Landing creation: how to improve landing page design, while increasing conversion?

Landing - the sales engine? Far from always this is the case, it happens that the product is so hard to understand from the information on the landing page that sales are falling: the landing page repels potential customers. We continue to publish materials that may be useful to young businesses to increase conversion. From this Peep Laja article, supplemented by examples, you can learn how to add additional “not for everyone” information to the sales page without interfering with the mass visitor, and is it true that ugly landing pages sell better than pages with a good design. The article is written in the first person.

Do not leave the page

Sometimes you have additional information that may be useful only to part of the target audience. On regular sites, you can simply go to another page using the link, however, for landing pages consisting of one page, this solution is not suitable. What can be done with this?

Information drop-down boxes

In this example, a mini-site or landing page is used as a FAQ page. When you click on a question, the answer block expands. This design will allow you to make the page shorter, as well as make navigation for users much easier.


Putting information into a lightbox

You can “hide” information in a link that will not display on another page, but open a lightbox with information, as in this example:



Use a Sidecar block or something similar

Company Digital Telepathy has developed a tool, which has been called Sidecar . With its help, by clicking on the tab, you can call up a pop-up window with information hidden on the side of the page and hide it again.



Good design really matters.

Design is half the business of marketing and sales. Great design is designed to increase confidence and serve as a guide for the visitor to the site. Design must correctly place emphasis between the most important information and the secondary.

If your site looks terrible, the product will also be perceived poorly. Take a look at the example below. Is there really someone on the planet who sees this page and says “hmm, this is trustworthy”?


Show full version

Many people have a distorted idea of ​​design, believing that good design is flash movies and all sorts of other excesses.

If we talk about extremes, sometimes it results in this:


It’s worth looking at the full version and enjoying it to the full.

We don’t know what the conversion rates of this site are, but in any case a huge amount of animation does not make the design better, and very rarely promotes sales. Great design, optimized to increase conversion, designed to increase sales, and nothing more. And any component of the design that interferes with this should be improved or removed.

I saw blog entries that imposed the opinion that "ugly sites attract more people." And every time a “good” design was given for comparison, it was, to put it mildly, nothing.

Example from the forum: “I want to know the reason why ugly sites convert so many more buyers than“ professionally ”made-up ones. I tested this hypothesis on some of my products and realized that this is true. In one case, I filled the site with beautiful pictures, graphs, and in the other, I just laid out the cover of the e-book and the text, nothing more. In the second case, the conversion was just crazy! Why?".

The author of the topic did not give examples of pages for comparison, so some part of me believes that he came up with all this. “Professionally laid out”, “beautiful pictures”, “graphics” ... Perhaps we should be grateful that he did not post screenshots. I can only imagine a stupidly made site.

It seems that this is the real reason why some people think that sites with ugly designs attract more visitors: they probably think that a professionally designed site should be full of stock photos and leaflets. They just have no idea what a good design looks like.

So, let's take a look at some of the arguments in favor of the “ugly” and against the “good” design and try to challenge them.

• No. 1: “If your site looks as chic as the brand-new BMW, then users will assume that the product is like BMW” The

buyer understands the real cost of the product. If BMW were sold at the price of Suzuki, everyone would drive a BMW and be satisfied. Therefore, if your site looks like BMW, but the product costs like Isuzu, you and your client will only win. For example, iPad tablets sell best in the world. Have you ever seen their site (and price tag)?


• No. 2: “Believe me, no one likes advertising.”

Yes, customer confidence is extremely important, and a good design only strengthens it, and an ugly cheap design, on the contrary, kills confidence in a product. Identifying good design and product advertising is illogical and stupid.

• No. 3: “In order to make a readable and accessible website, technologies of two years ago are enough.”

To say that a cool design will make the site less convenient and readable is just ridiculous. Good design is always designed to be understandable and accessible to the audience, and this argument is for the lazy.

• No. 4: “The sites Google, Amazon, eBay, Craigslist are quite primitive and ugly.”

First of all, they are not ugly at all, but rather high-quality (with the exception of Craiglist , perhaps).
In addition, if you didn’t notice, then Google’s design has undergone a global redesign because they take this problem seriously. Amazon and eBay have also been redecorated.

Ebay - old interface:



Ebay - new interface:



Craigslist is a unique case (and exceptions only confirm the rule), and it was successful despite, not because of its design.



Try to create an unknown site of this type today, and we will see what you will achieve.

• No. 5: “Ugly sites are very simple”

This is not an argument. Why can't beautiful sites be simple? Look at Simple , Blossom , Customer.io, or Google’s minimalism. Now you can find an unimaginable number of simple, but from this no less beautiful sites.

An example is the Blossom landing page:



• No. 6: “The most important thing is content, design is just an addition”

Yes indeed. But the design is needed in order to visually support the content. The design facilitates the perception of content. On ugly sites, on the contrary, the design prevents the understanding of the text, distracts from the content.

• No. 7: “I tested the effectiveness of the ugly old design and the new improved - and the old version won!”

It is impossible to comment on this statement without an example of that new improved version. I think that in this case the improved version contains a leaflet, stock photos and flash players here and there. In this case, it is not surprising. Without examples, the arguments are meaningless.

• No. 8: “Look - the case”.

It happens that a poorly designed version does sell better. Why? Landing performance is directly related to a call to action at the right time in the right place. The “beautiful” version usually offers a minimum of text (including advertising), and then unexpectedly offers to pay. No wonder this doesn't work. The so-called “ugly” version usually sells the idea even before offering to pay for it, with a simple product description. In such cases, you just need to take the text and its structure from the "ugly" version and qualitatively improve its appearance, then the result will become better.

• No. 9: “But this ugly site is selling so well!”

I bet it will sell even better if you work on its design!

Any well-chosen ugly website that sells well, for example, does not turn this paradox into a rule that should be followed. Anyone who follows the logic “if this ugly site sells well, then I should create a similar one so that my sales go up” is incredibly mistaken. What about attractively designed sites that sell even better?

People make subjective judgments about everything they see. We meet a new person - and judge him by the way he looks. We are going to a new place, and our opinion about it is formed on the basis of the situation there. A friend buys a new car - we look at it and make the first conclusion based only on how it looks.

When people visit your site, they need about 50 milliseconds to create a lasting impression of it that will remain with visitors to your site even after you change the design.

These impressions have a big impact on conversion.

Conclusion

Most of the long selling pages are inefficient, but it’s not at all in their format, but in execution. Audience research, good advertising text and attractive design, if they go hand in hand, will help increase conversion. Relying on the subjective opinion that this ugly site sells well precisely because of its terrible appearance is pretty stupid.

Source: conversionxl.com/how-to-design-kickass-long-form-sales-pages/# .