Building A High Converting Landing Page For Your Startup

Building A High Converting Landing Page For Your Startup

Landing pages can be an extremely effective way to generate leads.

They also seem to be underutilized in the startup world, which means that using them might give you a competitive advantage.

That’s why today we are going to discuss how to build a high-converting landing page for your startup!

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a web page designed for a specific conversion goal.

This differentiates landing pages from other types of web pages that don’t have one clearly defined conversion goal such as homepages, “About” pages, etc.

Typically, that conversion goal is converting visitors into leads by persuading them to provide their contact details, usually their email addresses.

Consequently, landing pages serve as lead generation funnels, which is the first stage – the Bait Stage – of the Value Ladder sales funnel. More on that later.

However, you can use landing pages for any conversion goal, it doesn’t have to be lead generation.

Say, you can use them to get people to follow you on social media, share a specific piece of content, answer survey questions, etc.

Also, in theory, sales pages are landing pages because they are designed for the specific conversion goal of converting visitors into paying customers.

However, in practice, when people use the term “landing page”, they are typically referring to lead generation landing pages – that’s why in this article we are going to focus exclusively on them.

Traditional vs. Modern Landing Pages

Traditional landing pages are landing pages that have no clickable elements except for the call-to-action buttons.

This means that there’s no navigation bar, no links to blog articles, no links to social media profiles, nothing.

When the visitor arrives on such a landing page, they only have two options:

  1. Click the call-to-action button.
  2. Leave the page by either clicking the “Back” button in their browser or closing the window.

Landing pages like that tend to have the highest conversion rates due to this single focus on the conversion goal.

However, this strict approach doesn’t always make sense, which is why a more lax approach to landing pages is becoming increasingly popular.

These modern landing pages are still designed with a specific conversion goal in mind but they feature more clickable elements than traditional landing pages.

Say, a modern landing page might feature a navigation bar, so if the visitor wants to leave the page, they can do so not only by clicking the “Back” button or closing the window but also by clicking one of the links in the navigation bar.

Landing pages like that tend to have lower conversion rates than traditional landing pages because those additional clickable elements serve as distractions. So why do entrepreneurs use them?

Because this approach allows you to have landing pages on your website.

You can use landing pages as your:

  • Homepage.
  • “About” page.
  • Pricing page.

…etc.

That way, you can increase the conversion rates of these pages while also providing your website visitors with the user experience that they expect.

This is important because of Jakob’s law:

“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

Completely removing site elements that users expect, such as the navigation bar, might backfire!

Does Your Startup Need a Landing Page?

Does Your Startup Need a Landing Page?

Okay, now you understand what landing pages are, but does your startup need one?

Landing pages are arguably the most effective way to generate leads online.

This means that using landing pages can help you to:

  • Generate more leads.
  • Improve lead quality.
  • Decrease your cost-per-lead (CPL).
  • Decrease your customer acquisition cost (CAC).
  • Improve your profit margins.

Moreover, as we pointed out in the introduction, landing pages seem to be underutilized in the startup scene, which means that using them might also give you a competitive advantage.

How To Build a High-Converting Landing Page

How To Build a High-Converting Landing Page

So how can you build a landing page that converts?

Design Your Sales Funnel First

Landing pages don’t exist in isolation – they should always be viewed in the context of your sales funnel.

That’s why we recommend designing your sales funnel before you start creating landing pages for your startup.

But there are several popular sales funnel models out there. So which one should you use?

We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.

It was created by our co-founder Russel Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).

This sales funnel has four stages:

  • Bait. You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address. This is your landing page!
  • Frontend. You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
  • Middle. You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
  • Backend. You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross-sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.

Design Your Sales Funnel First

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

  1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value.
  2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email.
  3. Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage.

Here’s how Russel explains it:

Now what would the Value Ladder sales funnel of a startup look like?

Here at ClickFunnels, we have a bunch of sales funnels that vary in terms of the lead magnets and some of the paid offers but ultimately are designed to sell our software.

Russel has written three books on growing online businesses that we now use as physical “FREE + Shipping” lead magnets:

Here’s our “Dotcom Secrets” Value Ladder sales funnel:

Here’s our “Dotcom Secrets” Value Ladder sales funnel

We were using this approach right from the start when we launched back in 2014.

That’s what allowed us to grow as fast as we did, dominate the funnel builder market, and eventually reach $100M+ in annual revenue.

You would think that the software industry would have caught onto this by now but nearly a decade later there are still very few software companies that have proper Value Ladder sales funnels.

This means that building a Value Ladder sales funnel for your startup might help you dominate your niche!

Use a Proven Landing Page Template

We don’t recommend creating your landing page from scratch if you have no previous experience designing landing pages. Why?

Because there are established landing page design best practices that you should follow if you want to maximize your conversion rate.

And the easiest way to ensure that your landing page is compliant with these best practices is to use a high-converting landing page template.

For example, our software, ClickFunnels 2.0, includes a template library with landing page templates for pretty much every use case imaginable.

So why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can simply do what’s been proven to work for businesses just like yours?

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Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses.

It can be anything that they can either download to their device or access online:

  • A report.
  • An ebook.
  • A video course.
  • An email course.
  • A webinar.

…etc.

Alternatively, you can use a physical “FREE + shipping” lead magnet where you offer the potential customer a physical item such as a print book for free but ask them to cover the shipping.

What’s important is that your lead magnet:

  1. Offers a solution to a problem that the potential customer is struggling with.
  2. Sets the stage for the upcoming sales pitch for your frontend offer.

Keep in mind that people won’t give you their email addresses unless you offer them something super valuable in return!

An approach that tends to work well for software startups is to provide information for free, then pitch your app that allows people to put what they learned into practice.

In our case, we have a bunch of lead magnets where we teach people how to grow their businesses with sales funnels, which we follow up with a pitch for our funnel builder software.

Make Sure That Your Landing Page Headline Conveys the #1 Benefit of Your Free Offer

One of the most important copywriting principles that you need to understand if you want to write copy that converts is the distinction between features and benefits:

  • A feature is a function or a quality of a product (e.g. “These shoes are waterproof!”).
  • A benefit is the value that the customer will derive from that product (e.g. “These shoes will keep your feet dry!”).

People buy based on benefits, not features – as the old copywriter saying goes, “Features tell, benefits sell”.

In the context of lead generation, this means that if you want to persuade potential customers to give you their contact details in exchange for your lead magnet, you need to emphasize the benefits of that lead magnet.

This is especially true when it comes to your landing page headline because the headline is your one and only opportunity to grab the potential customer’s attention before they get distracted by something else and leave.

So what is the #1 benefit of your lead magnet? How will it make the potential customer’s life better? Emphasize that in your landing page headline.

Focus on the Benefits of Your Free Offer on Your Landing Page Copy

In the body copy of your landing page, you should:

  1. Reiterate the #1 benefit that you have mentioned in the headline.
  2. Introduce additional benefits.

We don’t recommend mentioning the features of your free offer beyond what’s absolutely necessary.

One exception to this is if doing that would help you increase the perceived value of your lead magnet.

Say, if your lead magnet is an ebook, there’s probably no need to mention the number of pages.

But if that ebook is a full-length book, then mentioning the number of pages might make sense because it would make it seem more valuable.

Pique Curiosity With Your Landing Page Headline

One of the most common landing page mistakes that we see is giving everything away in the headline.

If you provide too much information about your lead magnet in the headline, the potential customer might feel like they already know what you are going to say and therefore pass on your free offer.

Here’s how Russel explains it:

We recommend this approach:

  1. Focus on the #1 benefit of your free offer in your landing page headline.
  2. Don’t reveal the exact method you will be teaching that will help the potential customer get that benefit.

Say, if you have a productivity app that can help people increase their productivity with the Pomodoro technique, focus on the benefit of increasing productivity but don’t mention the Pomodoro technique itself.

That way, you make it clear to the potential customer what’s in it for them, but don’t give everything away which makes them curious to learn more.

Use Relevant Images to Support Your Landing Page Copy

Persuasion isn’t about logic, it’s about emotion. So what emotions do you want to invoke with your landing page copy? We recommend using not just words but also images to do that.

What does the potential customer really want and what imagery can help establish an association between that and your lead magnet?

Display Social Proof on Your Landing Page

Social proof is a psychological principle that says that whenever people are unsure of what to do, they look at what others do in order to determine the best course of action.

In the business context, this means that whenever potential customers are unsure of whether to trust you, they will seek indications that other people trust you.

You can take advantage of this by providing social proof yourself.

There are two types of social proof:

  1. Direct social proof that relates to the offer in question. Can you get testimonials from people who have benefited from your lead magnet?
  2. Indirect social proof that relates to you as an individual if you have a personal brand or to your company if you have a company brand. That can mean relevant credentials, accomplishments, awards, media mentions, numbers, etc.

We recommend displaying both types of social proof on your landing page if possible.

Optimize Your Landing Page With A/B Testing

Another common landing page mistake that we see quite often is spending way too much time creating your landing page because you want to make sure that everything is perfect before you show it to potential customers.

This is a huge waste of time because you can never know whether your landing page will resonate with your target audience until you start driving traffic to it.

That’s why we recommend creating your landing page as quickly as possible and then testing it with paid traffic.

Choose a social media platform that is favored by your target audience, set up a small daily budget, and start running ads on your landing page.

Once you have the baseline conversion rate data, you can start optimizing your landing page with A/B testing, also known as split testing:

  1. Create two variants of your landing page: variant A and variant B. There should only be one difference between them – say the headline. That’s the element that you are testing.
  2. Split your traffic in two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B.
  3. Let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, then look at the data and keep the winning variant.

In all likelihood, the vast majority of A/B tests won’t produce meaningful results and when you do see increases in the conversion rate, those increases will probably be small. Big wins tend to be rare.

However, those minor conversion rate increases add up over time, so if you continue A/B testing your landing page, it might eventually have a significant impact on your bottom line.

But What if Your Landing Page Isn’t Converting?

Okay, so you have implemented all the advice in this article, but your landing page isn’t converting. What now?

As we have already discussed, landing pages don’t exist in isolation, they are an essential component of your sales funnel and should always be viewed in that context.

This means that when your landing page isn’t converting, you need to take a closer look at these three factors:

  1. The offer. It might be that your lead magnet simply isn’t valuable enough and therefore doesn’t resonate with your target audience. In that case, it’s best to ditch it, go back to the drawing board, and come up with a better free offer.
  2. The landing page. It might be that your free offer is valuable enough but your landing page design, copy, or both are suboptimal and don’t convey its value. In that case, you should use A/B testing to figure out the best approach.
  3. The traffic. It might be that your free offer is valuable enough and that your landing page conveys its value well but the traffic you are driving to it is low-quality. Are you sure that the people you are sending to your landing page are your dream customers? In that case, you should improve your ad targeting, assuming that you are using paid ads to drive traffic.

We recommend examining these potential issues in reverse order – look at the traffic first, then at your landing page, and then at your free offer.

Build Landing Pages That CONVERT With ClickFunnels 2.0!

ClickFunnels 2.0 has everything you need to create landing pages that convert:

  • Proven landing page templates.
  • Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
  • A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your landing pages.

What’s best is that we have a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk.

So why not start building your landing page today?

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