You can have the best offer in the world but if your landing page looks terrible, potential customers won’t stick around long enough to learn more about it.
They will leave immediately, probably to never come back. Wouldn’t you? We all hit the “Back” button or close the tab when we stumble upon web pages that look outdated, cluttered, or confusing.
That’s why it’s so important to ensure that your landing page design is on point.
Here are seven landing page design tips for high conversions…
- #1: Set a Conversion Goal
- #2: Pick the Right Landing Page Format
- #3: Use a Proven, High-Converting Landing Page Template
- #4: Use Relevant Images to Support Your Landing Page Copy
- #5: Make Sure That Your Call-to-Action Button is Impossible to Miss
- #6: Add an Exit-Intent Pop-Up to Your Landing Page
- #7: Use A/B Testing to Optimize Your Landing Page
- Create Landing Pages That CONVERT With ClickFunnels!
#1: Set a Conversion Goal
If you want to build a high-converting landing page, the first step is to set a conversion goal for it.
In theory, that goal can be anything, but in practice, the vast majority of landing pages fall into one of these two categories:
- Lead generation landing pages that are designed to persuade the potential customer to provide their contact details.
- Sales landing pages that are designed to persuade the potential customer to buy a specific product or service.
Other possible conversion goals include persuading the visitor to share a particular piece of content on their social media, filling out a survey, leaving a review, etc. These conversion goals are extremely rare, though.
#2: Pick the Right Landing Page Format
There are three types of landing pages:
- Short-form landing pages
- Medium-length landing pages
- Long-form landing pages
Short-Form Landing Pages
Short-form landing pages, also known as squeeze pages, are the most basic type of landing page that is characterized by only being one screen long.
They are used exclusively for lead generation and should be your default if that is your conversion goal.
Here’s an example of a simple, yet high-converting squeeze page that we are using to promote our “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” lead magnet:
Get “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” for FREE!
Medium-Length Landing Pages
Medium-length landing pages are landing pages that are several screens long and require scrolling to reach the bottom of the page. They are used for both lead generation and sales.
Once you have validated your lead magnet with a squeeze page, you might want to consider creating a medium-length landing page for it to see if it will convert better.
Also, if you are selling an inexpensive product (e.g., your frontend offer), a medium-length sales page should be your default.
Long-Form Landing Pages
Long-form landing pages are the longest landing pages that seemingly go on forever and are almost exclusively used as sales pages.
They should be your default for selling expensive products (e.g. your backend offer) but you can also experiment with using long-form sales pages to sell affordable offers.
For Example:
One of our frontend products, “Perfect Webinar Secrets”, only costs $7 but we decided to create a long-form sales page for it. And guess what? It converts like crazy!
Get “Perfect Webinar Secrets” For Just $7!
While long-form landing pages typically aren’t used for lead generation, there’s one notable exception: “FREE + Shipping” lead magnets.
These are physical products that you offer for free but ask the potential customer to cover the shipping costs.
For Example:
Russell has written three best-selling books on the subject of growing an online business:
They are all available on Amazon.
However, we also use them as “FREE + Shipping” lead magnets, so you can get them for free directly from us.
Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!
In theory, “FREE + Shipping” lead magnet landing pages are lead generation landing pages, but in practice, they are sales pages because you are asking the potential customer to pay for shipping.
Consequently, it makes sense to use the long-form landing page format because persuading someone to part with their hard-earned money, even if it’s just a $9.99 shipping fee, takes a significant amount of effort.
And the longer the sales page, the more space you have for your pitch.
#3: Use a Proven, High-Converting Landing Page Template
We don’t recommend designing your landing page from scratch unless you have previous landing page design experience. Why?
Because online marketers have been relentlessly optimizing landing pages for at least two decades now.
At this point, we know what works and what doesn’t. Or, to be more precise, we know what’s most likely to work.
That’s why when it comes to the initial design of your landing page, it makes sense to follow the established landing page design best practices.
The most straightforward way to ensure that your landing page complies with those best practices is to use a proven, high-converting landing page template.
Our software, ClickFunnels, includes a template library that features landing page templates for all of the most common use cases.
So why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can simply do what’s been proven to work?
#4: Use Relevant Images to Support Your Landing Page Copy
The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” doesn’t apply to landing pages because the copy matters more than the images.
That being said, you can still use images to support your landing page copy. Here are three ways to do that:
Evoke Emotions
You can use images to help evoke emotions that will then propel the potential customer into taking the action that you want them to take (converting).
The most straightforward way to do that is to use aspirational images that remind the potential customer of what they want to achieve and what their life could look like once they reach their goal.
You can find beautiful free photos on Unsplash.
Lend Credibility
Do you have a strong personal brand?
Would people in your target audience recognize you?
If you answered yes to both of these questions, you might want to consider using photos of yourself to lend credibility to your landing page copy.
Provide Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological principle that says that when people are unsure of what to do, they look at what others do in order to determine the best course of action.,
In the business context, this means that whenever the potential customer is unsure of whether to trust you, they will feel inclined to seek indications that other people trust you.
Online marketers use the term “social proof” to refer to those indications of trust.
There are two types of social proof:
- Direct social proof that relates to the offer in question. Typically, this means testimonials. Ideally, you want to display not just the testimonials but also photos of the people providing them. With their permission, of course!
- Indirect social proof that relates to you as an individual or to your company as a business. This can mean mentioning relevant education, credentials, accomplishments, awards, media features, and so on. Consider displaying “As Featured On” media badges, company logos of your previous clients, photos of yourself speaking at prestigious venues, etc.
- Social proof is incredibly powerful and can do wonders for your conversion rates.
In our view, there’s no such thing as “too much social proof”, provided that it doesn’t distract the potential customer from the conversion goal. If you got it, flaunt it!
And if you don’t have any social proof to speak of, then go out there and acquire it. Being proactive about it will take effort, but it will be worth it in the long run!
#5: Make Sure That Your Call-to-Action Button is Impossible to Miss
The human eye is naturally drawn to page elements that are:
- Large in comparison to other page elements.
- Of a color that contrasts with the overall color scheme of that page.
That’s why it’s important to ensure that your call-to-action button meets these two criteria.
If you have followed our earlier advice and are using a proven landing page template, you probably don’t have to worry about this because it should already be taken care of.
However, if you decide to tinker with that template, especially with the color scheme, make sure that you adjust your call-to-action button accordingly!
#6: Add an Exit-Intent Pop-Up to Your Landing Page
Everyone hates pop-ups.
And yet online marketers continue to use them. Why?
Because it’s undeniable that pop-ups work, especially the exit-intent ones.
An exit-intent pop-up is a pop-up that is shown to the potential customer when they are about to leave the page.
At that point, you have nothing to lose, so you might as well make one last attempt to convert them.
However, if they visited your landing page but didn’t convert, then they probably aren’t interested in that particular offer.
That’s why you want to pitch a related but different offer in your exit-intent pop-up.
For Example:
Remember our “DotCom Secrets” FREE + Shipping lead magnet?
Here’s the exit-intent pop-up that we are using on that landing page:
Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!
Humans are creatures of habit so it’s understandable that some people prefer to buy Russell’s books at a place where they always buy books, which probably means Amazon.
We don’t mind this at all because our goal here is to persuade the potential customer to read “DotCom Secrets”. It doesn’t matter that much where they get it from.
That being said, getting it directly from us is legitimately a better option because we offer a bunch of bonuses that aren’t available elsewhere!
#7: Use A/B Testing to Optimize Your Landing Page
You can’t possibly know whether your landing page works until you start driving traffic to it. Until then you are literally just guessing what might work.
So create the initial version of your landing page as quickly as you can, use paid advertising to drive traffic to it, and establish its baseline conversion rate.
Then you can begin optimizing it with A/B testing:
- Create two variants of your landing page: variant A and variant B. They should be identical except for one difference. That difference is the element that you are testing (e.g. the call-to-action button color).
- Split your traffic into two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B.
- Let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, analyze the results, and keep the winning variant.
Any software that has an A/B testing functionality, such as ClickFunnels, will do the mathematical heavy lifting for you, so you don’t need to worry about that. Still, we recommend reading up on relevant statistics.
It’s important to set realistic expectations: the vast majority of A/B tests that you run probably won’t produce meaningful results and the ones that do will only lead to small conversion rate increases most of the time.
However, those small conversion rate increases add up, which means that continuous testing can have a significant impact on your bottom line in the long run.
Also, if you run enough tests, you will probably stumble upon a few big wins as well.
Say, there was a famous A/B test conducted by the Performable team where the red call-to-action button outperformed the green call-to-action button by 21%. Interestingly, no one was expecting much, so this result was surprising.
“My hunch was that even if one color performed better than the other, the difference would be small.
I could imagine that one color might be more appealing or grab the user’s attention better than another, but that the overall conversion numbers would be overwhelmed by the overall message of the page.
I assumed that the results of this test would show what we’ve seen in testing before — that the major difference between good and poorly converting pages was the message the page was communicating,” shared Joshua Porter, then VP of Product and Community at Performable.
This goes to show that while the previously mentioned landing page best practices exist for a reason, you just never know what the test results will be until you run it.
That’s why we recommend the “Always Be Testing” approach: develop a habit of always running A/B tests without getting your hopes up for any particular hypothesis. It’s the best way to optimize your landing page for conversions!
Create Landing Pages That CONVERT With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to create landing pages that convert:
- Proven landing page templates.
- Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
- A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your landing pages.
What’s best is that we have a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk. So why not start building your landing page today?