Build, Publish & A/B Test Landing Pages Without IT
A collection of interesting landing pages you can use for design and layout inspiration. Each post includes a discussion of the elements that make up the anatomy of a landing page.
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We'll be featuring some pages created by Unbounce users (always with permission). If you'd like to submit your own landing page for inclusion - send an email to oli@unbounce.com.
In this post Carlos and myself (Oli) are going to analyze one of our customers – Vinoetic.com – landing pages (after they opted to allow us to get our opinionated hands on it). Our goal is for it to be an educational exercise that can hopefully help improve the page, but let’s have a little fun too, shall we? We’ll be scoring each point in our discussion with + or – points to arrive at a total score and we’ll be arguing on certain points to show that everyone has a different opinion – which shows the importance of testing.
Warning for the creator of the page: There are going to be some criticisms, but our goal is for this to be useful to you so that you can have a more successful campaign in the future.
Let the battle commence!
Oli: Provides a sense that this product or service can help you to grow your business. #ValuePropositionWin
Score: +1
Carlos: That is clear and to the point. It speaks to a real problem that I might have.
(Oli: What’s your problem?)
(Carlos: my problem is that I keep drinking wine and waking up covered in corks)
Score: +1
Oli: The form area and button don’t explain what you are going to get for “joining”. There are also too many other competing links on the page which provide distraction from the main goal.
Score: -1
Carlos: What do I get for joining? Do I have to pay? I’ve only been here a few seconds, and I don’t know what is happening.
Score: -1
Oli: It’s not immediately apparent who this page is for. Until you click the drop down menu, you don’t know that it’s applicable to 4 different types of business. It would be better to see a block of information for each type so that they are able to immediately recognize that they are in the right place (maintaining information scent) with a short explanation of how the service benefits them. Each could then have it’s own lightbox “learn more” to give them the information they need without transitioning to another page.
Score: -1
Carlos: If I was your customer which would best describe me:
A winemaker.
A wine distributor.
An alcoholic with obsessive-compulsive issues and a bitchin’ catalog system.Score: -1
Oli: The background immediately sets the scene, letting you know that it’s a page about wine.
Score: +1
Carlos: Your background is beautiful, but it is distracting and causes some disembodied elements (it’s really hard to see the navigational arrows on either side that lead to the other pages – especially on page 1) and eats your logo (Cookie monster). This a wash for me.
Score: 0
Carlos: Visually the most important thing to me is the sign-in button, but I haven’t signed up yet so I am lost as to why it’s there. There are also some floating arrows and little boxes at the bottom and a pricing page. I’m going to go have a glass of Pinotage to build up some liquid courage before tackling the rest of this site.
(Oli: Pinotage? Never heard of it, it can’t be good)
(Carlos: it’s a South African red)
Score: -1
Oli: You must be drunk already, the sign-in button seems fairly innocuous to me. The headline and sub-header do an adequate job of describing what the page is about – but I do agree that the *purpose* is a little confusing. Is it a lead capture page, or a full-on website. We’ll get more into that in #10 below.
Score: 0
Oli: There are 3 benefits listed, but none of them explain how your particular product/service is unique and will address the problem. Given that it’s a software service, I’d like to know how it will benefit me. e.g. “Gain insight into your customers… with x feature that does a,b,c).
Score: -1
Carlos: How do you enhance my traditional sales model? My current model is yelling “Hey, you! Buy my wine!” whenever I see someone new? I guess that could use some help (Extra explanation of how you enhance it).
Score: -1
Oli: This is where your CTA comes into play. It should be made crystal clear what will happen when the button is clicked. (That you will be added to a beta list, that you will receive further details about the product).
Score: -1
Carlos: You need to say that this is free and that I am signing up for a beta list.
Score: -1
Oli: I like that the learn more buttons (on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th pages) open up in lightboxes to keep the visitor on the page. Note: this has changed in the latest version. However, they are full pages in their own right and should be distilled into smaller chucks of useful and easily/quickly readable information.
Score: 0
Carlos: I didn’t get this far during my review.
(Oli: cos you were hammered on cheap South African wine?)
(Carlos: Quiet you!!)
Score: 0
Oli: Lead gen pages, where you’re asking for personal information, should include a privacy policy or statement. This should typically be positioned close to the email or the form button to add a sense of legitimacy and trust. Especially if you are doing paid advertising (e.g. Google AdWords) – not having a privacy policy can risk you being flagged or banned.
Score: -1
Carlos: You have a privacy statement, but it says “Legal,” that is okay, but it’s too far away – it should be right next to the CTA button.
Score: 0
Oli: The 4 pages don’t seem to be cohesively aligned with the different target audience types (see personas above). Neither has a strong headline that indicates the purpose of the page.
Score: -1
Carlos: Plus 1,000,000,000 points for building a microsite with us! Unfortunately, the internal pages seem disjointed and don’t further the conversion process – so I’ll have to take most of your points away.
Score: +1
Oli’s Final Score: -4 I guess I’m more of a hardass.
Carlos’ Final Score: -3
Sorry! We do genuinely hope that the discussion helps you and others when thinking about your landing pages.
Btw. If any readers think we missed something – it would be awesome if you added it to the comments.
Usually we celebrate the awesomeness of landing page design. But today we’re taking a stroll down scary street to look at some examples of how it shouldn’t be done. I apologize in advance if anyone takes offense – but really, your pages scared me!
Note: The majority of these pages were found by clicking on paid search ads, and most of them should really be using standalone landing pages specific to the promotion, rather than a homepage. I’ll give a couple of quick comments on each below the images. Yikers!! I’ll try not to be mean, but it’s scary out there.
If you do find yourself getting frightened, you can see some good examples of landing pages here.
Read More …
This post is all about showcasing awesome landing pages, to give you some inspiration for your next design. It’s worth stating that no page is ever perfect – or conversely, every page can be better. With this in mind, we’ll be offering perspective on what makes each page special or interesting, while providing some insight into what we would try out in an A/B test experiment to optimize for higher conversions.
Read More …
A lot of articles entitled “20 best this…” or “50 greatest that…” have a lot in common. The main thing being that they’re all about what works.
So here’s what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to give you 20 landing pages that work – although some do – or 20 pages that don’t work – even though some of them do indeed ‘suck.’ No, I’m going to give you a mix of the good, the bad and the in between.
Because sometimes it’s just as important to know what not do, as what to do.
Read More …
Back in the 1990′s we thought having an animated gif on our web page was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but nowadays using an animated gif is considered a huge FAIL. However, by using video on our websites we are able to still capture the “wowness” of an animated gif with much better bottom line results.
Now that video production is affordable to all business sizes, we’re beginning to see companies use video on landing pages and not just their homepages.
Spinning off of Oli’s Your Landing Page Sucks! Here are 10 Examples That Don’t… I wanted to take a look at some great landing pages that incorporate video. Great landing pages explain exactly what you do in a brief amount of time, and video is a great asset for accomplishing such a task.
Here are 10 examples of pages that are crushing it with video.
Read More …
Your landing pages should be this awesome! (Image source)
Fact: in the world of landing pages, there are far more misses than hits. If you’re skeptical of that statement, do some quick research by clicking on some paid search or display ads.
Here’s what you’ll find: over-the-top cheesy stock photos that evoke strange emotions, sketchy testimonials from seemingly non-existent customers, blast-from-the-past color combos with too much orange, green, bright blue and flashing red (think of a 1990s music video), displaced enthusiasm and more information than the user could possibly digest. Hopefully, you’ll be able to reopen your browser after the surprise audio feature crashes it.
When you finally do find a stellar landing page, you may want to jump out of your seat and high-five it. It will be conversion-centric, trust-inspiring, energetic and straightforward all at once.
There is no recipe for the perfect landing page design, but your favorites may look a bit like these:
Read More …
You may not think of a “Coming Soon” landing page as much of a target for improving conversion rates. Wrong. Just a year ago, startups like Hipster gained 10,000 subscribers virtually overnight without ever revealing their purpose. Brilliant foodie and social app Forkly had to put in a few late nights to create a viral invitation and social sharing form after a TechCrunch article highlighted their up-and-coming product.
Since then, startups have hopefully learned the lesson that they, too, can unexpectedly be thrust into the spotlight – and it’s best to be prepared. Now the question is – are you?
Here are five ways you can not only help spread the word about your launch, but reel in the kinds of customers you want to reach.
Read More …
Don’t take that too personally, I’ve not actually seen your landing page yet. Rather, I’m going to cling to the assumption that it sucks simply because most of them do. Sad, but horribly true.
Note: I’m bringing this post back from the archives. A) because it’s timeless, B) because it’s awesome and C) as a teaser to an upcoming landing page examples post.
A real-world style landing experience
Imagine walking into a restaurant, and finding that the decor is gross, the music is too loud, the staff look sketchy, the menu has 400 options on it, they have an award on the wall for “Best meatloaf in Idaho, 1995″ and to top it all off, the place is empty. What would you do? I know I’d be getting the hell out of Dodge.
And online…
And that’s exactly what your visitors do when your design sucks, you have a video auto-playing with no mute button, there are no indicators of trust or security, the form has a million fields and the testimonials look like you wrote them yourself.
Excuse me waiter, could I just get the back button please?
Soooooooo, today we’re going to take a trip down to the Top-Notch Landing Page Store and see if we can rustle up something to inspire your next design.
Each of the following pages exhibits excellent qualities of conversion centered design, but most of them also do a couple of things wrong.
I’ll admit it right off the bat – I have a crush on Webtrends landing pages. If you’re looking anywhere for design inspiration for lead capture forms, this is a good place to start.
After my last landing pages examples post (Your Landing Page Sucks – Here are 10 That Don’t), people asked for some examples from smaller companies. At Unbounce there is a giant pile of cool small-to-medium sized businesses that are creating landing pages every day, so I trawled through the community and asked some people to share their work.
Below, you’ll find 22 examples of landing pages that cover classic lead capture, product pre-launch/beta pages, ecommerce “buy now” or click-through pages and even a few microsites – and I’m stoked to say that they were all built using the Unbounce landing page platform. As usual, I’ve given them a mini critique to explain why I like them, and a couple of ideas they could use to optimize and test their pages for higher conversions.
Let us know what you think – provide your own critique in the comments
Because many of these companies are either new or small, I think it would be great if the community could dig in and provide their own critiques in the comments at the bottom. Conversion specialists, designers, usability, copywriters and marketers – perhaps you can make a name for yourself by lending a hand?!?!?
Note: If you do comment, include the # of the page you are critiquing for easy reference.
My goal here is to provide suggestions that might help others to solve similar issues on their pages. But more than anything, I wanted to show some of the diversity that’s being created in online marketing.
They’re not perfect (what page is), but they all show something interesting and worthy of discussion (hint hint – comments please!).
See if you can spot any trends…
Landing page design is easier when you have some inspiration, so I dug out some of the cool pages our customers have been building in Unbounce. Would love to hear your thoughts about the pages in the comments section.
Enjoy…
Type of landing page: Click Through
Website: Loop 11
Built using Unbounce?:Yes
It has a Zebra crossed with a Rhino! How can you not like that?
Download our free white papers and reports for some bedtime conversion optimization reading.
Read our opinionated guide to landing page conversion.
Using Twitter to enhance, promote and measure your landing page campaigns.
