For my sophomore English class, my professor tasked us with analyzing a genre of our choice. I immediately chose something to satisfy my passion and craving for the web, so I decided on analyzing landing pages. While I would’ve rather written about back-end architectures or code in general, I reached the conclusion that observing the subtleties of these pages would be more appealing to an English professor who had little literacy below the surface of the web. I was just happy to be writing about something I genuinely enjoyed.
Months, maybe years, after your company decided on a battle plan, you’ve now completed the project, turning in a final product. In it, among content and real viable solutions, are your blood, sweat, and tears, as well as business funds that have yet to be realised. While the product is done, that doesn’t mean you’re out of the woods yet: it’s time to sell it. Among the dissonance of competitors and social media, one thing you cannot let happen is a potential customer, who visits the site in interest, walk away without a unit or two moved into their hands. You need a landing page, a single page that walks potential buyers through the fruit of your labors, but at the end of the day sells your work. While every product and page will be different, there are conventions they all hold in common, like the use of call-to-action’s and establishing trust.
The end result of a landing page is a customer being converted into a user via call-to-action’s, or CTA’s. These are links or buttons that takes viewers to a signup area or performs the signup itself. The page’s job is to make the user click these, thereby selling the service or product. But the page also has to sell the customer on the value, the features, and the content of the offering, hence the length of these pages explaining the details of the app or service. Once convinced, the user will then click the CTA, signifying their conversion to your product.
Thoughtbot, a company that services other developers by maintaining and writing code for you, takes a traditional approach.
Thoughtbot’s navigation is fixed, so that black bar will keep in view at the top of the screen at all times, no matter how far a viewer might scroll down. That way, as the page explains why Thoughtbot’s service should be used and the true value of the company, the CTA, the “Hire Us” button, is never buried, lying in wait for the user to convert. The CTA also “pops out” by using a red color, contrasting to the black and white; the user need not look far in order to buy Thoughtbot’s services.
ConvertKit, an app that increases lead conversions like landing pages, but through email marketing, employs a landing page that follows a different logic. It’s landing page still follows the pattern, trying to get as many potential clients to click on a CTA, but the main “Create an Account” CTA isn’t visible until the user scrolls to the bottom of the page. Instead, ConvertKit uses a separate CTA that provides a free ebook. But how does this landing get away with it?
Notice the chalk line in the lower right, indicating something more, pulling the user down a section to look a screenshot of the ConvertKit’s dashboard in action. But the subtlety of this page now lies in it’s size: even with a massive monitor, the dashboard screen capture is taller than most if not all viewing resolutions, nudging the user further down until arrival of another section on how and why the app is useful and volatile. However, this section’s dimensions were not by cause of whimsy or circumstance either; this new section is just small enough for many screens to reveal the color of the bottom-most section, where the main CTA lives, centered on the page and drawing the eye to it.
So while these two approaches differ, the main goal of clicking the CTA invariably stands. But even more than the purpose of funneling readers towards a button, these two landings also hold the sacred purpose of establishing trust and value with the page’s visitor. Thoughtbot always presents its CTA in case a user becomes converted during the course of the site, but what on that page actually sold them? What made the conversion?
In the case of ConvertKit, the whole burying the CTA seems moot as the page itself inducts a flow, pulling you through content to read. The screenshot section, if looked at carefully, details the app inside the image. ConvertKit could have easily use filler text or a random capture of someone using the app, but they chose to go with an example filled with why a user should scroll all the way down and click the CTA.
It takes market research, such as the reason customers don’t buy due to trust, and shows the app being a solution to the problem they wish to solve. In this capture, it also shows blue links to more content where ConvertKit teaches clients to wield the application more effectively. As the saying goes, “If you can’t teach it, you don’t know it well enough.” So by the inverse, if ConvertKit is teaching effective marketing strategies that translate into more lead conversions, they must know about it.
While Thoughtbot might not possess the flow of ConvertKit, they still packed their landing with sections trying to establish trust and polish features for all readers to see. In the first few sections, Thoughtbot highlights their previous work with MIT and nationally known payment network LevelUp, borrowing from the established ethos of both firms, all in an effort to persuade someone to trust them with code that will or has become the crux of their own business.
Up next on Thoughtbot’s page, in my opinion, is what could possibly carry the landing all by itself: the “Our Team” section. More than effective, this section simply sells the service itself by taking the fear from the risk of sharing code with a partner and assuaging it by putting cheerful faces to the developers and designers who will soon carry your Ruby on Rails burden. But to go even further, clicking on any of the sixty-two beaming smiles will reveal just exactly why that employee is qualified to work on your project. This section alone gives you sixty-two reasons to hire Thoughtbot, as though a potential customer had interviewed each one themselves, removing the unknown factor of remote partnerships and instead working towards establishing an intimacy needed for such a leap in trust.
Landing pages have, on the surface, the purpose to get potential customers and clients to click on CTA’s. But the CTA itself, while clear and concise, weighted and available, doesn’t sell the product. The landing must fulfill a greater purpose of establishing the trust that an investment in the app or service is well spent, so the page must focus on the viability of the product offered. Without value in a product, a landing simply cannot sell it’s features or content; selling a product without worth or relevance is simply overrated packaging.
thoughtbot. Thoughtbot. Web. October 16, 2013. http://thoughtbot.com
ConvertKit. ConvertKit. Web. October 16, 2013. http://convertkit.com