People create landing pages for different purposes: someone is looking to grow an email list, present new product, or increase sales. Depending on your goals, you can steer your visitors in exactly the direction you want them to take using a landing page.

Conversion Rate Experts brought $1M to Moz by landing page optimization and email marketing, so you see the power of a single landing page with a few links and call-to-action buttons.

However, crafting a good landing page is not the same as creating a successful portfolio website or online store. There are certain guidelines of a landing page you need to be aware of.

Whether you’re a marketing expert in need of fresh ideas or you’re a newbie, this guide is exactly what you need. Here you’ll find out what landing page is, what types of landing pages exist and how to increase conversions using web design.

What is a Landing Page?

Due to Unbounce, a landing page is:

“any page that someone lands on after clicking on an online marketing call-to-action. Dedicated landing pages are standalone pages that are designed for a specific marketing campaign.”

A landing page can be used for almost any purpose, whether it’s selling a product or service, inviting people to webinar or event, getting visitor’s email address, offering a discount or making an announcement. But your purpose should be clear and lead to some call-to-action buttons. Let me show you an example.

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Why do you need a landing page? If you have a specific goal to achieve, a landing page could be useful. Your goal could be growing your email list, increasing brand awareness, or making a profit.

The primary goal of any landing page is lead generation. Landing pages are built to grow your audience so that you can promote future products, offers, and discounts to a ‘warm’ audience and build a community around your brand.

48% of marketers build a new landing page for each marketing campaign that is half of the business owners.

Types Of Landing Pages

Depending on your needs, there are certain types of landing pages. Just look through these four landing page types and choose one which will perfectly fit your purposes.

Splash Page

A splash page is one of the most commonly used landing pages, that is also known as a welcome gate. They are used as an introduction page on a website.

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Splash pages usually appear before visitors can enter a homepage. Such kind of pages are used to ask visitors for an email newsletter or offer a discount.

Lead Capture Page

Another term that is often referred to as a landing page is the lead capture page. It’s just a synonym to a landing page. And of course, it’s designed to capture leads. It works on “ask” and “reward”. The “ask” are questions you ask your visitors.

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Usually, it’s basic contact info, such as an email address. And the “reward” is your offer. Such pages can be used to offer free ebook or webinar in exchange on up to contact details.

Sales Page

You need to present your product and provide value to your visitors before you offer them to buy a product. However, there are some circumstances when you could start selling your product to first-time users.

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Instead of focusing on lead generation, the sales page is focusing on promoting your product with testimonials and videos to sell it.

Squeeze Page

A squeeze page is called so because its primary goal is to get information from the visitors, especially their email address. Their purpose is lead generation. But, they often feature different shapes, sizes, and content types.

How to Create a Landing Page that Converts

Landing pages let you narrow the focus of your visitors and make them take the action you want them to take. You help visitors find what they are looking for faster.

A right landing page can improve your conversion rate which is the number of visitors who took the action you wanted. Below I’m going to talk about the essential parts of a perfect landing page.

Create Eye-Catching Headlines

When you’re thinking on the headline it’s important to know that you have only 3-5 seconds to grab visitor’s attention and make them decide to keep scrolling your page or exit forever. As a rule, the headline is on the top of a page, so it’s the very first thing a visitor sees. A headline should be large and clear.

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If you are offering exercises to being able to run a half-marathon in 12 weeks, tell them about it. You need to determine what you’re offering with a headline and let people know what their benefits are.

Your landing page should use just a few images, so do not distract visitors from the main goal. Larger font size is also a good idea for a headline so that you can highlight the main points of your product or service. The perfect line length for copy readability is 39 characters, so you can size your font accordingly.

Use Powerful Images

Have you ever known that images, videos, and other visuals can attract your visitor’s attention and even persuade them to buy your product? Because 40% of people respond better to visual information than text.

That’s why it’s important to include attractive relevant images and videos to your landing page.

It’s not that easy to create compelling imagery, especially for non-photographers. By using Lightroom presets you can take your photos on a whole new level. Using presets is the best and fastest way to get better images and keep them all in one style. There are many beautiful, modern, and useful presets available on the market these days, and you definitely need to give them a try.

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Videos are also useful visuals for a landing page. Due to eWeek the online video platform market to top $80M by 2019 as YouTube, Vimeo and other video sites become more popular.

Watching videos is a great way to introduce your product or service to people and show how to use it and why to use it. That’s the reason you need to consider adding a video to your landing page. Also, due to Impact, using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86%.

Clear Text and Design

Before you start crafting a landing page, you need to decide what your offer would be. Are you going to advertise your product or service and convince people to buy it right away?

Or are you going to give away some useful piece of content in exchange for visitor’s email address? It all depends on what you want to accomplish with your landing page. Your offer should be valuable and unique.

Don’t forget about usability. Your landing page should be simple, usable and easy-to-navigate. Of course, it’s not common to have external navigation on landing pages, because usually, it’s single-page sites. In any case, make sure it’s user-friendly.

It’s apparent that you need to use simple language and be clear about the purpose on a landing page. You need to give a visitor the reason to stay on your page, push the button, by a product quickly. Do not overcomplicate your language.

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Also, grammar is not the place where you could be careless. It not only makes you look like an amateur but also says that your website is not trustworthy.

Clean landing page design will work best for your conversions. Minimalist design is what all landing page builders should employ. For a landing page, it’s better to use only a few colors, and just a few fonts. In another case, you risk to overload your page with clutter and unnecessary graphics.

Many people without design experience see white space and think this space is empty and it should be filled with info right away. However, this choice should be avoided. White space is an important part of the page which helps visitors separate content items from each other.

If every pixel of your landing page is filled with images, text, and icons then you risk to end up with a busy complicated landing page. Such kind of sites doesn’t motivate to stay there more than one second.

Use Subheadings and Bullet Points

Subheadings are second most prominent pieces of content on your landing page, right after headline. Top Left Design thinks subheadlines will give people a reason to read your content, not just quickly scan it. It’s a perfect place for headline ideas that were too long to feet ‘above the fold’.

You can intrigue visitors with some surprising statistics, or use a deadline for a sense of urgency. Just say that your offer has limited time or low volume which will push visitors toward the CTA faster.

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Apply K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, stupid) design principle to your landing page and increase the conversion rate. List from 3 up to 5 core benefits of your product/service, using bullet points. Such kind of formatting will undoubtedly bring the attention of the visitors.

Build High-Conversion Buttons

Call-to-action (or CTA) is a button on a landing page you visitors have to push to subscribe to your email list, buy a product, or register for a free webinar. Goog CTA should be well-written, clear, and easy-to-use. Make sure your call-to-action is placed ‘above the fold’ which means as close as it is possible to the top of the page.

Buttons are call-to-action signals. You need to make these buttons stand out from the text and whole design. Make them noticeable.

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Fit Your Message “Above the Fold” that is an area above which is 1/3rd of the page. Consider placing the most prominent information and your message there. Because most people would not even scroll to the end of the page and leave the site even without knowing what your page is about.

If you want to make for your visitor as easy as possible complete the intended action, your button’s copy should be clear and specific. The best button copy often is written in the first person, for example,

• give me the marketing video course;
• yes, I’m ready for fitness webinar;
• send me the photography workflow ebook now.

Your button copy is the final chance to encourage them to do some action.

Use ‘Trust Signals’

Testimonials and security checks are signals for visitors that your website is trustworthy. Testimonials are the signs that someone already had a positive experience using your product or service.

You could add real client testimonial to your landing page. Testimonials will boost your sales and give visitors a higher level of confidence so that they tend to take action faster.

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However, use testimonials only when you have real results of your work. If you’re just starting out, this part is optional.

People visiting your page should know that they are valued and essential for your brand. Using words like ‘I’ or ‘we’ only gives the impression that you only care about yourself and your own business decisions.

crazyegg.com

Crazy Egg used the headline Make your website better. Initially. And added CTA button saying “Show Me My Heatmap” which put a user in a position of convenience and full control.

Make Sure Your Page is Mobile-Friendly

Let’s face reality: people use mobile devices more and more each day to browse the internet. And when your landing page is online, there is a considerable chance someone will access it via a mobile device, whether a tablet or smartphone.

This is the only reason every landing page you create needs to be mobile-friendly. You need to make it easy for the mobile visitor to see, read, understand, purchase or submit information as it would be on the desktop version of a landing page.

Over to You

Of course, there are numerous signs and rules for creating a perfect landing page that converts. The techniques described above are just recommendations. Create your design and test how different buttons, images, and text will work for your potential clients.