14 Best Practices for Designing Highly Converting Landing Pages (with Examples)

It’s been a while since businesses have moved the majority of their marketing campaigns online. With features that allow you to easily track the progress of each of your campaign, these businesses are now enjoying numerous benefits from their online platforms. Among various tools to improve your business results are landing pages. They help businesses create powerful strategies to promote their products and services. They’ve become one of the vital parts of the design development process with a goal to engage visitors and drive them through the stages of your conversion funnel.

The design of your landing page needs to be impeccable if you want to achieve your goals. To design an effective, captivating landing page, we bring you some of the best practices from companies across various industries to help you find a way to successfully turn your prospects into leads.

1. Sign up landing pages: Shopify

Landing pages with ‘Get Started’, ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Try it now’ call-to-action buttons are one of the most common landing pages. As almost every business has this type of a landing page, it’s crucial to do it the right way, like Shopify. Keeping it simple while providing important information is what will have a tremendous impact on your prospects and encourage them to engage with your products. With this page, Shopify only highlighted its benefits and added a visually appealing design to make it as simple as possible for their audience. If you’re planning on creating a sign up landing page, make sure you keep it simple.

2. Video landing pages: Sprout Social

Many businesses are adding a video to their landing page as they are aware this type of content significantly increases the conversion rate. Nothing can captivate your visitor as a video with a ‘Play’ button. Sprout Social managed to incorporate it perfectly with the rest of their content on the page. It takes only a second or two to understand the main benefit of using this tool as it’s strategically placed right in the center. Also, the colors used for the background and buttons help visitors understand the key elements of this landing page. With a great page structure like this one, it’s very easy to move on to the next stage.

3. Download content landing pages

To keep their existing and potential customers engages, many businesses produce useful content in the form of a guide, eBook, webinar, study, research, etc. To promote that content, they will create a specific landing page for it. As there are plenty of such landing pages, we’ve decided to take a closer look at two great examples by HubSpot and FlyWheel.

3.1 HubSpot

When you land on this page, it’s immediately clear what you’re supposed to do. The headline is direct and below it, there are fields you need to fill to get their free eBook. This simple design is enhanced with a blue colour to match the image background and the only button on the page. By adding only three fields, visitors don’t have to give too many information in the first step which will encourage them to press that ‘Continue’ button.

3.2 FlyWheel

Similar to HubSpot, FlyWheel created a landing page for their guide. With more text than the previous example, this page managed to make it look spacious with different font sizes and a big image on the left side. FlyWheel also used different shades of blue to make the design more playful and added a green-colored button to grab your attention as soon as you enter the page.

4. Product-oriented landing pages

We can say that every landing page is product-oriented in some way, however, promoting a certain product with your landing page differs from the rest of landing page types. The ultimate goal is to emphasise the elements which will sell your product, but it’s not really easy to achieve that. If you want your product-oriented landing page to be a success, take a look at Infusionsoft and Vivino for an inspiration.

4.1 Infusionsoft

Knowing what customers pay attention to when looking at products, Infusionsoft used an effective color like purple to place their product benefits to immediately catch your attention. Below the section with only four fields, they’ve placed their key features and customer testimonials. This landing page has everything you need to make your purchase decision — easy access, informative product demo one click away, key features and previous customer experiences.

4.2 Vivino

You don’t need to have a B2B product to create an excellent product-oriented landing page. Vivino used simple elements to get you to download their mobile app for wine lovers. Coloring the buttons in red makes you automatically think of wines. This concise and simple headline lets you know what the app is about. The three steps below reveal that the app is also very simple to use but highly beneficial to its users.

5. Free trial landing pages: Slack

If you use Slack, you know they love their colors. By using their signature colors in the image on this landing page, they instantly captivate your attention. They’ve decided to tell their visitors what Slack is through an image. And they did it great! On the left side, they’ve provided the heading with a brief introduction of what the app provides to its users. With a color-matched button, the visitors are invited to try the app for free.

6. Mobile-friendly landing pages: Industrial Strength Marketing

Keep in mind that the majority of your landing page views will be coming from mobile devices. That’s why it’s vital that your page is mobile-friendly. Neglecting the importance of responsive design will harm your business. Industrial Strength Marketing created a terrific mobile-friendly landing page with a punchy headline. If that’s not enough to capture your attention, the simplicity of their page directly invites you to download the guide so you don’t have to waste time on reading unnecessary long text.

7. Webinar landing pages: Autopilot

You’re preparing a webinar and not sure how to promote so it gets the attention it deserves? Create a landing page! Autopilot decided to organize a case study webinar to share their experience and they’ve built a standalone page for it. Notice how that orange button has personalized text which is the best call-to-action button text we’ve seen so far. Autopilot also listed the presenters and benefits of attending their webinar. It’s almost impossible to say no to such an inviting landing page.

8. Pricing landing pages: HostGator

If you provide services to your customer, a pricing landing page should definitely be one you need to create. Take a look at HostGator to see how pricing models can be presented in a creative way. With lots of elements, they’ve decided to play a little bit while still providing all the information about their pricing plans. They’ve even decided to highlight their Business Plan as their best option and gave the rest of the plans really cute names — Hatchling and Baby.

9. Upgrade landing pages: Codeacademy

Creating a landing page for your existing customers will require a different form of messaging. If you know your customers very well, you will be able to get them to upgrade. Codeacademy chose a simple, clear design to invite their customers to make the most of the product features. With these colorful elements, they’ve managed to bring creativity while keeping the focus on simplicity to highlight how their product is very easy to use.

10. Simple landing pages

Landing pages that achieve the best results are usually the simple ones. They are easy to understand and visitors and not confused and wandering hopelessly to find any useful information. Keeping your landing page simple helps you convert your visitors faster and more efficiently.

10.1 Squarespace

Simplicity is what Squarespace had in mind when they’ve created this landing page. The headline asks you to act immediately and claim your domain below. If you want to learn more about Squarespace, you have the anchor text ‘Learn more’. However, these simple pages mostly work with simple products and companies that can explain their entire business in just a few words. Before creating it, make sure you are communicating all your key messages with it.

10.2 Wix

Another example of a simple landing page is this one by Wix. By turning a single photo into a website, Wix explained their business in a very clever way. The copy of the page is structured in just a few words which tell you what to do to get to your free landing page. The most interesting thing about it is that visitors don’t need to provide any information to get started. Minimalism was the key to success in this example.

11. Multiple CTA buttons landing page: TransferWise

Contrary to simple landing pages, the ones with multiple call-to-actions have a few challenges of their own. However, TransferWise managed to create a landing page with several buttons, options and different pieces of information without confusing their visitors. Each section provides useful information in one place, from security concerns to currency calculator and send or receive option. The two call-to-action buttons are communicated through powerful, vibrant colors so you can easily proceed to your next step without wasting your time on other elements.

If you can add a video to your landing page, why not add a GIF as well? GIFs are highly engaging and, if placed right, can convert your prospects into leads easily. Landbot is a company that creates chatbot-based landing pages and they showed us how to do it! Adding the emojis and this funny GIF will capture the attention of every viewer that lands on this page. Not to mention that people enjoy sharing GIFs with their friends, so your hilarious, animated landing page might even go viral.

12. Problem-solving landing pages: Plated

Realising the common problem your target audience faces is one way to to get their attention, but providing them with a solution is another thing. Plated decided to provide a solution for their customers who have to cancel their food delivery each time their plans change. They provided three options to let their viewers know they thought of everything. Each issue you might face, Plates will take care of it. The elements in the image are also perfectly aligned with the text in the middle. To spice it up a bit, they’ve added their brand color, orange, and painted the ‘Sign Up’ button green so it immediately draws your attention.

13. Personalization in landing pages: Airbnb

Your customers want personalization in every aspect of your business, so there is no reason for not including it into your landing pages as well. To convert their visitors into hosts, Airbnb created a landing page where visitors can calculate their weekly average earnings based on their location. Even though the result is not precise, it gives a good idea on how much the potential hosts could actually earn. More importantly, it raises their interest as they land on the page and see a very interesting headline and just one button that invites them to become Airbnb hosts.

14. Interactive Landing Pages: Unbounce

There are plenty of companies that offer interaction on their website in the form of chat but not so many landing pages. Unbounce, a popular landing page platform, decided to integrate a chat window instead of a usual form on their landing page. This level of interaction resulted in big success as their target audience loves interactive features because it allows them to communicate directly with the company. Also, they’ve provided detailed information below the chat window, so visitors can have all the information they need even without the interaction.

Conclusion

When it comes to creating something as landing pages, it’s crucial to follow the trends but, more importantly, check the successful examples for inspiration. There is no doubt whether a landing page will bring benefits to your business or not. The only thing you should be focused on is how to provide your prospects with a landing page they will not be able to resist.