How to Create High Conversion Landing Pages

So you have built an interesting product or service and it’s time to spread the word about it.

Where do you start? And how do you ensure that your visitors understand your business and go about buying your product?

Over the last months, we have designed a ton of landing pages at ManyPixels so I have decided to set up a small guide on what goes into creating a conversion oriented landing page.

Before we dive into this, I’ll start with bold claim: There are no special tricks - or shortcuts.

This post is not about which colour or fonts will help you convert best but rather about sharing some common principles for what needs to be in a high conversion landing page. These ideas and principles are mostly about business and not design. If you’re looking for design inspiration - we’re producing a lot of other articles.

I will lay down those principles in this post.

You need to have a good product. And communicate about it.

It is important to ask yourself two questions:

1. What is your value proposition?
2. How are you going to tell people about it?

In other words the goal of your landing page is : How can my website explains so well what I do so that my visitors will buy?

The high-conversion landing page structure

Julian Shapiro wrote a great guide on landing page structure which essentially consists of four sections:

1. Hero
2. Features and objections
3. Validation and Proof
4. Call to action (Book a strategy session, get a free trial, sign up, …)

Your landing page should mostly convey all of this!

by Alex Banaga

Or

by Jess Eddy

1. Hero section

Your hero should comprise of a few things:

1. Your value proposition (What problem you are solving)
2. A call to action (Learn more, Get started, Sign up, Schedule a demo)
3. If you want to do: Photos, pictures of your products, video of your product, etc.

Let’s take have a closer look at ManagedByQ hero section, an office management solution.

We can notice a couple of things:

• The first thing that captures the visitors’ attention is the tagline "We run workplaces"
• They also put a very large photo of an office space with people which is very appealing.

2. Features and Objections

Once your value proposition is clear and makes sense to your visitor, that’s when you’ll really have to stand out of the crowd and counter objection.

Here’s what happens in most visitors head: "I do not see what is interesting here. What’s in it for me?" Then they eventually leave your website.

Asking yourselves these questions can help:

• What do you better, faster, cheaper or what can you provide more than the competition?
• Why is your problem important?
• What objections from the customers can you address?

Here are some examples:

MakeSpace, an on-demand storage experience is doing really great by using natural languages, simple icons and a call to action about each feature they have.

Another example, from FlatFair is conveying really well their value proposition (for both tenants and landlords)

Some tips:

• Use natural, plain language, avoid jargon or buzzwords.

3. Validation and proof

Once your value proposition is clear and how you’re going to solve it by countering objections, a key aspect of landing pages is actually to provide validation (case studies) and proof (it can be social proof, companies you’ve helped work)

A few questions worthy to ask in that regard are:

• What clear benefits did you deliver for that particular customer, in that particular case? (Companies basically ask themselves: "Hey, I want this too! How can I have it?")
• What was the problem / challenge you solved for that customer and how did your solution help it? (The idea here is to show that you understand what problem companies are facing, and why you’re the expert to solve it)

Here are some good examples:

Blyss, a Mobile Massage company in Australia is doing a good job by doing two things really well:

• They show they are the first in Australia, with the best reviews
• They show real reviews from TrustPilot

Another example of social proof is from Orca, which shows how many people already joined the service.

Some other ideas to include as validation / social proof:

• How many customers you served
• Ratings, reviews
• Video case studies / video feedbacks of your users

4. Call to action

Last but not least, you need a clear call to action to get your visitors to actually do something on your website (leaving an email address, signing up for a free trial, etc).

Here are some examples of great call to actions:

ZeroEight is a SaaS for designers. They have two CTA’s : Get started for free (the main CTA) and See example, which directs visitors to an actual demo of their product.

Another great example is from Spendesk, a management platform which also offers two CTA’s:

Some ideas / tips:

• It can be a good idea to offer two CTA (sign up + free demo) in case some visitors are not yet convinced. Showing a demo, example, or webinar of your product is a low friction action vs. asking for a sign up which takes time.

Tools and resources

I have summarised a list of tools and resources we often re-visit or to design our landing pages. Do let me know if you have any other resources!

1. Balsamiq is a great tool to design your landing pages wireframes.
2. The blog of Pedro Cortes is a gold mine to get landing page inspiration tips.
3. We highly recommend you Land-Book for Landing page inspiration
4. This guide from Julian Shapiro gives excellent copywriting tips as well as helping you how to structure your landing page.