I've compiled the best SaaS Landing pages and broke down all their secrets
cortes.design
cortes.design
I think a landing page should answer what it does, and how it does it in very unambiguous terms. Too bad so many SaaS companies try to make promises without giving an idea on how they'll deliver them.
Both home pages were designed by the same team.
Designing Missive's home page was way harder.
Why Conference Badge:
- I have a conference in a few days, I have absolutely no time, I don't know how to do this but I need badges. HELP!
Why Missive:
- I have a shared inbox, I need to easily collaborate around some emails.
- I want to consolidate all my shared inboxes into one app.
- I have an assistant, I want to her/him to help me with my emails.
- I want to merge back both internal and external communication into one app.
- I receive hundreds of orders a day, I want an app that let me share the load in between my production team.
- I'm a solo user I just want a fast email app that works fast on Android and a Mac.
- I want an app that lets me auto send confirmation SMS to my customer when their order is ready.
- I want to chat with my team in a threaded interface
- …
Was the team that designed these pages an internal team, or hired externally?
As added bonus, everything is still visible, the signup button and phone button rollover work with my default mode of all JS off. None of the usual need to enable JS for clicking a signup button to have any effect at all, or to be permitted to see images.
I'm very impressed.
1) Have a product the market needs (even if they don't know they need it yet.) Yes. Easier said than done. The point is marketing mumbo-jumbo won't make a Me Too product unique.
2) Explain __crisply & clearly__ why I need it. Focus on benefits more than features. In short: Why should I care?
3) Make finding a complete features list easy. If I'm interested (i.e., I think I will benefit) I'll want to see in detail all you can do for me.
4) Making finding a product comparison (e.g., free v paid) easy.
5) Making finding an FAQ is easy, and make sure that FAQ is an FAQ and not more marking spin.
6) Make finding pricing easy.
7) Maintain a semi-active Twitter accnt. If that looks left for dead then I'm going to presume you're soon to fade as well. I can't commit to and invest my time in a solutions that'll soon be MIA.
8) A free trial is NOT a proxy for any of the above. My time is valuable, so free is not really free. If you can't clearly communicate your brand / product to me then I'm going to presume you don't know, or are too lazy. In any case, it's a red flag. I'm leaving.
9) Speaking of leaving: conversions are a false god. What's more important is churn / retention. High conversions aren't good if there's also a lot of churn. You want to build relationships, not one night stands.
10) If you think you're special and that any of the above doesn't apply to you. Think again.
I abstain from Twitter because I don't believe it's a good place to actually communicate and I refuse to buy followers and likes to keep up with the Joneses. Not saying you're wrong, but there's a disconnect between being "social" in a specific platform and being able to do the job.
It's about me (i.e., the buyer).
I don't think I'm alone when I say, Twitter is a fairly healthy signal. That is, having looked past Twitter activity (read: the lack there of) in the past, that signal has come back to bite me in the arse.
Perhaps you're the exception? But I, the buyer, don't care. I'm not going to risk shaming myself again. And if you abstain from Twitter - even if __you believe__ you have good reason - I don't care. It's not about you ;)
It's 2019, I don't think it's too much to expect to see:
- system status - new product announcements - product updates - relevant industry shares - trade show presence - etc.
Basically, something / anything that shows me you're alive, you['re well, and you actually care. Again, I've ignored this (lack of) signal before and I've paid for that. Sure you can ignore Twitter but then you all the questions I have above better be addressed somewhere; in a place I care about. Because...you got it now :)...it's all about me!
For the record, I'm not a big Twitter fan either. But it's not about me.
Yes there are. At no point have I suggested otherwise. What I'm saying is this:
- A dicey Twitter accnt is a red flag.
- The lack of a Twitter account (very often) a __red flag__.
Of course there are exceptions. Always are. Let's not get stuck in the weeds over the obvious :)
If you think you are an exception (read: you're 99% certain) then yes, of course, don't worry about. But if your "logic" is, you don't care about Twitter (and have not considered that I, the buyer, do) then good luck. My confidence in you being able and willing to serve me has dropped, likely significantly.
The original article was about SaaS. If there's a SaaS that (e.g.) never ever goes down (or anything else mentioned) then sure. No Twitter. Anyone else should probably not ignore it. Is it really that big of a deal to be safe rather than sorry?
The main point of that article was showing strategies that you can replicate for each scenario (social proof, intro, product explanation...)and I think you got that ;)
The reason for that is too many still have it all wrong. They get the means right. "Look ma! My CTA is just like that article!!" But they miss the start, and the ends. That is: It's not about them, it's about me.
The article is about tools. That's great. But unless you understand and embrace why you're using them, you're going to get it wrong. Again, plenty are still getting it wrong.
Put another way, a fancy new IDE or a hot-shot framework, etc. are tools. They don't mean you're going to build good / great product. You need a broader awareness for that. Not just how to use the tools, but why.
I was wanting to shine some light on why.
10) Beyond just the website...The Experience is The Product. Not just the X in UX, but the end to end experience. For example, does the contact form send me a copy? How soon do I get follow up? Is the getting starter / documentation up to date? Etc.
Just the same, if you flip it over, those who have done well 99 of 1000 times have got all / most of these right (i.e, B to B+ or better).
About 35% of all visitors to our site end up subscribing.
We’re not a SaaS company, so I realize this may be comparing apples to oranges, but we had experimented with a lot of different, elaborate, shiny landing pages that were similar to a few encouraged here.
And after falling flat on our face for months, we realized that an incredibly simple, borderline-mysterious landing page converted users far more effectively.
(For the curious, this is the landing page: https://techloaf.io)
I always thought this was a shifty strategy to get you on the phone and have salespeople con you, but after reading _Mastering the Complex Sale_ I've come to realise that it makes sense - you want to understand a potential customer's needs before you actually try to pitch anything concrete at them.
For the lazy, here's a preview: https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time
Without that, what would be the qualification of "best"? The best the OP has seen... but then that's comparing landing pages mainly from the perspective of one person (that may or not be part of the target group of the SaaS).
Now it’s a (nice) collection of pages the OP found eh... nice/interesting/attractive (and likely to convert well, since these are actually in use - insert “survivorship bias” here), but no real explanation for why these are measurably better than others.
Appreciate the effort though. Just questioning the wording like “best” and “better”.
Thanks for feedback, cheers! :)
That could be a very interesting follow-up to your analysis, also by providing data that sometimes “best” is an opinion or hunch, sometimes a choice or preference, sometimes a measurable result. Cheers!
The author gives several reasons why he likes the examples (creating curiosity, layout, using case studies, ...), but without data it's more about personal preferences, current best practices and common sense. No real secrets.
When creating their landing pages, people often model pages of well-established companies, missing the fact that their audience's awareness level is totally different. It's a common mistake. You end up with a website as pretty as the one from your favorite startup, but with horrific bounce and conversion rates.
I call it the cargo cult[2] approach to marketing
--- [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20110225071634/https://www.crazye... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult
Jakob Nielson says something similar about Amazon here:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m...
They do a very poor job of explaining what it is the company does and you could put 10 companies under the same tag line and it would be just as true.
It helps if you search for something that makes your website better, you know you are in right place and you can read more. If not you move to next page in 0.5 second instead of reading some irrelevant technical details of how.
I am more like discarding stuff after reading first page and getting into details when I have more time, then after I get through details I buy.
This would be a stupid idea in most cases but I mentioned CrazyEgg get's most of their traffic through content marketing.
This means their landing page is an article and when people see that headline the audience is already warm, it's totally different.
Indeed I noticed this pattern in 2014 and suggested the idea to a colleague who then built the first website builder around this pattern: https://www.redferret.net/?p=45278
These days, a site has to completely break this pattern to be innovative.
Let's face it people are looking for "secrets" so I used the article to steer them to the right direction.
I wrote another article about the ideal structure if you interested: https://www.cortes.design/post/how-to-make-a-conversion-driv...
Thank you for saying this! I've been pressing Medium for a long time to be more aggressive at shoving crappy publishers off of the platform.
I think what happened is that Medium was originally great for content marketers. There was a growth hack that let certain publications get big just by publishing any remotely relevant article. Many of these published 30 times a day (and still do). Additionally, the Medium algorithm seemed to reward articles mostly for having a clickable title.
However! Medium made a recent change to manually review all articles before allowing them to get algorithmic boosts. That did a ton for weeding out the junk articles and removing the incentives for these content-mill publications.
You can see this in action if you go to one of the big publications and append /latest. Most of the articles these pubs are publishing now are getting fewer than 50 claps. In other words, nobody is reading them. I think eventually, most of these pubs are going to end up leaving.
Then on the flip side, Medium is partnering/paying a lot more for high quality writing. And as a result of less competition with content marketing junk, those high quality articles are getting a lot more views. I just published something the other day that I spent two years writing and researching, and it's got 250k views (and I think will make $10-15k in their network over its lifetime). I'm not going to link it, but I think it met a bunch of standards of quality that many past Medium articles haven't: all the advice had been tested on multiple people by the author, the article was peer reviewed, it was copy edited.
My world is mostly personal development writing and we do have a partnership with Medium. It's just a weird middle ground where the old growth hackers are still around and have been offered a chance to participate at a higher level of quality. But I'm finding that most of them either aren't able or don't want to. From my world, the old definition of quality was an article that was a summary of something the author read but probably never personally tested, i.e. "10 Foods That Made Ben Franklin Crazy Productive." And what got us a partnership with Medium was putting together a style guide that had a much stronger opinion about what goes into a high quality personal development article. Style guide here, but you'd really have to be a nerd to read it =) https://betterhumans.coach.me/draft-style-guide-for-personal...
"Make your website better. Instantly." is a totally meaningless header that will only frustrate visitors.