A landing page is a self-standing web page where the audience lands mostly through links in emails and advertisements. The sole aim of the landing page is to convert visitors into customers.
When designing a landing page, you should remember once a visitor lands on your page, you only get a few seconds to make them stay. Your landing page design must be persuasive enough to get them to complete the CTA task. An effective landing page has a headline, a clear and concise business description, customer feedback, and a strong call to action.
You can include additional things, that may make your target audience want to explore more.
Why Is Landing Page Important?
Many companies make a mistake by sending their visitors to their homepage through links. Most people click the links with one goal in their mind. When they are sent to the homepage, they get disappointed because they would have to scroll through numerous options to find the information they were looking for.
On the contrary, a landing page is more goal-oriented. It does a similar task to a homepage, which is generating leads for the sales but removing additional steps. That’s why a landing page has a better conversion rate than the homepage.
What to Include in Your Landing Page?
Here are a few mandatory things that make an effective landing page.
1. Your Unique Selling Point
Your unique selling point tells the customers what they should expect from your company and why they should choose you. People often make mistakes here. They would go on to write long paragraphs about the features of their products.
It’s not about the features of your product but how the features will solve your users’ problems. Talk about how your product differs from your competitors and what you’re offering that other people aren’t.
Remember, your landing page doesn’t need to contain any company history information. That information is essential but not on landing pages.
2. Your Visuals
Images and videos are crucial in making a landing page design effective. Before exploring stock photos on the internet, consider what kind of picture/video will grab the attention of your target audience. What feel does it give to your page? And how is it connected to the solution you are selling through your product?
3. Your Features
Now that you’ve grabbed your potential buyer’s attention through your unique selling point and visuals, it’s time to give them a few details about your product. Along with the description, you need to talk about how your features benefit the consumers.
Put yourself in your target audience’s shoes, and think about what features you want to hear to be convinced to buy a product. Keep your description and sentences short and simple to read.
4. Social Proofs
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Social proofs include customer reviews, awards or appreciation from reputable organizations, and the customer count.
When visitors learn about your business for the first time, they need a reason to trust your company to make a purchase. And your social proofs serve the purpose of trust building.
5. Call-To-Action
The sole aim of your landing page is to convert a visitor into a customer. And your CTA button is the key to achieving it. Correction–a great CTA button. You must’ve seen many CTA buttons only saying, “click here to… ” or other similar words. That is a bad example of a CTA button.
Connecting your CTA button to your selling point, features, and benefits is a good example. You can list a few advantages above the button, but keep each sentence at five to six words max.
Tips to Design an Effective Landing Page
Here are some practical landing page design tips that will help increase the conversion rate of your landing page.
1. Make Your Page Scannable
Nowadays, most people have an attention span of 8.25 seconds. Shorter than that of a goldfish. When they land on your page, they won’t read word to word to find what they are looking for. Instead, they might search the heading, images, etc., to find something related to what they want.
Therefore, keeping the headers bold and separating different sections by colors or images is a good practice. Suppose your landing page design looks the same throughout, for instance. In that case, the size of the text is the same for the heading and paragraphs. Your reader will have difficulty differentiating between the content and the headers.
They will have to read word for word to recognize the headers and content, leading to losing interest.
2. Make Your Page Mobile Responsive
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
One of the most effective landing page design tips is to make your web page mobile responsive. Almost 60% of the traffic on websites comes from mobile phones. That’s a massive chunk of the audience you wouldn’t want to disappoint. And as per research, there’s been an increase in online shoppers making purchases from their phones.
To make your landing page design mobile responsive, keep it simple. Don’t show too much of the content at one time. Keep the font size larger and an easy-to-understand font face.
3. Select the Colors Carefully
To create an effective landing page design, the colors you use need to complement each other and reflect the theme of your company. Each color has a meaning. For example, the green color symbolizes nature and life and yellow is seen as fun, attention-grabbing, and energetic.
Consider your target audience as well while choosing the colors. Make sure you don’t use too many colors or too few. You can use online tools such as Color Hunt or Adobe Color CC to decide your color palette.
4. Remove Any Distractions
Your landing page design needs to be well-structured and shouldn’t have any distractions. Such as a navigation bar. If there are any external links or a navigation bar, it might take people to the other pages of your website without them clicking the CTA button.
5. Use a Landing Page Template
Creating an effective landing page design from scratch can be challenging if you’re not a professional. As all the landing page designs use the same structure, proven to work, working with templates will ease the process.
You don’t have to scroll through different sites to look for perfect templates. Strikingly is a website builder that has a wide range of landing page design templates. You don’t need coding or web designing experience to create an effective landing page with Strikingly.
Image taken from Strikingly
To make your landing page design well-structured, you can add sections in just one click.
Don’t forget to get a custom domain. It helps in building credibility and ranking your landing page. A custom domain also makes remembering your website’s name easy for people.
Strikingly offers a free custom domain for users who sign up for yearly (or longer) plans.
6. Keep the Important Information Above the Fold
Above the fold refers to the top section of your landing page which is visible to the audience the moment they land on it. The top section must contain a call to action, a convincing headline, your logo, a slogan, a concise (no more than three lines) information about your product.
7. Optimize Your Page’s Loading Speed
Most people will be frustrated if a site takes longer than 4 seconds to load. Therefore, it is essential to increase your page’s loading speed as much as possible. Avoid adding huge-sized pictures and videos to optimize the speed of your landing page.
8. Add a Video
One of the most productive landing page design tips is to add a video to convey complex information. According to online video stats, 84% of people were persuaded to buy a product by watching a video about it.
Moreover, many people prefer watching a video to reading complex information.
You can easily add videos and images to your Strikingly site, by adding a gallery or big media section.
Image taken from Strikingly
9. Keep the Forms Short
There’s no bigger turn off for people than visiting a landing page and seeing too many fields to fill in a form. Minimize the users’ efforts to input information.
The key is to only ask for the necessary information. If there are just one or two fields, the user will be encouraged to take action as it wouldn’t take longer than 20 seconds.
10. Conduct Split Testing
Split testing is a way of deciding which landing page design works best out of the two options you have. Design and launch two different landing page designs. Then see which one got the better conversion rate, to secure the position of your company’s permanent landing page.
The Best Landing Page Examples
Here is a list of the best landing page design examples to inspire you.
- Shopify
Image taken from Shopify
This is one of the best landing page design examples. See how the headline tells the idea of the entire website in just four words. There are no distractions, such as links to other web pages, and a concise call to action, which only requires emails.
- Unbounce
Image taken from Unbounce
The best thing about this landing page is that all the information is provided. In addition, Unbounce has also provided the information users didn’t know they needed until they read it.
- Inbound Emotion
Image taken from Inbound Emotion
This is one of the simplest yet most effective landing page designs. See how they’ve kept the structure simple, didn’t use too many colors, and used a fixed form. A fixed form provides a great user interface, as you wouldn’t have to scroll back up to fill it.
- Zillow
Image taken from Zillow
In this landing page design, see how they’ve kept the most important things above the fold. This search bar gives people exactly what they want, hence a better conversion rate.
- Founder Mastermind
Image taken from Strikingly user's website
The best thing about this page is simplicity. There are no external links that might distract the user. A call to action button above the fold serves its purpose. And adding a menu bar that takes to users different sections of the landing page is a great idea.
Conclusion
A landing page is the standalone page of your website, and its sole aim is to convert visitors into customers. An effective landing page is scannable, well structured, contains concise information about the product, and has a straightforward call to action.
When designing a landing page, research everything from colors to content that would attract your target audience. In most cases, the more complex the landing page you build, the less effective it is. Therefore, keep it simple and catchy.
