Last updated on December 18th, 2025 at 03:28 pm
The best way to grow your email list is to drive traffic directly to a landing page that has an email sign up form.
But how can you create a landing page like that for your business?
That’s exactly what we are going to discuss today…
What is a Landing Page?
Okay, so before we get into our main subject, let’s make sure that we all agree on the definition of the term “landing page”:
A landing page is a web page that has one specific conversion goal.
In theory, that conversion goal can be anything, but in practice, the vast majority of landing pages fall into one of these two categories:
- Lead generation landing pages are designed to persuade the visitor to provide their contact details.
- Sales landing pages that are designed to persuade the visitor to buy a product or service.
Other possible conversion goals include persuading the visitor to share a particular piece of content on social media, leaving a customer review, completing a survey, etc. These conversion goals are extremely rare, though.
Also, while the term “landing page” is an umbrella term that includes all web pages that have a single conversion goal, online marketers typically use it to refer specifically to lead generation landing pages.
What is an Email Sign Up Landing Page?
The most popular type of lead generation landing pages is the email sign up landing page where you ask the visitor to provide either their name and email address or just their email address.
Typically, email sign up landing pages ask for the potential customer’s email address in exchange for a lead magnet, as that is the best approach to lead generation.
While offering a lead magnet isn’t strictly necessary, it will be much more difficult to persuade people to give you their email addresses without it.
Also, note that just because a web page features an email sign up form, doesn’t mean that it’s an email sign up landing page.
It’s common to display email sign up forms on the homepage, on the About page, under blog posts, etc. These are not landing pages, though!
Remember, a landing page is a web page that has a single conversion goal.
So when we are talking about email sign up landing pages, we are talking about standalone web pages designed for the sole purpose of obtaining the email addresses of your dream customers.
For Example:
Here’s one of our email sign up landing pages:
Get “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” for FREE!
See how there’s nothing on this page to distract the potential customer from clicking the call-to-action button and signing up for our email list?
That’s what we mean when we say that landing pages are web pages that have one specific conversion goal!
How to Create an Email Sign Up Landing Page
Okay, so with all that out of the way, here’s how to create an email sign up landing page for your business:
#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.
It can be anything that the potential customer can download to their device or access online:
- A report
- An eBook
- A case study
- A video class
- A video course
- An email course
- A webinar
…etc.
Your lead magnet should provide an effective solution to a problem that the potential customer is struggling with.
Ideally, that problem should either be the same one or related to the one that your frontend offer addresses.
However, you don’t need to have your sales funnel all figured out in order to start building your email list.
You can create an email sign up landing page with a lead magnet even if you don’t have anything to sell yet!
#2: Choose the Right Landing Page Software
No one codes landing pages from scratch anymore. Why?
Because that would be a complete waste of time considering that landing page software can generate a landing page for you in a matter of seconds.
But there are so many landing page builders on the market right now. How should you choose the right one for your business?
Here’s the core functionality that you need to create email sign up landing pages:
- A landing page template library
- A visual editor that allows you to customize those templates
- An email marketing functionality that allows you to collect email addresses, set up automated email sequences, and send one-off broadcast emails.
All landing page builders have a template library and a visual editor but not all of them include an email marketing functionality so you might need to pay for a separate email marketing app.
Beyond that, you should consider what functionality you need for your overall business workflow, then see if you can get at least some of it from the same software.
For Example:
ClickFunnels includes a library of high-converting sales funnel and landing page templates, a visual funnel builder, a visual page builder, an email marketing functionality, an e-commerce functionality, a membership site builder, an online course builder, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and more.
In other words, with our software, you get everything you need to build a successful online business!
#3: Use a Proven Landing Page Template
Some landing page builders allow you to design your landing page from scratch using a blank canvas mode in their visual editor. We don’t recommend doing that, though. 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.
That’s why it makes sense to follow established best practices instead of trying to come up with some innovative landing page design based on your aesthetic sensibilities.
And the best way to ensure that your landing pagie complies with those best practices is to use a proven landing page template.
ClickFunnels includes a template library that features high-converting 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?
#4: Have a Headline That Conveys the Value of Your Free Offer
Now let’s talk about landing page copy. How can you make it persuasive?
Here’s a famous quote attributed to David Ogilvy, one of the best copywriters that ever lived:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Ogilvy was a 20th-century man, so presumably, he was talking about newspaper and magazine print ads.
But it’s safe to assume that headlines are even more important today than they were back then.
After all, the Internet is an extremely distracting environment, so when a potential customer clicks through to your landing page, you only have a few seconds to grab their attention. And that’s the purpose of your headline!
There are several approaches to writing compelling headlines but the most straightforward one is emphasizing the main benefit of your free offer.
How will it make the potential customer’s life better?
Focus on that!
#5: Have a Subheadline That Provides More Information About Your Free Offer
While the purpose of a headline is to grab the potential customer’s attention, the purpose of a subheadline is to provide more information about the offer.
When executed well, this combination of a headline followed by a subheadline is extremely powerful. Why?
Because if you can get the potential customer to read the former, they will almost certainly automatically read the latter as well because that’s how human attention works.
This gives you an opportunity to convey the most important information about your free offer in a matter of seconds.
If you succeed at doing that and the visitor belongs to your target audience, they will probably feel inclined to continue reading in order to learn more.
One of the best examples that we have seen of this 1-2 punch approach is Nick Stephenson’s “$0 to $1k Per Month” landing page headline and subheadline:
If you are a writer who wants to make money as an author, this headline and subheadline will get your attention and pique your curiosity.
Also, note how the headline is aspirational but realistic. This is clever because this landing page is the Bait stage of Nick’s sales funnel.
This means that it’s not just about collecting email addresses, it’s also about gaining the potential customer’s trust so that he could then sell them his “Your First 10k Readers” course.
And the best way to build trust is to make a promise and then deliver on that promise.
If you go through the free “$0 to $1k Per Month” course, implement what you learned, and reach that $1,000/month milestone, you’ll probably be interested in the paid “Your First 10k Readers” course. Makes sense, right?
So avoid bombastic headlines. Only make promises that you can deliver on provided that the potential customer implements your advice.
#6: Reassure the Potential Customer With Social Proof
Social proof is a psychological principle that says that when 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 feel inclined to seek indications that other people trust you.
When online marketers talk about social proof, they are using this term to refer to those indications of trust.
You can use this feature of human psychology to your advantage by providing social proof yourself.
There are two types of social proof:
- Direct social proof that relates to the offer in question. Typically, this means testimonials.
- Indirect social proof that relates to you as an individual or to your company. This can mean mentioning relevant education, credentials, accomplishments, business data such as sales figures, previous customers, media features, etc.
Not all social proof is made equal, though – the more credible its source, the more impactful it will be.
For Example:
Nick Stephenson features several testimonials on his “$0 to $1k Per Month” email sign up landing page, including this testimonial from an NYT best-selling author Joanna Penn:
It’s unclear whether this is direct or indirect social proof because it’s unclear whether Joanna is referring to the free offer in question or to Nick’s paid “Your First 10k Readers” course.
But the testimonial itself is extremely powerful because:
- It comes from a real person with verifiable accomplishments that are relevant to the target audience.
- It comes from someone who has been studying marketing for years but nevertheless benefitted from Nick’s advice.
- It describes results in concrete terms using numbers.
If you are a writer who wants to make money as an author, this testimonial will immediately boost Nick’s credibility in your eyes.
Of course, if you are just starting out, you may not have such high-caliber social proof, but you should still implement the same principles when it comes to testimonials:
They should come from real people, describe the situation they were in, and then describe the results that they got in concrete terms.
Avoid testimonials that look fake even if they are real such as “This product is great!! Jane, USA” because displaying them would likely damage your credibility instead of boosting it.
Also, we really recommend going out there and obtaining as much social proof as you can, whether it’s credentials or media mentions or speaking gigs at conferences or whatever.
Even a little bit of social proof can do wonders for your conversion rate provided that it comes from credible sources!
#7: Support Your Landing Page Copy With Relevant Images
There are two main approaches to using images on landing pages:
Using Images to Evoke Emotions
The most common way to do this is to use aspirational images that remind the potential customer of what they want to achieve.
Say, Nick Stephenson uses a typewriter image on his “$0 to $1k Per Month” landing page.
Pretty much no one writes with typewriters anymore but they still have a symbolic meaning to writers, so when Nick’s dream customers see that image, it’s going to remind them of their dream of writing full-time.
And that will make them more receptive to Nick’s pitch for his free online course.
You can easily find beautiful photos that you can use as aspirational images on free stock photo websites such as Unsplash.
Using Images to Boost Credibility
You can do this by using photos of yourself if you have a strong personal brand.
Say, our co-founder Russell Brunson is the face of our company, a best-selling author and one of the most influential people in the digital marketing space.
This means that using his photos on our landing pages, like we do on “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” landing page, is helpful because it adds credibility to the copy.
Alternatively, if you don’t have a strong personal brand yet, you can use photos of yourself at industry events (e.g. speaking at a conference).
You can also use photos of yourself with well-known people (e.g. thought leaders in your niche) but you will need to get their permission first.
How to Optimize Your Email Sign Up Landing Page With A/B Testing
You can’t know whether a landing page will convert until you start driving traffic to it. Until then you are literally just guessing what might work.
That’s why we recommend creating your email sign up landing page as quickly as possible following the guidelines in this article and then driving traffic to it with paid ads.
Once you have gathered enough date to establish the baseline conversion rate, you can start optimizing your landing page with A/B testing, also known as split testing:
- Create two variants of your landing page: variant A and variant B. There should be only ONE difference between them (e.g. the headline). That’s the element that you are testing.
- Split your traffic in two and drive half of it to the variant A and the other half to the variant B.
- Let the experiment run until it reaches statistical significance, then evaluate the results and keep the winning variant.
Any software with an A/B testing functionality, such as ClickFunnels, will handle mathematical heavy lifting for you.
Still, you might want to read up on A/B testing statistics, as that can help you understand the underlying statistical principles, avoid common mistakes, and become better at both experiment design and interpreting data.
Note that the vast majority of A/B tests won’t produce meaningful results, especially once you run out of low-hanging fruit.
However, even tiny increases in the conversion rate add up over time and can have a significant impact on your bottom line, plus you will probably stumble upon an occasional big win.
That’s why you should get into a habit of continuously A/B testing all pages in your sales funnel, starting with your landing page.
It can help you 2x, 5x, or even 10x your profits!
What if Your Email Sign Up Landing Page Isn’t Converting?
Okay, but what if you implemented all the advice in this article and your landing page still isn’t converting?
Here are three potential problems:
- Your offer – It’s possible that your free offer simply isn’t valuable enough. In that case, you need to either improve your current offer or come up with something better.
- Your landing page – It’s possible that your free offer is valuable enough but your landing page isn’t conveying that value. In that case, you need to improve your landing page copy.
- Your traffic – It’s possible that your free offer is valuable enough and that your landing page is conveying that value but the people you are sending to it are not your dream customers so the offer doesn’t resonate with them.
In that case, you need to improve the targeting of your marketing campaigns, specifically your ad targeting if you are using paid advertising to drive traffic to your landing page.
We recommend troubleshooting these potential problems in the reverse order: first the traffic, then the landing page, then the offer.
You might have to ditch your lead magnet altogether and go back to the drawing board but that should be your last resort because producing a new lead magnet is a resource-intensive task.
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!