Landing pages have a 160% higher conversion rate compared to other types of signup forms. Therefore, landing pages should be your favorite tool to boost conversions. Read on to find out how to build a high-converting landing page for your startup.
Why do startups need a landing page?
Many SaaS startups send traffic from advertising, email, or social media directly to their homepage. However, the homepage acts as the main entry point to a website and provides a comprehensive overview of the company. Therefore, the way we usually structure a homepage is not oriented toward conversion at first sight.
The goal of a landing page, on the other hand, is to convert potential customers, or leads, into actual customers.
A high-converting SaaS landing page provides concise content, reduces bounce rates, and increases the likelihood of capturing new customers.
What do I need to know before crafting the landing page?
Before you start drafting your SaaS landing page, take one step back to align your page with your brand strategy and marketing goals. Defining the following crucial points beforehand will help you reduce iterations at a later stage and make the process of copywriting, design, and development a lot easier. Make sure you know:
- Your target audience: Have you already created your user personas?
- The goal of your landing page: Is it newsletter signup, download of a whitepaper, purchase of a product or service, or demo request?
- The channels you want to promote your landing page: Will you promote it on social media, search engines, or in newsletters?
- Your traffic source (organic, paid, review platforms, etc.) and quality of traffic: What is the quality of the traffic on your landing page?
- The way you measure the success of your landing page: Will you do A/B testing?
- The tracking tools and integrations: What do you need to consider on a technical level
What are the secrets to conversion?
In order to convert, you need to reduce the effort of your visitors: not only technically speaking, but also on a psychological level. Keep in mind the following four principles to craft a high-converting landing page for your startup:
Know your audience's pain points
Once you have the essentials settled, let's create content that is relevant to your target audience:
At this stage, the question about HOW you find relevant content usually comes up. You need to dig deeper into the needs of your visitors. Detailed target audience research is crucial to get more information on their pain points and desires: find out more via sales calls, customer service calls, reviews, or keyword research.
On your landing page, address the pain points of your users and explain why the solution you offer is the right thing for them to do. Make sure to convey this information in a simple, neat, and cohesive way, reducing the mental load for visitors and sticking to your brand's verbal identity guidelines.
Provide one way out only
Your landing page should have one specific goal, e.g. signup, download, demo, or purchase, to avoid having users struggling between various options. Thus, for each goal, you need a specific landing page. Closely related to this, you need a clear CTA with one single link to convert. Don't link to other pages of your web, as this could make users leave your page without conversion. By providing only one choice, you reduce the effort for users.1
Make your offer irresistible
Your offer is the basis of your landing page. When elaborating it, keep in mind the following:
- Maximize the attractiveness of your outcome: Include numbers or percentages to show the positive results of using your SaaS solution. These statistics need to be attention-calling, hence, include high numbers or transform them into percentages. However, don't sell smoke, be realistic and truthful.
- Guarantee predictability of your outcome: This is the social proof that backs your offer. You need to add reviews with a high rating, case studies, etc. to gain trust.
- Minimize the time to reach the outcome: In the business world, no one has time to wait for results. Therefore, if applicable to your solution, highlight which impactful results can be seen within a short period of time.
- Reduce customers' effort to get to the outcome: Customers strive for easy solutions. This is the time to highlight that your offer will only require minimum effort from users, eventually showcasing your process.
Brand your SaaS landing page
Your landing page as an important part of your marketing assets needs to be in line with your visual and verbal identity. Ideally, you've already defined those two factors beforehand and established a brand identity for your startup that allows you to grow and apply it to all brand touchpoints.
The copy of your landing page should be consistent with your tone of voice guidelines and in line with your brand personality. By register, vocabulary, and other language mechanics, you define the way you speak to your audience. You can find detailed information on how to create a strong verbal identity for your brand in our last blog article.
86% of marketers say video is the #1 element that impacts conversion.3
The design of your landing page should be aligned with your general startup's website aesthetics and your brand guidelines: fonts, colors, visuals, and overall look and feel. Also, branded motion graphics increase the conversion rate. Create impactful video material and illustrations that explain your solution's benefits or functionality to visitors to reduce their effort and maximize your landing page's persuasive effect.
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A Hubspot study demonstrates other factors that positively affect conversion rate: adding social media sharing icons, short descriptions of the offer, short contact forms, and statistics related to the topic or product.1
How do you structure a high-converting landing page?
1. Hero section: Your key offer, form, and CTA
This is the very first section of your landing page. Its role is to either convert visitors, keep them scrolling, or leave the page in case the offer doesn't fit their needs.
In your main claim and the sub-heading you include the key benefit of your offer: remember the pain points of your audience and the solution you provide. Based on your previous work, focus on maximizing its outcome while minimizing the visitors' effort to reach the desired result.
Next to this is the ideal place for the form to capture your lead's details. While there is no one-size-fits-all for the number of questions to ask on your landing page form, 58.4 % of marketers say the ideal number of questions on a landing page form to get the best conversions is three or four.1 The less effort is required from the user, the higher the chances of converting them. You need to find the balance between user-friendliness and capturing all the information you need.
Now, it's the moment for your CTA to make an impactful appearance. Remember to stick to one single version of your CTA across the whole landing page. It should be neat and straightforward. Also, depending on where you gather traffic to your landing page, you can personalize your CTA.
Personalized CTAs have a 202% higher conversion rate than default versions.1
For instance, if your landing page traffic comes from your newsletter, you can start with the user's name, e.g. “Chris, get your free demo now”.
2. Problem - Agitation - Solution (PAS)
The PAS framework is a copywriting tool used for landing pages, email marketing, etc. Its ultimate goal is to get visitors to realize that there is a problem worth solving, hence to take action.4 It consists of three points:
- Problem: Outline your visitors' problem and bring it to the top of their minds. By showing empathy, you gain their attention.
- Agitation: Educate your visitors about the possible consequences of the issue in case they don't solve it. This adds emotion to your message. Be careful not to come across as too salesy or pushy.
- Solution: Introduce your product or service and educate your visitors on why this is the solution to the issue. Here, focus on the pure benefits rather than the features.
3. Benefits & features
Now it's time to dig deeper: you need to outline 3-4 key features of your solution in relation to the benefits and the impact it will have. For each feature, structure your argumentation line like this: benefit, feature, meaning.
- Problem: Highlight it in the heading.
- Feature: In the first sentence, introduce the supportive features that back up the benefit.
- Meaning: In the second sentence, explicitly explain the positive impact of the benefit on visitors' lives.
4. CTA
Again, add your CTA here.
5. Social Proof: Testimonials
As for our website, social proof is key to increasing reassurance. Share real client stories about working with you. Starting ideally with a photo, name, position, and company name, these testimonials should include: the problem they were facing, the way your solution solved this issue, and specific impact data.
6. FAQs
Leverage this section to list out the most common objections you come across on calls and preempt them by answering them directly. This adds further clarity and professionalism to your SaaS solution, while also improving your organic SEO by adding keywords strategically.
7. CTA
Last but not least, it's time for your compelling CTA to show up again.
Your startup's landing page in a nutshell
Your SaaS landing page most of all needs to be easy to digest: a clear framework provides the basic for its structure. Remember that the CTA needs to be one single message and offer one single goal.
High-converting landing pages of SaaS startups have a few things in common: they are in line with the brand strategy, visual and verbal identity, have one single goal, and are designed for optimal user experience across all devices. Also, their structure is clear, the information neat, and motion graphic elements contribute to a higher conversion rate. Whether your offer consists of a Fintech, AI, Logistics, Cleantech or Biotech solution, keeping in mind the outlined landing page principles will help you to reach success.
Hopefully, you're feeling more secure when it comes to creating landing pages for your tech startup. In case you need branding or web assistance, we're happy to lend you a hand.
Sources
1 Hubspot
2 Portent
3 E-Mail Vendor Solution
4 Clutch