Few words on landing pages

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Recently I read the book “Refactoring UI”. It’s a great book about making User Interfaces clearer with simple yet super-effective rules.
The book is great and I recommend it to anyone starting to get into UI design.

Similarly to UI, I design and build a lot of landing pages, these are your first point of contact with a customer after you somehow convinced them (advertising or other) to click and follow you into your realm: the landing page.

A lot of people understand how important landing pages are. That’s why there are places on the internet where you can get your landing page “judged” or “reviewed” by others.
Notably on the Indie Hackers sub-forum

Before designing your landing page

A landing page needs to be:

  • Visual appealing and responsive
  • Insightful and exciting
  • Able to convert viewers into leads

To build the perfect landing page you need to go through a few steps:

  • Identify what are valuable selling points of the product or service you’re selling
  • Discover the amount of steps a visitors is willing to take before giving you their info
  • Design the landing page so it’s appealing and all the information is presented clearly

Example

Let’s take for example a service that delivers groceries to your door.
Such service has a lot of value propositions to the customer:

  • It’s fast: You can shop in seconds and from anywhere and get it delivered to your door
  • It’s secure: Your payments are processed electronically over a secure channes
  • It’s transparent: Everything is itemized and flat delivery fees, no surprises on the final bill
  • It saves you time: You can do other things that you love, instead of shopping manually and having to park and walk the aisles
  • It’s convenient: Buy as much or little as needed, as many times as needed and you can schedule repeat deliveries.

As you can see the qualities of the product are followed by the value propositions and their benefits.

For each of the above qualities you can build multiple landing pages

If you can’t figure out how to quickly find out your own value propositions, you can do this simple exercise:

  • Create a list of things that people don’t like about the current state
  • Create a list of things that you’re going to solve with your solution
  • Create a list of places and personas where you can sell your solution

If you are unware, a persona in marketing is:

A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.

Okay let’s get back to our example, let’s build a short list to identify the current state of affairs and derive USP and personas:

  • Parking, Checkout lines, Overbuying groceries, Traffic
  • Prevent wasting time, enable transparency and ease of payment, create convenience
  • People who buy food and live far from grocery shopping, people who don’t have time to shop because they work a lot, people who are lazy, people who are old, people who are disabled

The list goes on…
The more accurate you work on this step, the more landing pages you can create matching a persona’s profile.
The aim is to create a list of unique selling points that are beneficial to your audience because it solves one or more of the pain-points.

Structuring a landing page

Now that you know who to target and how to sell it to them you need to have a structure that works for your landing pages.
The rule of thumb is to have the following sections on your landing page.

  • Header: Navigation and or a simple logo that is clearly visible
  • Social proof
  • Problem & How you solve it
  • Benefits
  • Call to action

You can play with the order of these sections and, more importantly, how many times you repeat these sections throughout the page. Depending on the market, audience and product you could have multiple social-proof blocks.

A/B Testing your landing pages only works when you have enough traffic, and 100 hits a day is definitely not enough traffic if you’re planning to run a 2-week long A/B test. Simply take a look at this A/B split test duration check to verify how long you should run it for. As you can see for a small page it would be months worth of data that you would need to come up with a somewhat-relevant decision on which page performed better.

Get started now, don’t wait tomorrow

Sometimes creating landing pages can feel daunting, there are a lot of skills involved in creating a landing page, here’s a recap:

  • Structuring
  • Copywriting (and the picking the right tone)
  • Designing & Illustrating
  • A/B Testing
  • Promoting & Advertising

The sooner you can get a landing page together, the sooner you can get people to share their feedback with you (online like on Reddit/Quora/IndieHackers & many other platforms or offline), the sooner you will start seeing the results you want.

If not, you can always hire someone who will do it for you. I know a few people who can help. Contact me if you want an intro :+1: