One week before Harry’s launched in March of 2013, founder Jeff Raider was terrified of one thing. He and partner Andy Katz-Mayfield had spent two years researching and developing their brand, importing razor blades from a family-owned German factory that was nearly 100 years old and building an ergonomic handle designed to compete directly with Gillette. Sounded fun and exciting until you realize the one thing that they didn’t have: customers.
“Were we going to hit launch and hear crickets?” Raider wrote later on Tim Ferriss’s blog. “Would people even notice?”
Instead, they built a landing page.
Not a website. A page. “Skinny,” as Jen Sincero might say. Harry’s landing page had four elements: an image of their razor, a short tagline (“respecting the face and wallet since like… right now”), one field to enter your email address, and one button to submit it. There was no menu navigation. No about page. No blog. No social links. Those who did enter their email got redirected to a second landing page with a referral program: Refer friends, earn rewards. Share Harry’s with 5 friends and get free shaving gel. Share Harry’s with 50 friends and we’ll send you free razors for life.
100,000 emails. In one week. Referral-driven traffic drove 77% of those signups. Because Harry’s launched to a waiting list, instead of crickets.
Why?
Here’s the counterintuitive point: because their landing page was almost empty.
Empty in terms of everything but text. Images. A conversion point.
Loading Speed
For marketers limited on budget and resources, page speed might be your biggest weak spot. It’s included here for completeness, but you have ZERO excuse not to have a fast landing page. Simply put: slow pages don’t convert. How’s yours doing?
What Is a Landing Page?
If you’re unfamiliar with landing pages, the distinction between a landing page and not-a-landing-page is crucial.
A landing page is not just a website with a purpose. It’s a website from which every element that doesn’t support a single conversion goal has been removed. That’s why building a landing page can feel so difficult. Our instinct as builders is to add: more information, more links, more ways for our visitors to explore our brand. Every new addition feels helpful. Every bit of additional information is actually an escape hatch.
Anything on a landing page that isn’t the conversion action is an opportunity to click it. Marketing intelligence firm VWO illustrated this by removing the navigation menu from an eCommerce retailer’s landing page. Yuppiechef saw their conversion rate double from 3% to 6%. No other changes! Same page copy. Same offer. Same traffic sources. They just removed every possibility that someone could leave the page without converting, and it worked. Only 16% of landing pages don’t include a navigation bar. That means 84% of landing pages give visitors plenty of reasons to explore other pages before you’ve had a chance to convince them to convert.
What Your Landing Page Should Include
Once you grasp what a landing page isn’t, you’ll have a much easier time building your own. Here’s what you should include, in order.
- A headline. That answers “what is this and who is it for?” in a single sentence. Not your brand name. Not your tagline. One sentence that directly answers your visitor’s first question.
- A subheadline or short description. This answers “why should I care?” One sentence. No more. What is the specific benefit you offer? Say it plainly.
- An image or visual. Treat your visitors like children. Give them a picture. Show them what your product looks like. Editor's Note: Showcase the outcome, rather than the product itself. The Obama campaign ran six versions of their Internet landing page and found images produced a higher volume of discussions than both videos. There’s a reason we read media sets like Explorable as Image-Heavy articles. Photographs of real things, contextually minimalist, beat out graphics every time in every published study we’ve seen.
- One call- to-action. Asking for one specific thing. Not “learn more and sign up and follow us on Twitter.” Pages that ask for one action convert at a much higher rate than pages that offer multiple options. Average conversion rate for landing pages with one call-to-action: 13.5%. That’s right, compared to pages with five or more links/buttons (Unbounce).
- Trust signals, close to the CTA. Customer count? Recognizable logo? Nice testimonial? “We don’t sell your email address” guarantee? Visitors make a trust decision before they click your call-to-action. Don’t make it difficult for them to trust you.
What to Leave Off Your Landing Page
Now for the fun part!
Navigation bars. Social icons. Footer menus. Links to blog posts that explain what your business does. If it answers a question your visitor doesn’t immediately ask, leave it off the landing page. Hell, take your entire website off your landing page (we did).
Think about Harry’s landing page with 100,000 email submissions. What would happen if you added a fifth element? Every person who gave you their email has just gained another opportunity to click away. Don’t do it.
It’s tempting to throw everything you have at your visitors. You care about your business. You want them to know how great you are. Landing pages work best when you give your visitors exactly one reason not to. One.
How Landing pages Work
You might have noticed that nearly everything we recommend including on a landing page answers a question.
- Who is this for?
- Why should I click?
- What will happen if I do?
When done correctly, your landing page will communicate quickly, answer those questions clearly, eliminate anything that doesn’t help the visitor make that decision – and your conversions will soar.
Imagine launching to 100,000 subscribers instead of crickets.
