How to Make a Highly Converting Landing Page in 2020

20 years ago, we didn’t have much science on human behavior to back our design decisions. And let’s be honest, we designed based on our gut feelings. I was lucky enough to get a client very early in my career that knew what his customers wanted. He was skilled enough to create quality content for his website and lots of it! You can read all about it here. I learned early on that content is king.

Good copywriting will create the change you want to make in this world. I want you to have your own success story and a website you can be proud of!

That’s why I have written so much about copywriting and SEO in my website. But without further ado! Let’s look at some techniques on how to make a highly converting landing page for your business. In today’s standards!

Let’s talk about conversion action. A conversion action is the percentage of people who start and also complete the desired conversion action you’re tracking.

When a visitor comes to your site, what is the action you want them to take?

Are you looking to generate brand awareness? Engage your current customers to generate more sales (make a conversion action). Do you want to build an email list to generate leads, so you can educate your audience?

You have three types of objectives:

1. Awareness
2. Engagement
3. Conversion

Remember – people are busy. We only have their partial attention and we take that into account when we design the landing page. We need to get out of their way, make things easy for them. And I don’t mean usability. We need to make the page relevant to the user. How? We need to understand who our target audience is.

As a business owner, you know who your customers are. Talk to your sales team to discover more. What age, gender, job title or are they self-employed? Try to narrow as much as you can almost see his/her face in your mind.

New visitors are low in commitment. They are looking for reassurance, value and above all else – clarity. If you can’t communicate what you offer and what value your product or service provide, there will be no interest.

If you try to appeal too wide of an audience, you risk your most potential customers to lose interest. Business owners intuitively know this, but they often act the opposite.

B.J. Fogg the founder of the Persuasive Technology Laboratory at Stanford University. According to Fogg’s behavior model (Fogg model). Three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur:

Motivation

• sensation
• anticipation
• belonging

Ability

• increase training
• decrease difficulty (simplicity)

Triggers

• facilitator
• signal
• spark

It’s next to impossible to motivate people to do something they don’t want to do already! Understanding your visitor and what motivation already exists, you can place triggers in the path of motivated people.

Products and services differ from each other. Product sales need more practical and pragmatic information to convert. Services require more psychological and emotional tactics. In this article, I don’t go into further details about the differences.

Above the fold is the best place to get your visitor’s attention. According to NNGroup, users scroll more than they used to, but they still spent 75% of their time looking at the first screenful.

Your visitor must be able to get the answer to these three questions in the hero section of your landing page:

1. What services or products do you sell?
2. What value do they provide for your customers?
3. What to do next?

You can use these three simple formulas to plan your copy. This section is the most difficult to get right. Prepare to spend a few days to write the copy. There is a small amount of text in this section, but it is the most important section of your site. Your most important goal here is clarity. It takes people only 10-20 seconds to decide whether to leave your web page or not.

Test your hero

Ask people not familiar with your business, those same questions. If you don’t get a satisfactory answer within 5sec, you need to start all over. Spent an extra few more days to rewrite your copy.

SaaS companies are notorious for trying out different copy text in their landing pages. They will change formulas even if they know their current conversion rates are decent. You don’t know if some other copy works even better if you don’t try. So don’t invent the perfect copy, you risk raising the bar way too high. If you are stuck with ideas, you might have forgotten to narrow down your audience!

On my website, I wrote twenty headlines before I got a clue about what I want my headline to reflect. Finally, I tested four before perfecting the one that resonated the most. I asked myself these questions: Why my visitors come to my site? Who are they? Where they came from? What are their hopes and desires? How can I help them achieve their goals?

“Inspiring, Beautiful and Effective Websites” It’s a short and simple line of text, but it took me weeks to get it right. A few words took so much effort right… But after that little line of text, I knew exactly what to do with the rest of the site. I write these articles so you can achieve that goal promised in the headline.

You are not stupid if you need time to perfect your message. It’s hard to even for people who do this for a living, my friend.

Within 5sec your visitor now understands that this might be the right solution. We have now increased motivation. We can expect a little more patience and concentration. We’re not out in the woods yet. Our prospect is interested in the features, but we still have to be selective of what features we want to show. Common three-column section under hero is a good option if it’s not too generic for your taste. Maybe an example of a common use case in a real environment. Don’t list too many features. Our prospect is not ready to take all in at this stage.

WIIFM? What’s in it for me?

Rather than having a read more button below your features, spend more time to improve your copy. Make the text self-explanatory. This is not the place to show how it works, it should show how it benefits the user in the simplest way. If you are a SaaS company and the user wants to know more, offer a free trial instead of a “read more” button. “Contact me” if you are a service provider. And so on..

Note: If a visitor is evaluating your service against a competitor, they will go directly to the features page. It’s not a good idea to focus on these types of use cases on the landing page. They have specific needs, so they need a specific page. I will discuss this more at the very end of this article.

Our prospect is now somewhat convinced that this product you are offering align with his/her needs. Curiosity is shifting into questions and that is exactly what we want. Now the only thing preventing the sale is that the client doesn’t trust you or your company yet. So let’s change that!

We want to show an example of how exactly our product or service works. Break down your features into actions. Show how the features provide the desired outcome for your client. People like to see what is happening behind the curtains. When you show how things work, the prospect builds trust in your product or service. If you can wow them, that’s even better!

As visitors develop a desire for your products or services. They’re now looking for transactional assurances and social proof. Testimonials from real people are a great way to build trust for your company. People trust other people. When they see others to have good experiences, they will presume the same for themselves. There is a little caveat btw. You should always include both first and last names. Otherwise, the testimonial will look fake and that’s not what you want. If you can include a photo, it makes the testimonial even more trustworthy.

Tip: When you ask a testimonial, show them an example. When the client doesn’t know what to write, they’ll delay their testimonial till the end of times… Ask if you can use a photo from their LinkedIn page!

Logo carousels are an easy way to add trust to your company. But it doesn’t compare the value of an honest real-world testimonial from your trusted customers. Keep that in mind.

Your page is meant to convert. We need to ask them to either sign up for a free trial or at least sign up for our newsletter. We have now earned our prospect trust, so it is a perfect time to ask to sign up. Tell them they get something that has value in the minute they push the send button.

Offer an incentive:

• free trial
• eBook
• case study
• exclusive deal or discount
• run sweepstakes or a contest
• join webinar

You are doing well so far, so don’t screw it up! You are in that crucial final stage of conversion, so don’t ask your prospect to jump any unnecessary hoops. Don’t ask for any information that you don’t need. Don’t create confusion by asking optional questions. You may do that later, but now is not the time. Make things easy by simplifying choices. Remove irrelevant distractions and even omit unnecessary words from your sign up page.

Show your prospect that your company is people, not a building! Clients often need help with the product and like to communicate with real people. When you have friendly faces on your site, they think they are communicating with real people. You can ask them to join a webinar where they can see your representer in person. A blog is another good way to show that you have an opinion on things or your company has a mission to be proud.

At this point, the prospect has accepted your offer and is ready to buy. The only objection left is the price. You have to reveal your pricing at some point, so why not now? You can save yourselves a huge amount of effort by packaging your prices. Put your offering into easy to digest categories. Your client wants to eliminate the worst deal and choose the one that fits their needs the best.

For SaaS companies, it usually starts with a free trial, regular and enterprise. 

People have a tendency to rely on an anchor when evaluating subsequent options within the context of that initial anchor or option. It’s sometimes possible to convert more users for a higher profit than without the anchor.

Example of an anchor:

Freelancer 19€/month
Team 89€/month
Entrepreneur 199/month

Option 1 & 2 seems like a good deal compared to the most expensive one, doesn’t it? Sometimes large companies will buy the most expensive by default. They want all the functions available.

So many companies use that kind of pricing model, that it has become a standard. If you want to go against the grain, you might see a decline in your conversion rates.

It’s almost always a good idea to add pricing to your landing page.

Note: If you have a product that is really cheap, under $20/monyh. You should show the price uprfront! Consider showing it in your hero-section.

A lot of companies have started to put some part of their FAQ on the landing page. If your prospect is not ready to buy after the pricing section, there are still unanswered questions. So why not answer! It’s also critical that you can find FAQ right below the pricing table.

• How does the billing work
• What can I expect from the trial

When you overthink, you get easily distracted on your landing page design. You try to put all eggs in the same basket and your conversion rates plummet. Narrow your focus and your conversion rates will improve. I hope that this is the key takeaway from this article.

And remember! Not all visitors are prospects. Conversion is not always a sale, but it is something you can measure. They sign to your mailing list or do some other important activities that lead to taking your primary conversion action in the future. There are three types of visitors:

Not for me (will never convert)
It’s a yes from me (will always convert)
Maybe

Good landing page design only focuses on those in the “maybe” category. That is approximately 60% of your visitors. This is where a good landing page design really makes a difference. You can divide the “maybe” category to even smaller slices:

Maybe yes
Maybe-maybe
Maybe no

You don’t need to focus on the “maybe no”, you cannot convert any of them. They are too early in the funnel. Your design will not have any impact here.

Your design will impact those who are leaning towards your services and those who are on the fence.

If you are wondering why so many of your site visitors will not convert, this is the reason.

This is how you build what Joseph Sugarman calls a slippery slope. It starts from low commercial intent and slides towards the desired conversion action. A lot of webpages today follow this exact formula and for a simple reason. It converts.

Thank you for reading the article, my friend. See you at the next one!