An effective landing page can help you give the user a more relevant experience of your site and better targeted marketing. By getting your visitors to make selections or enter data, you can determine which content you should serve them next and further down the line. You may also infer how to target them with digital marketing.
In this article, we’ll talk about 5 examples of landing pages that use great design and strategy to gather information, boost conversions and funnel users to the right experience. Look out for the tactics that some of these ostensibly very different sites have in common.
Hootsuite
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most archetypal landing pages are often to be found on the sites of B2B marketing tool providers. Take this gem from Hootsuite for example.
There’s a lot to like about Hootsuite’s landing page. Look at that header: “Manage all your social media in one place”. It instantly tells the reader exactly what the webpage is about, which effectively hooks in relevant visitors, whilst dissuading those who were never likely to convert. The [H2] follows with more detail (“finding prospects”, “helps you do more”) that teases the product’s broader capabilities. The combination of a header emphasising the brand’s essential strategic position with a sub-header demonstrating depth of product can be highly effective.
Echoing CTAs
Take one glimpse at this landing page and you’ll quickly notice the CTA buttons in the header banner: “Start Your Free 30 Day Trial” and “Compare Plans”. These buttons are in themselves well executed. Which of the two do you think Hootsuite most wants you to click? If you’re anything like us, you’d probably say “the green one”. It stands out.
Conversion rate optimisation specialists think very deeply about the cultural and instinctive associations people make with the colours used in their CTA buttons, but you probably don’t have time to take things quite so far. What we would recommend instead is getting your dev team to set up A/B experiments to compare how different colour CTA buttons perform on your landing pages. Over time you’ll be able to see which colours glean the best click-through rate from your audience.
Now, returning to our Hootsuite landing page, some of you may have noticed that those CTAs don’t just appear once; in-fact, they are repeated towards the foot of the page.
The copy and destination URLs used are exactly the same as those used in the header CTAs, albeit with different styling. So why use the same CTAs twice on the same landing page?
The obvious answer is for the visitor’s ease-of-use. People who know they want to try the product or view Hootsuite’s rates can click one of the header CTAs straight off-the-bat, while those who want to read the landing page content first can do that first and then click one of the handily situated CTAs further down the page. The viewer can easily locate a button at both points in the process where they might be deemed most likely to convert.
The fact that different styling is used in these otherwise similar CTA buttons is important, as identical buttons used repeatedly on a page can create an off-puttingly spammy effect. Like an echoing sound, echoed CTA buttons should only appear natural when they return in an altered form.
As you might expect, social media landing pages are all about getting new members to sign up. LinkedIn clearly demonstrate as much here by placing a sign-up form smack-bang in the centre of their landing page.
There’s very little selling going on here – just two short lines of copy urging the visitor to “Get started – it’s free” and to “Be great at what you do”. These imperatives are designed to keep the reader’s thought process clear and proactive. Let’s get started, and don’t worry about hidden costs, because it’s free.
The cleverness of LinkedIn’s landing page lies in how simple it makes the registration process appear to the visitor. Just fill in four fields (first name, last name, email, password) and then hit that shiny, golden(!) “Join Now” button to become a member. As most of us are aware, there’s far more to creating a fit-for-purpose LinkedIn profile than entering these crumbs of info, but their landing page attracts high engagement by asking for only a little of this content at the crucial first stage of registration.
A sea of faces
We think it’s interesting that the designers of this landing page have opted to fill its background with a grid of headshots – presumably showing people who use LinkedIn. Whether the subjects are real members or not, they provide a sort of social proof. ‘We’re all on LinkedIn, join us!’ Uniformly smart and smiling, the models transmit the idea of success, which must surely be an important goal for anyone who considers signing up for a LinkedIn account.
Another clever aspect of the use of headshots on this landing page is that it highlights LinkedIn’s most valuable selling point: its network of users and the business opportunities they represent. LinkedIn users want to dive into a global network of new and established professional contacts – placing the registration form over a background representing these people tells the viewer that they need only complete the sign-up process to gain access to contacts and opportunities.
Spotify
This landing page from Spotify looks oddly familiar… the outfits may be less office-appropriate and the photos less naturalistic, but the music streaming service seems to have employed a very similar grid of faces to LinkedIn as their landing page background.
Spotify have used this method to promote a specific feature: their playlists. The wide range of musical styles represented in the image assures the viewer that they’ll be able to find music they like once they’ve created a Spotify account.
Placing the best deal front and centre
Spotify’s landing page places the brand’s eye-catching introductory offer – “3 months of Premium for £0.99” – in a highly prominent position, as the first slide on a header carousel that remains static until the user manually toggles left or right. The focus on this message is clear. Not much other information is visible to the user without scrolling down or navigating away, which lends added prominence to the “Learn more” CTA button beneath the header.
Leading with an attractive introductory offer makes sense in this landing page’s case, as a high proportion of already registered users will surely remain signed in between visits to the Spotify site, and many will use the app instead. This means the best offer is being relayed to the right people, and the chance of conversions is improved.
RightMove
We would venture that one of the golden rules of web design is: the clearer and simpler you can make the user’s experience, the likelier they are to convert.
This landing page from property portal RightMove is a sterling example of how to achieve this ideal – particularly the search box at the head of the page. Let’s break down its components:
- Header – “Find your happy”: highlights the positive outcome behind the at-times-challenging task of finding a property
- Sub-header – “Search properties for sale and to rent in the UK”: unambiguously spells out the purpose of the search tool. This sentence is also a smorgasbord of SEO keywords and keyword combinations like ‘search properties for sale’, ‘properties for sale’, properties for sale UK’, etc.
- Search box: example copy shows the visitor how to use the search tool
- For sale/To rent buttons: funnels the visitor by intent
After clicking either ‘For sale’ or ‘To rent’, the user will find themselves at a more detailed search options screen that urges them to enter specifics such as number of bedrooms, search radius and property type. Just like LinkedIn’s slimmed down registration box, the simplified start to RightMove’s search function is designed to draw visitors in with apparent ease-of-use, to increase engagement.
Even if the visitor does not continue with their search beyond the landing page, the website has already chalked up a big marketing win: it has received the visitor’s inputs on whether they’re looking to rent or buy, and on the area they are looking to move to. Used with a tracking cookie which the website automatically adds to the user’s browser, these details can now be used to deliver targeted online marketing such as display ads to the user.
AirBnb
Given AirBnb’s clean and simple brand, it’s perhaps a little surprising to discover their homepage is so content-rich. Scroll down past the search bar and header (doesn’t that just sound like two focus group soundbites glued together – “Book unique homes and experience a city like a local”?), and you’ll find rows of content items highlighting different aspects of AirBnb’s offering – featured homes, destination-specific guides, experiences and so on. Scrolling through these rows feels oddly akin to browsing for a show to watch on Netflix, and we think that’s precisely the point.
The landing page immerses the visitor in a sea of colourful content in varied forms – it keeps lazy-loading content until the user has scrolled past a considerable number of rows, which increases the chance of the user finding a content item they’d like to view. These clicks-through may lead to conversations or further browsing in the short term; and failing that, they provide AirBnb with a basis for targeted marketing. Just like Netflix, AirBnb attracts engagement by providing curated quality in kaleidoscopic variety.
Highlighting community activity
AirBnb’s vitality as a website and business is user-generated – so it comes as no surprise that this landing page repeatedly highlights community content and interactions, for example:
- Adding review tallies and star ratings under listings: trust is everything in online travel booking, and one thing AirBnb really has over more traditional competitors is its engaged and vociferous community of users. Review tallies and star ratings are included with all relevant listings on the landing page, lending prominence to this trust-boosting aspect of the AirBnb setup.
- Attaching names to packaged experiences: take a look at some of the experience categories on the AirBnb landing page and you’ll notice experience hosts’ names are included in many of the images. We could only speculate as to how much likelier someone is to book onto a winery tour because they know it’s organised by a guy called Juan, but one important thing this personalisation does achieve is reminding the viewer that the experiences offered are community-sourced.
- User-submitted guides: user-authored guides show off the vibrancy not only of certain AirBnb destinations, but also of the community members who live there. A wide range of themes and destinations are used to create a broad appeal.