered seeing encapsulation in some of the examples listed. Here is another one. Lyft used this technique to wrap up their submission form along with the CTA button.

Turned out, LANDING PAGE actually is an abbreviation! Eleven valuable tips hidden within its name itself. No matter if you are planning to redesign an existing landing page, or start a brand new one from scratch, all of them would certainly come in handy and effective to help you get the best out of your design!