How to Design an Effective Landing Page: Everything You Need to Know

Blog: Education Web Design Marketing

You may have not known the definition of a landing page, but you’ve definitely come across a landing page before. The best way to describe a landing page is a website page focusing on one feature, and serving a purpose to direct the visitors towards one single action. It’s the page where you “land” after clicking a link, and more often than not this happens as a result of a marketing campaign. This is the main difference between the landing page from other, multi-purpose pages on the website (e.g. homepage or blog.)

While narrow in usage (e.g. a Christmas landing page would be useful for a month during the year), when done correctly, landing pages are a beloved channel among marketers around the world. The simplicity of navigation and a complete focus on one topic makes landing pages an extremely effective promotional channel that boasts improved conversion rates while lowering cost per acquisition.

Usually, the main purpose of the landing page is to generate leads, whether it’s a product sale or an event registration. Marketers and businesses for conversion and sales-oriented tasks, such as

  • Promoting new products;
  • Growing subscriber lists;
  • Boosting sales and attracting leads;
  • Capturing important insights and assembling data.

But how to make sure that you’ve built a landing page that will be effective? What should you keep in mind during the entire creation process? To help you answer these questions, in this article, we’ve taken a look at what a great landing page should consist of, as well as answered all the important ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ you need to know.

Why Do You Need a Landing Page?

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of the landing page creation process, let’s first understand why your business needs a landing page. After all, creating a website page just for people to fill in a form may sound like too much work. Can’t you just add it to your homepage?

Well, yes and no. While you indeed can add the information to the homepage or elsewhere on the website, having a dedicated landing page yields a number of benefits for your business. Here are a few of them:

Helps with lead generation — Having a separate landing page will help you remove all distractions and competing links, drawing the undivided attention of the visitor to what you want them to do: fill in the form, start the free trial, or purchase the product. By having their attention, you can guide them through the process you’ve so carefully designed, significantly improving the chance of attracting and capturing a lead.

For example, in the “Website import from WordPress” page of Site.pro, the visitor can get a glimpse of the import process, compare the two services, and decide whether to go or not with the import process. All other options are eliminated to avoid distraction.

Attracts different types of customers — You can create custom landing pages to attract different types of audiences, based on your interests and needs. You can use them to reach people from different locations and belonging to varying demographics. Experimenting with the design, content, and the offer itself will allow you to appeal to different groups.

Here’s an example of two different landing pages by the same company, design platform Venngage, created to attract two different audiences. The first one is an Infographics landing page designed for professionals looking to present their data in a more visually appealing way.

Source: Venngage

Another one is a YouTube banner maker, an entirely different solution from the same company, this time targeting video bloggers, marketing specialists, musicians, and more.

Source: Venngage

Improves Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign results — If you are running PPC advertising on Google or other search engines, having a dedicated landing page for them will improve your ad rankings. Because the quality of the PPC ad is also partially judged by the link attached to it, having a highly-relevant landing page at the end of your ad will positively impact the end result.
This was far from being an exhaustive list of benefits of having a landing page, but it will hopefully give you an idea of why creating a landing page is worth the effort. And now that you already understand the importance of landing pages, let’s take a look at some of the best practices that’ll help you design a landing page that converts.

Landing Page Design Best Practices

As mentioned earlier in the article, landing pages, though similar to regular websites, serve a different purpose. That’s why, to be effective, they also have different design needs. Here are some of the key characteristics and design tips that can help you create a landing page that both looks great and brings results.

1. Visual Simplicity Is Key

Keeping your landing page visually simple is important as it helps to keep the focus of the visitor on the main aim of the landing page. Too many colors and too many elements can be distracting, while a clean minimalist design will focus the attention of the visitor on your value proposition and guide them through the conversion process.
Here are some characteristics of visual simplicity and clean interface:

  • Visual simplicity leaves a lot of white space on the page in such a way that the attention of the visitor is focused on the CTAs of the page.
  • Visual simplicity isolates CTAs from other elements to avoid a “crowded” page, making them easier to stand out.
  • Visual simplicity creates a smooth design flow by placing the elements on the page in such a way that visitors keep reading without getting distracted by any element, CTA, or an unnecessary contrast of colors.

Here’s an example of an effective eCommerce landing page design that’s clean and simple, yet contains everything needed to ensure the shopping process goes smoothly.

Try this template

2. Consider the Colors

When it comes to design, the importance of color is hard to overestimate. Colors have big impact on how we feel and can affect the ways in which we act and perceive what’s around us. This is true in the case of landing page design as well.
Choosing the right palettes for your landing page can help you guide the behavior of the users towards the direction that’s beneficial for you and that will help you to eventually get them to convert.
Here are a few tips on how you can effectively use color in your landing page design:

  • Create contrast on your page by using high and low colors, to make the text on your landing page readable for the users.
  • Build a color palette that consists of compatible color combinations.
  • Incorporate opposite and complementary colors as an addition to your main color palette.
  • Understand the role of colors in marketing and behavior, and use this knowledge to your advantage. For different landing pages, you are going to have varying needs and expectations. Design your landing pages using colors the impact of which match your final goal.
  • Keep in mind that in different countries, colors may symbolize different things. So, when designing a landing page, for example, for a specific location or demographic, consider learning about the symbolism behind that hue.

3. Create a Responsive Landing Page Design

In June 2020, Google rolled out the mobile-first indexing, which meant that from that time on, the search engine giant was going to rank the websites based on their mobile-friendliness, among other things.

This hardly came as a surprise given how widespread and important smartphones have become. As a result of this, mobile-friendly websites have become standard in the industry, becoming a must instead of a “nice to have.” This is true also for landing pages: to ensure the success of your campaign, you need to have a landing page that works on mobile as great as it works on desktop.

Having a responsive landing page helps you achieve just that. They ensure that people interacting with your landing page on their mobile devices get to have a comfortable and smooth browsing experience.

Try this template

Mobile commerce is taking the lead and global customer spending on mobile devices is expected to reach $728 billion in 2025. Understanding the potential of this for your business, and designing your website and conversion-oriented landing pages in a way that will ensure the best experience for your customers will be critical for your business success.

Here’s a graph showing the percentage of mobile users when it comes to landing page responsive design statistics:

Source: GoodFirms

As smartphones become device #1 for users around the world, and a sub-par mobile browsing experience can become a cause of leaving the website, having a responsive design for your website becomes an absolute must.

4. Incorporate High Quality Images and/or Videos

The saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is as true today as when it first came to be. A great picture can tell a story, share an idea, and push the person viewing it to take an action.
Adding high-quality images and videos to your landing page can have a number of benefits. Here are some of them:

  • You can tell the story of your brand and product in a much more engaging way.
  • High-quality visuals will help you demonstrate your product more effectively or share about your service or your offer in a more compelling, and visually pleasing way.
  • Improve your connection with the visitors.
  • Help with SEO.

To make sure you’re crafting visuals for your landing, there are a few additional steps you can take to ensure the best possible result.

One way is to make your images retina-ready. Devices with retina screens have more pixels, so they require images at higher resolutions to fill those pixels. Currently Apple devices, Android phones, Surface tablets all require retina-ready images.

Another way to improve the quality of your images is through using varying image formats.. For example, for static images, .png is preferred to .jpg. For illustrations, logos, or brand elements, going with .svg is a smart way to ensure you get the sharpest quality of your visuals no matter how much the visitor zooms in. Depending on the website builder service you use, you can even animate your .svg elements to create a more interactive experience for your users. Site.pro supports both .svg and animated .svg file formats. Additionally, it has an automatic support of retina-ready images, as shown below.

The image or video you display should, of course, be relevant to the theme of the landing page. A carefully crafted visual with a message behind it will, naturally, work better than generic stock images, and will give a better idea to the customers about what they are buying.

5. Powerful Call-To-Action (CTA)

A powerful CTA, much like everything else in a landing page, is a combination of design and text content. It serves as both a guide and an invitation to take a certain action, by showing what is expected of the visitors to do. From “Learn More” to “Book a Demo,” your CTAs can be as diverse as your goals.

That said, buttons come in all sorts of shapes, sizes, and styles. Here’s an example of a CTA button on Canva inviting the user to start crafting their resume:

Source: Canva

The button is eye-catching, contrasts well with the background, matches company colors, and contains a clear and powerful CTA.
If you are unsure about how to craft a CTA that’s effective, here are a few tips you can start with:

  • Choose the primary goals;
  • Work with the right colors;
  • Pick a simple serif or sans serif font;
  • Make the text bigger than the surrounding body text;
  • Keep it in line with the modern design trends;
  • Keep it consistent across your landing page.

Content: the Foundation of a Great Landing Page

The design of the landing page has a critical impact on its success, but it's not the only thing: the content of your page is critical, and it can make or break your campaign. A well-structured landing page with strategically-crafted textual content can help you significantly grow your business. Below, we take a look at some of the ways you can make sure you’ve crafted highly converting and effective content for your landing page.

1. A Persuasive and Eye-Catching Headline

Once people land on your landing page, the headline is the first thing they are going to see. And it’s based on your headline and the front page that they are going to decide whether to stay on the landing page or to leave. To reduce the bounce rate as much as possible, and make them want to read on, your headline needs to be eye-catching and benefit-packed: make sure that from the very first second your visitors know what’s in it for them.

Source: Zendesk

A few qualities of an effective headline:

  • Conveys your message in a clean and concise way;
  • Poses the problem and offers a solution;
  • Creates a sense of urgency and desire to act on it.

Bonus tip: in addition to the headline, the first section of your landing page will need to include your CTA, be it a button or a lead generation form. Make sure it’s responsive, and fits the screens of different devices.

2. Social Proof

One of the harsher truths in business is that people believe other people more than they believe in brands. And very often, they are reluctant to try a new service unless they see that other people like it as well. This is especially true in the case of technology or software products.

To show people that they can trust your brand, you need to add helpful, but also subtle trust mechanisms to your landing page. A few ways to do this are to include testimonials from customers, mention download (or subscription, or registration) numbers, and introduce some of the famous partners you’ve worked with, to name a few. Including social proof makes people feel more comfortable with your brand, resulting in a higher number of leads.

3. Informative Copy

If the headline’s function is to attract the reader so that they don’t leave right in the beginning, the role of the body copy is to get people reading until they reach your CTA. And here comes the “scary” part of the body text: you have to decide how long the text is, what topics it covers and what leaves out, and what type of solutions you need to offer.

To make sure that you have an informative copy about your product or service on your landing page, you need to make sure that your body copy does these two things:

Addresses a pain point — Smoothly remind them about a pain point or a problem that they are experiencing, and why it’s important to find a solution.

Suggest a solution — Next thing you want to do after you’ve reminded them of the existing “headache” is to offer them a “pill.” Show them that you can help them get rid of that problem, and how exactly you can do it.

4. Contact Information

In the world of business, especially online business, trust is everything. Having contact information on your landing page can help you further improve the trust of your visitors towards your brand.

Add your email address, phone number, address, or any other ways of contact to your landing page to let the customer know that they can reach out to you anytime. If possible or if there is a need, you can also add a contact form or a live chat popup on your landing page. This way, people can ask whatever questions they may have directly from your landing page and receive answers.

Creating a Landing Page Online

All things considered, creating a landing page online doesn’t take much time and effort. Once you find the right website builder, it can become a nice pastime.

With Site.pro, you can easily create a landing page by choosing a template, testing it, and then customize it by adding your content and media and altering the design.

Explore templates

You can preview your landing pages to see how they look on desktop, mobile, and tablets, to make sure that your page is responsive, and ensure the best user experience.

Wrapping Up

Creating a high-converting landing page can sometimes feel like a real challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. Once you understand the needs of your brand, you’ll be able to craft nice-looking and effective landing pages, and understanding the key characteristics of an effective landing page can certainly help along the way. All the elements discussed above can have a place on your landing page, and improve the performance significantly.