The Landing Pages Hand Book!. What the heck are landing pages, and…
By: Manav Lakhadive
Tags: Psychology, Website, Marketing, Lead Generation, Landing Pages

Hey, I am Manav, I make websites using Webflow, if you want to make a landing page for your product or Lead generation funnel here is the complete guide on how to make landing pages for better conversion. Let's get straight into it!

But first,

What the heck are landing pages, and how can you use them?

A simple way to define it would be a page where your user or potential customer Lands! It can have different goals according to your use case it may be getting their email, making a sale, or scheduling a meeting. Simply put the only objective of the landing page is conversions.

Let me give you an example. Say your company is selling classy perfumes through an online store. Suppose there is this perfume “ABC” which gives you the highest margin. Now say that you created an online marketing campaign for ABC. Will you send your prospects through those ads to the original e-commerce page of your store where all the other products are listed along with ABC or will you prefer a specialized landing page made for ABC?

I guess we both have the same answers. Obviously, a specialized landing page. Primarily because it aligns with the objective of your marketing campaign and it will not confuse your potential customer out of all the products you have listed. You don’t want your customers to be lost!!

Use landing pages for almost everything! New product coming up? Have a landing page. Want freelance leads for your gig? Yes, for a landing page. Event tickets to sell? Hell, yeah for a landing page!

Generally Landing pages can be of three types.

Sales Page — which aims to make instant sales at the page itself.

Lead Generation Page- aims to collect some information from users such as email or phone number for further marketing purposes.

Click through the page — Aims at warming up users before they check out on the original site.

But don’t get caught up in classifying landing pages in the end all of them are Landing Pages!

Use landing pages for almost everything! New product coming up? Have a landing page. New announcement? Yes, for a landing page. Event tickets to sell? Let’s make a landing page!

Now let’s dissect the landing pages and understand what are different parts of the landing pages!

Understanding Headlines

What’s the first thing your users will see when they land on your page? Yes, it’s the headline. The Aim of the landing page should be to direct the attention to the headline. The headline should provide a value proposition without over sensationalizing it but yet keeping the reader curious.

The headline on the Marketing site of Asana.

Above is the headline of the Landing page of Asana; it is the platform to organize the work and teams. Look at the headline and the value it clearly offers to its users without revealing everything to them.

The heading is the biggest thing on the landing page hence it grabs user attention first.

Avoid over sensationalizing, i.e. taking a message and blowing it out of proportion. You don’t want your users to assume you are a scam, right? Striking the right balance between spiking curiosity and delivering value is the key! The headline should be properly designed and should have proper space and contrast maintained so that it is easily visible to your users!

If your product cannot be put together in just one line you can use a subheading to make it more clear to the users. But remember if you are not exactly able to convey your message in two headings you might be doing something wrong!

So, to summarize, delivery value, make it clear and noticeable and use sub-headline as helping hand

Call To Action!

The ultimate goal of your landing page is to make them take action on what your landing page is offering! That is where the magic happens!

According to Wikipedia call to action is

“a piece of content intended to induce a viewer, reader, or listener to perform a specific act, typically taking the form of an instruction or directive (e.g. buy now or click here)”

A call to action can be a button, form, or a link, or anything according to the landing page. Similar to headings buttons to require proper space around them should have good contrast and clearly identifiable.

The content of your Call to Action matters too. It can make users take action confidently or just make them turn away! The text will make up the mind of your users at the very last moment.

The good call to action should be descriptive as well as it should also offer value to your customers.

Example- “Sign Up Now” vs “Manage Your Team Now”

Your user is very less interested in signing up it does not indicate value to it. But on the other hand, “Manage Your team now” describes as well as shares the value!

Call to Action should be the right balance between value and description.

Take a look at this landing page (source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/5-awful-landing-pages/). My mind has to do so much processing just to find the value it offers and to find a call to action button.

The call-to-action text such as “Get Ripped in 60 days” sounds scammy and oh boy internet is filled with such scams so you better not want your page to look like one. Even though your product may help people lose fat in 60 days but your call to action button may make it over-sensational. The better call to action can be “Start Getting Ripped Now”.

Commitment vs reward — If you are giving something for free then asking for Name, Email, and even company size is not too much. But if you want them to signup for your newsletter that would be too much to ask for!

To summarize call to action button is where conversions happen, it should call for attention, describe and offer value effectively, and lastly, commitment from the user should match the reward!

First-person Narrative vs Second Person Narrative for CTA

A study done by lots of marketers around the world shows that first-person narrative works better than Second person narrative ex- Start Your free Trial vs Start my free trial. Some people believe that there are psychological reasons for it or simply because the internet is filled with second-person narrative.

Hero Section/ Image

You build landing pages for people and if people feel good then chances of conversion increase. Your hero shot should be exactly doing that.

Hero shot can be an image or a video or a plain simple background.

Remember that the hero shot will steal a lot of attention from your headline and call to action button.

Should you use stock photos in Hero shot?

Yes and no, both. Finding right stock photo is the key

Look at this image, I mean who does that in an office. This obviously looks fake and modeled. You don’t want your users to take you as fake even subconsciously. But that doesn’t mean stock images are a bad idea.

Now, look at this image on the right, this looks believable and convincing that the people in the image are actually working.

Secret tip:

Whenever you decide to use the image of the person don’t have them looking into the screen as it will grab the attention of your users and your headline will be of less importance. Instead, choose an image where the person is not directly looking into the screen or ideally looking towards the headline or call to action!

Look at the image above the model stares directly at you and steals lots of your attention. And your goal should be to make users take action and focus more on headlines.

The above example though it uses a similar hero shot it is a lot better compared to the previous example as the model is looking at the headline so it naturally draws your attention to it. (Though the site is not that well made)

Body of Benefits

Sometimes the hero section is not enough to explain to the user what you are offering satisfactorily. In that case, you can use the body of benefits, it is simply a section of your landing page explaining a little more about what you are offering. Depending on your product you may have to give more or less a description of what you are offering.

But Manav, how do I decide how much info to put out there? The answer is simple if you are offering a product that requires very little commitment then you need not even have a body of benefits. For example, if you are just asking for an email address in exchange for a freebie, then you need not explain it much. But say suppose you are using your landing page to sell a product which is worth $300 then you may need to explain in detail what’s it is about as you will be under heavy scrutiny by the customer.

To find the exact amount of information to be used you have to make an educated guess and then A/B test your landing page and optimize to find the sweet spot, Simple!

What type of content you should have? Well, it can be benefits or how to use the product or anything that may make users feel convinced according to the commitment they are supposed to make.

Social Proof

How often do you buy products without reading the reviews?

All of us read reviews before buying the products (or at least the products which are high priced).

Having testimonials or reviews of other customers increases the chances of conversion as your offer instantly becomes more trustable. But remember you cannot put fake reviews or use stock photos to fill up the testimonials.

Using tweets as your testimonials are one of the best ways to gain trust as it shows that customers were self-motivated to tweet good reviews about you.

Another way of gaining trust is to list out customers or companies using your products, the bigger the name easier it is to gain trust.

Remember fake testimonials can be sensed it can be either through photos or through the language of reviews.

So, if testimonials are that helpful why not use them all over the place? Because testimonials are only used to gain or increase trust. First, you offer the solution then convince them that your product or service is better or cheaper compared to the competitors and then gain the trust by showing them the testimonials.

One of the best examples of a good landing page is the home page of asana.com it nails all the listed components of the landing page.

Thank You page

Thankyou page or confirmation page shows up when your customer has completed your conversion goal. But a lot of people just let customers go on their way once the conversion is being done. You can use it to redirect your customers or users to social media pages or make users do some other task.

Remember that the design of your thankyou page should be very similar to the landing page because your users may notice the change subconsciously.

AB Testing Your Landing Page

How to decide what hero image to use? How to decide what to modify and what content will work?

Let your audience decide it.

How to AB test? Simple create a landing page, make copies of, change one thing in each page such as heading, hero shot, or button, and then split your audience and test the landing page. The landing page that comes as the winner is the one you keep and throw the rest of them.

Go on deciding one thing at a time say suppose in your first AB test you want to decide the design of the button then make two similar pages with one change i.e. in the color of the button then AB tests them. Whichever page comes out to be the winner will decide what design your landing page will have.

Also never rely on very few conversions to make decisions, a good number would be around 300 conversions to decide the winner.

Now that you have decided on the button design go for the hero shot next or the headline.

That is it! Yes, that's all you needed to know how to make awesome high conversion Landing Pages now go and make amazing landing pages!