Building A Successful Landing Page – 10 Requirements

Last updated on February 17th, 2025 at 02:32 am

Landing pages are a type of web page that converts the best.

However, that’s just the general rule, it doesn’t mean that all landing pages convert well.

In fact, landing page conversion rates can vary drastically depending on a whole host of factors.

So how can you create high-converting landing pages for your business?

Here are the ten requirements for building a successful landing page…

Table of Contents:

#1: Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet

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

There are two types of lead magnets:

Digital lead magnets
Physical lead magnets

Digital lead magnets can be anything that the potential customer can either download to their device or access online:

A report
An eBook
A video course
An email course
A webinar

…etc.

For Example:

Here are some of our digital lead magnets:

Meanwhile, physical lead magnets, also known as “FREE + Shipping” lead magnets, are physical products that you give away for free but ask the potential customer to cover the shipping costs.

For Example

Our co-founder Russell Brunson has written three best-selling books about online marketing that are collectively known as The Secrets Trilogy.

All three books are available on Amazon but you can also get them from us for free provided that you pay for shipping:

We recommend starting with “DotCom Secrets”!

Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet

Get “DotCom Secrets” for FREE!

If you have never built a lead generation funnel before, we recommend starting with a digital lead magnet because it’s the safer bet from a financial perspective.

Regardless of whether you decide to go with a digital lead magnet or a physical one, it’s important to make sure that:

Your lead magnet offers an effective solution to a problem that the potential customer is struggling with.
That problem is either the same one or related to the one that your frontend offer addresses.

Keep in mind that your lead magnet is arguably the single most important factor that determines the conversion rate of your landing page.

If you have an amazing lead magnet that your dream customers desperately want, you can get away with a mediocre landing page, though of course, we don’t recommend that.

But if you have a low-quality lead magnet that no one wants, you can have the best landing page on the planet and it still won’t convert well.

That’s why you need to make sure that you have a super valuable lead magnet before you start worrying about your landing page!

#2: Use a Proven, High-Converting Landing Page Template

Okay, so you have your lead magnet, now what?

We don’t recommend building your landing page from scratch if you don’t have any previous experience designing landing pages. Why?

Because online marketers have been relentlessly optimizing landing pages for more than two decades now.

At this point, we know what works and what doesn’t, or, to be more precise, we know what’s most likely to work.

This means that if you want to create a successful landing page, your best bet is to follow the established landing page design best practices.

And the easiest way to ensure that your landing page complies with those best practices is to use a proven, high-converting landing page template.

Our software, ClickFunnels, includes a template library that features landing page templates for all of the most common use cases.

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

Start Your Free Trial

#3: Make Sure that the Headline Conveys the Value of Your Free Offer

Now it’s time to start writing landing page copy.

The most important copy element of any landing page is its headline because that is your one opportunity to get the attention of the potential customer.

If you succeed, they will feel inclined to read the rest of your landing page copy, but if you fail, they will leave immediately and won’t come back.

There are several approaches to writing compelling headlines. We recommend starting with the most straightforward one – focus on the value of your free offer.

How will it make the potential customer’s life better?

Emphasize that in your headline!

#4: Have a Subheadline that Provides More Information About Your Free Offer

While the purpose of the headline is to grab the potential customer’s attention, the purpose of the subheadline is to provide more information about your free offer.

This combination of a headline followed by a subheadline is a one-two punch because someone who has read the former will almost certainly lead the latter.

That gives you the opportunity to convey the value of your free offer and the most important information about it in just a few seconds.

A great example of this is Nick Stephenson’s “$0 to $1k Per Month” landing page.

See how the headline and the subheadline immediately make it clear what this free offer is all about?

Have a Subheadline That Provides More Information About Your Free Offer

#5: Focus on the Benefits of Your Free Offer in Your Landing Page Copy

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

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

People make purchase decisions based on benefits – hence the old copywriter saying “Features tell, benefits sell!”.

Your lead magnet may be free but you still need to “sell” it to the potential customer. Why should they give you their email address in exchange for it?

The best way to do that is to emphasize its benefits in your landing page copy. Reiterate the main benefit that you led within your headline. Then, if you have enough space for that, introduce the secondary benefits.

Once again:

How will your free offer make the potential customer’s life better?

Emphasize that!

#6: Use Offer-Specific Call-to-Action Button Copy

This is just a quick tip but it can nevertheless have a positive impact on your conversion rate:

Use offer-specific call-to-action button copy that reiterates that this is a FREE offer (e.g., “Get Your FREE Ebook Now!”) instead of generic copy that could be used for anything and everything (e.g., “Download” or “Subscribe”).

Social proof is a psychological principle that says that whenever people are unsure of what to do, they feel inclined to 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 feel inclined to seek out indications that other people trust you.

You can take advantage of this by providing those indications – also called “social proof” – yourself.

There are two types of social proof:

Direct social proof that relates to the offer in question – This typically means testimonials.
Indirect social proof that relates to you or to your business – This can mean education, credentials, accomplishments, previous clients, media mentions, etc.

You want to display as much social proof as you can on your landing page, provided that it doesn’t distract the potential customer from your free offer.

Also, if you don’t have any social proof to speak of yet, we highly advise getting out there and obtaining it because it will almost certainly help you improve your conversion rate!

#8: Support Your Landing Page Copy With Relevant Images

You have probably heard the saying “A picture is worth more than a thousand words”.

Well, that’s not the case when it comes to landing pages because, in that context, copywriting is more important than images. However, you can use images to support your landing page copy.

And the most straightforward way to do that is to use an aspirational background image that reminds the potential customer what they want to achieve.

#9: A/B Test Everything!

Everything that we have discussed in this article is just guidelines.

We can’t possibly know what exactly will work for your business, which is why you shouldn’t take our advice – or anyone’s advice – as gospel.

Use what you have learned to create the best landing page that you can, then start driving traffic to it and optimizing it with A/B testing.

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the primary method that online marketers use to optimize web pages, including landing pages.

Here’s how it works:

You create two variants of the same page: variant A and variant B. There should only be ONE difference between them (e.g. the call-to-action button color). That’s the element that you are testing!
You split your traffic in two and send half of it to variant A and the other half to variant B.
You let the test run until it reaches statistical significance, then evaluate the results and keep the winning variant.

Any app with a solid A/B testing functionality, including ClickFunnels, will do the mathematical heavy lifting for you.

That being said, we still recommend reading up on the statistics of A/B testing, as that can make you better at both designing A/B tests and interpreting their results.

Also, the vast majority of A/B tests won’t produce meaningful changes in the conversion rate, especially once you run out of the low-hanging fruit.

However, small conversion rate increases here and there will add up over time, plus you will probably occasionally stumble on big wins as well.

That’s why you should get into the habit of continuously A/B testing things.

It can have a huge impact on your bottom line in the long run!

#10: Drive High-Quality Traffic to Your Landing Page

You can have the best landing page ever that’s been optimized to perfection but if you drive low-quality traffic to it, it won’t convert well.

Traffic can be divided into two categories:

High-quality traffic aka people who are your dream customers and therefore likely to convert into leads and then into paying customers.
Low-quality traffic aka everyone else.

Your landing page traffic will always be a mix of the two, but you want to optimize your marketing strategy in a way that allows you to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

When you are just starting out, you don’t have any data, so you have to make your best guess as to who might be interested in your products and services, target them with your marketing, and see what happens.

However, once you start making sales, you can begin calibrating your approach based on sales data. Who is actually buying your products?

Figure out what existing customers have in common and use those common traits to improve your targeting.

Also, look at people who give you their email addresses, but then never buy anything from you.

Figure out what they have in common and use those common traits to exclude them from your marketing campaigns altogether. Why waste your limited budget on them?

Note that it’s important to look at the sales data, not just at the lead generation data.

After all, the goal here isn’t to collect a bunch of email addresses, it’s to get the contact details of your dream customers so that you could then sell them your products!

Build Landing Pages that CONVERT With ClickFunnels!

ClickFunnels 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!

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