What’s the first thing people see when they land on your site? Are they met with an aesthetically pleasing, functional design that guides them toward solving their pain points? Or do they see a collection of promotional marketing messages that have nothing to do with why they decided to interact with your brand in the first place? This is where a successful landing page comes in.
If you think about it, investing in landing page design is one of the most impactful business decisions. And that’s not just because your landing pages directly determine the impression you will leave on your target audience. These pages also ensure you demonstrate your brand’s authority, trustworthiness, and user-orientedness. Plus, they directly impact your site’s conversion rate.
So, if you’re searching for strategies for building a successful landing page, here are the seven most effective tips to implement, along with a few great examples.
Welcome Visitors with Recognizable Branding Elements
Branding visuals are crucial for ensuring the success of your website. And it doesn’t matter if you’re designing your site’s homepage, collection page, or product page. However, knowing what type of imagery to use in these areas can help maximize your ability to attract and retain your web visitors’ attention.
Consequently, you want to guarantee your prospects form a positive opinion about your business when browsing your website.
Remember, initial impressions on the web are formed in less than 50 milliseconds and directly influence people’s willingness to interact with your business. Furthermore, people prefer to interact with brands they’re familiar with.
With this in mind, you must ensure the most noticeable components of your landing pages — the branding elements — are positioned and used to foster familiarity and trust.SaaS company Ignition does a tremendous job designing successful landing pages to maximize brand recognition. The logo in the top left-hand corner helps prospects recognize the business they’ve interacted with on social channels before. On top of that, Ignition understands how important it is to create a continuous browsing experience. So, the entire landing page utilizes the brand’s established color palette, typography, and numerous iterations of the star that makes up the business logo.
Compose a Relevant Value Proposition
What’s the role of a landing page in your digital marketing strategy? It’s to quickly convince your target audience of your brand’s competence to remove a pain point or frustration.
Do you want your landing pages to generate leads or inspire purchases? In that case, you must use them to directly address your prospects’ frustrations and show that your business has the solution they seek.
But how do you compose a relevant value proposition that appeals to your audience? Well, there are multiple directions you can go in.For example, if you want to appeal to consumers and boost conversions while keeping the buyer’s journey short, you can address one of your target audience’s main frustrations. Check out the 1Password Developers successful landing page. The brand uses its value proposition to address its target audience’s primary pain points — speed, complexity, and security.
Or, if appealing to your prospects’ negative emotions isn’t how you want to boost conversions, you can use your value proposition to introduce web visitors to the benefits of investing in one of your products. Check out the Church Texting Service landing page on the DialMyCalls website. The primary user benefit the brand advertises is sending bulk texts instantly, which is what the brand’s target audience wants to achieve in the first place.
Design Conversion-Inspiring CTA Buttons of a Successful Landing Page
Informing landing page visitors that your brand has what it takes to solve their pain points is just a start. However, ensuring the success of your website depends on your ability to get prospects to convert.
Naturally, the only way to do this is to design conversion-inspiring call-to-action buttons. They need to guide your audience from the initial stages of the buyer’s journey toward the bottom phases of the sales funnel.
The good news is that creating a great CTA doesn’t have to be complex. You just need to adhere to some of the more basic best practices for designing CTAs.
For one, when creating calls to action, use colors in sufficient contrast with the background you’ll place them on. The easiest way to do this is to refer to a color wheel tool. Simply pick a shade that’s complementary to your background.Secondly, do your best to employ direct, action-oriented language to demonstrate the value web visitors can unlock by converting. Check out the Classical Guitar Shed homepage, where the CTA invites visitors to download a free ebook. It emphasizes the fact that the business aims to help them perfect their musical skills with high-quality resources.
Finally, don’t hesitate to create urgency and foster trust by using relevant keywords or microcopy that remind potential customers of your brand’s benevolence. For example, the CUFinder Academic Engine successful landing page utilizes a CTA that invites prospects to “grab [their] free credits.” It highlights the fact that converting comes at zero risk with many potential benefits.
Utilize Engaging Visuals
In addition to optimizing landing pages with branding elements, value props, and CTAs, remember that people react exceptionally well to imagery.
In fact, photos convey information up to 60,000 times more quickly than text. So, if you want to leave a positive impression on your prospects, why not do it with engaging visuals?
You can opt for any visual format that serves your brand, as long as it’s not stock photography and is relevant to your prospects’ buyer’s journey.For example, in ecommerce, high-quality product photos are the best visuals for landing pages. Look at the Handcrafted Cowboy Boots page on Chisos, where you’ll find multiple depictions of the brand’s products. Each advertises an aesthetically pleasing and high-quality product that the brand’s audience is bound to find attractive.
However, if your business offers a more complex solution, employ illustrations or explainer videos. Thanks to their power to clarify complicated concepts, these visual formats can be an excellent way to introduce your solution’s benefits to your audience in a way that will feel relevant to their needs and position in the sales funnel. This is what Heap does on its Heap vs. Amplitude landing page, including a “What is Heap” section to give web visitors the rundown of what the software solution could do for them.
Incorporate a Variety of Proof & Trust Signals
When trying to convert consumers, remember that brand trust will play a crucial role in determining their willingness to purchase. Fortunately, you can effectively position your business as trustworthy by incorporating credibility-building elements on your landing pages.
Displaying the standard instances of social proof on your landing pages — ratings and reviews — is a great start. Along with them, it’s a good idea to explore additional ways to establish your business’ credibility and reliability.
For example, showing off third-party awards and acknowledgments or displaying customer logos is an excellent way to establish brand trust. This is what SOCi does on its homepage, dedicating an entire section to showing off accolades.
Or, if you check out the Monday Work Management Software landing page, you’ll see a section dedicated to case studies. The brand presents visitors with content that includes valuable social proof capable of persuading prospects to convert.
Offer Versatile Contact Options
As you explore ways to boost the conversion potential of your landing pages, remember that consumers often decide whether to do business with a brand depending on customer support.
Data from 2022 shows that more than half of people are willing to pay more for superior customer service.
So, if you want to capture more leads and convert more buyers through your landing pages, highlight your brand’s dedication to meeting (and exceeding) customer demands.
The great thing about this strategy is that it’s relatively easy to achieve. In some cases, all you need to do is add a couple of CTAs inviting web visitors to call your customer service team. For example, that’s what Pergola Kits USA did on the Cedar Pergolas landing page. This helps ensure your target audience understands your willingness to give them an unmatched shopping experience.
Alternatively, you can incorporate a live chat option on your website to present shoppers with real-time assistance. Or, you could do something like Levi’s, a brand with an extensive Jeans Guide page on its site, aiming to help shoppers find the ideal products for their needs.
Consider Creating Advanced UI/UX Elements
Finally, as you explore methods to boost the conversion potential of your site’s landing pages, it’s important that you consider your target audience’s specific needs when browsing your site and create UX/UI elements that will help meet those needs.Are the people landing on your site in the awareness stage, needing a gentle guiding hand to help them figure out the solutions to their pain points? In these cases, a product quiz — like the one on the Curology website — could allow your prospects to identify potential solutions to their problem and nudge them toward the lower stages of the sales funnel.
If you run a straightforward ecommerce business, note that buyers often go straight for the search bar on retail websites. So why not make this function as powerful as possible? Something as elementary as the search bar on the Allbirds site can be the key to helping consumers identify relevant products and encouraging them to enter the evaluation or purchase stages of the sales funnel.
Final Thoughts
Creating successful landing pages depends on your willingness to do more than the bare minimum in terms of helping your audience remove their pain points.
From a web design perspective, doing this doesn’t have to involve complex site features. In fact, getting the basics right will be a great start toward boosting landing page conversion.
However, if you want to maximize lead generation and sales, landing page design necessitates a strong understanding of your prospects’ core needs, aspirations, and values. Ultimately, knowing your web visitors is the only way to present them with purchase-inspiring content. You need that in order to demonstrate that your brand has the ability to remove their frustrations.