Landing page design trends

10 Landing Page Design Trends Guaranteed to Skyrocket Your Conversion Rates

So you’ve created and implemented some great content within budget. Everything’s up and running and looking good, but you can’t work out why your conversion rates are dismal compared with your desired targets. Lead generation and click-through-rate is down, and as a result you are seeing next to nothing in terms of actual purchases.

The good news is, it’s not an issue with the quality of your content. As long as you’ve done your research and kept the content succinct and focused, you can rule that out as being the cause.

Actually, it’s more likely that the issues you’re experiencing are due to faults in your interactive design, which means that people are choosing to not interact with your content. But don’t despair, your solution can be found in the latest design trends that are creating massive improvements in conversion rates.

We searched far and wide and have listed below the top 10 design trends. By helping users interact with your content and connect with the product, these trends are guaranteed to skyrocket your conversion rates and turn ROI from any digital content into a goldmine.

Test a shorter landing page for fewer distractions

Shorter landing pages feature less information, which means there are fewer distractions deterring a person from opting in. A shorter landing page is easier for a person to view in its entirety than if it is longer with a lot of text.

Conversionxl.com demonstrated how to switch to using shorter landing pages to increase conversion rates for Moto Message. An increase of CTR by 97% and a conversion rate increase of 21% on their pricing page was experienced when Conversionxl.com simply shortened the landing page length.

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Shorter landing pages are effective at driving conversions by allowing fewer elements on the page to be more convincing. A simple and short landing page will direct a user’s attention to performing the desired action as opposed to long, overwhelming landing pages.

Use a sticky CTA to let customers click any time they’re ready

Dropbox has over 400 million strong users and is an example of a company that utilizes a sticky CTA header. It says, simply, “You use Dropbox – why doesn’t your company?” It’s direct, and neatly targets the business market for their product. Sticky CTAs are consistently found to be greatly beneficial for improving conversion rates.

sticky-cta
Source. An example of a sticky CTA in the wild.

One test by smashingmagazine.com demonstrated a direct 22% increase in navigation speed, and found that 100% of the sample group preffered a sticky CTA. Sticky CTAs allow an undisrupted experience for users — having a CTA permanently on-screen allows a user to interact easily and very quickly in a intuitive way.

Full-width images help engage customers

Studies have shown that large images create the kind of positive “interruption” that leads to higher conversion rates. They are attention-grabbing, and distracting enough to allow a user to take notice of the content.

In a case study by econsultancy.com, Dell’s content team tested a ‘mega sized’ image on their landing page, replacing the whitespace of the site as an image. The mega-sized image lowered visitor bounce rates by 27%, plus it increased leads generated by 36%.

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Another area aside from landing pages where big, bold images are increasingly prevalent are emails. According to Campaign Monitor, this is a ‘revolution’ in email marketing design. Emails are now becoming more captivating by using large, aesthetic imagery in the content.

Send your customers where they should be going

If you offer several types of products, services, or categories, split-screen layouts can significantly optimise your conversion rates. Creating a split-screen website layout is a logical way to split your users into groups and help direct them sooner to the landing page that best suits their needs.

Bashooka.com tested and found that by quickly allowing your audience to ‘choose their own adventure’ and head exactly where they want to go is a more streamlined way to have them convert. This is reiterated by bluefountainmedia.com, which utilised homepage redesign and improved conversion rates by 42.9%.

Use some color theory to make certain things stand out

Utilise color in a smarter way that captures users’ attention. Create a similar color palette for your landing page with a contrasting CTA button that always stands out. According to Quicksprout’s ‘Psychology of Color’, audiences have limited attention spans online. They are travelling from website to website and collecting information more quickly than they even realize.

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A great way to grab their attention is to stand out from everything else competing for their attention – this is where color comes in. Ask yourself these questions – does my color palette appeal to my target market? Are the color combinations aesthetic or at least noticeable?

Another tip is to look at color trends — this is actually hugely beneficial because people (especially young people) are extremely sensitive to color trends. Think about it – that orange and brown interior of your grandmother’s house that was trendy in the ‘60s seems fairly unattractive now. Pantone’s color palette trends for 2016 can offer a glimpse into future color combos that can be easily transferred to your landing page.

Use the single-column CTA

The simple action of eliminating sidebar distractions and positioning your CTA in a single column, can increase your clicks and conversion rates. Utilizing white space around CTA buttons as well as a single column for both headlines and subheadings will lead to increased conversion rates.

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When the ‘flow’ of a web page is interrupted by multiple columns, sidebars, and a myriad of distractions, it appears messy and unappealing. If however you place your CTA with heading and subheading in a single column with lots of white space, this can eliminate the distractions present on the page.

Card layouts help communicate stories

Pioneered by Pinterest, card layouts create aesthetic interactive squares that act as visual ‘break points’, that encourage user interaction. According to alexa, Pinterest is the ‘15th most popular site’ in the U.S., which isn’t a surprise since we all know humans are visual creatures. Within the information architecture of a card layout design, imagery is almost exclusively used to communicate with users, and any copy on the same page is secondary information.

With sites like Facebook and Google beginning to utilise card layouts within their mobile platforms, it’s clear that this design trend has more depth than simply being visually pleasing. According to Intercom’s ‘Why cards are the future of the web’, the use of cards can be traced back to 17th century London, when trade cards helped people find businesses. For hundreds of years people have handed out personal business cards, birthday cards and greeting cards. We all carry debit cards, credit cards. Our childhoods were filled by games with cards.

cards
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Therefore cards have a long history as an easy medium for communicating quick stories, and this is no different on an online platform. This design trend is useful for every card within your page layout to tell a visual story of what you are offering your readers.

Use video to show your prospects what you’re all about

One of the hardest hurdles to overcome is the process of converting website visitor to a product purchaser. Video is an excellent way to personalize your brand, and let your audience see what you’re all about.

Video allows you to display an array of information in an interesting and engaging way where written content or photos just cannot compete. Utilising video on a homepage can quickly and explain who you are and help users make an instant emotional connection with both your brand and product, leading to a massive increase in conversion rates. According to a recent Unbounce case study, landing pages without a video experienced a 6.5% average conversion rate, compared to video embedded in page resulting in a 11% average conversion rate (69% conversion lift).

Make use of minimal lead capture design

If you you don’t sell anything on your actual website, but you’d like to gain leads anyway so that you can market to them in the future, minimal lead capture is a design trend that can help you.

Minimizing distractions by resisting the urge to include extra information that’s actually unnecessary and off-message will improve the likelihood of gaining leads. By asking for leads in a minimal but creative way that involves giving less information and therefore less options, a user’s attention can be more easily directed.

clear-cta-landing-page
Now these folks are doing it right! Source.

Try the following methods: a short and direct headline, engaging and sharp CTA, on-point messaging with just one aim to avoid confusing the message, and an email capture field, just like what you see in the image above.

Personalize your potential customers’ experience

This is probably the most useful and applicable in today’s data-driven markets capitalizing on targeted user experiences. As opposed to customization, personalization is when a program, app, website or software actually ‘adapts itself’ by the information it has attained from the individual user. This article by UX Magazine, refers to this tailored user experience as vital to modern day marketing.

While mobile user personalization is trickier to nail due to the small screen size, websites and landing pages are easy to incorporate personalized user experience.

Using location, buying activity, browsing activity, and other data, you can tailor the browsing to individual users. This personalization gives each interaction much more potential to convert.

Using these tips to convert

The 10 tips above can individually, or combined, help to skyrocket your conversion rates. As a whole, the 10 tips represent dynamic developments in design trends that allude to even more exciting developments to come.

As long as you stay relatively up-to-date with these changes and incorporate at least some of them into your landing pages, you will definitely see improvements in your conversion rates. Additionally, as design trends continue to evolve and progress, staying up to date with these will ensure your knowledge gap is as short as possible.

Mike Bird

Mike Bird

Michael Bird is CEO and a cofounder of digital marketing agency Social Garden. Social Garden specializes in data-driven lead generation and marketing automation to grow companies’ revenue in different verticals in Australia.

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