Ask HN: Best tip for landing pages? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best tip for landing pages?

55 pointstmaly48 comments

I have really not put much effort into my landing page because I have been working head down on the project.

I think I have lost a lot of potential opportunity to collect an email from interested people.

I know I should probably have: a headline, maybe a sub headline, a call to action, some features, some testimonials, and a second call to action at the bottom.

I am curious if there is one thing that would make a real difference on a landing page.

What is your best tip based on your own experience with landing pages?

View on HN

It tends to be easier to give advice based on concrete elements than abstractly.

Other than that, I compiled a list of tips a while back that should help you get a better intuition of what you need beyond the mechanics (sure, you need a headline, but what makes it good?):

http://yourlandingpagesucks.com/startup-landing-page-teardow...

If I tried to boil it down to the basics, it's mostly about trying to put yourself in the shoes of a potential customer with very little time to waste:

* What's in it for me? => Value proposition / claims

* Prove it => Proof

Bravo! Just what I needed to read today.

the part on headlines is brilliant! thank you. The cookbook looks interesting. How many pages is it?

Around 250.

The link below was submitted to Hacker News a few months ago. It has good tips for landing pages:

"I've rewritten 300+ websites for startups from pre-seed to unicorn. Here are my top learnings"

https://twitter.com/maiale/status/1419687196311752704

A follow-up twitter thread from the same author:

"..there's a template I recommend to almost every startup. Here it is"

https://twitter.com/maiale/status/1420413778592628741

The related Hacker News thread - only 6 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27988065

Thank you! Those links are exactly why the Ask HN section is my favorite part of HN.

I spoke w/ a YC founder who distilled it down into 3 simple words: Pain, Claim, Proof

- What pain are you solving for? - What's your solution to this pain? - What's the proof that your solution works?

Similarish, I use the structure:

- Claim

- Reason to believe

- Call to action

If I am to put an email into a landing page it has to convince me that it is very definitely more than "an opportunity to collect an email address".

Just look at kickstarter campaigns. There's the actual idea, which I'm interested in, or not. And then there's backup of how good the idea actually is, benefits I may not have thought of, and then a ream of validation; the team, how much work they've spent developing the idea, the execution plan, future direction, etc, etc, ad nauseam to be honest.

Personally, I prefer to just see the minimum; the idea, perhaps some surprising use-cases, and plausible execution plans, but clearly the kitchen-sink approach also works.

my previous page collected about 200 email addresses, but my project is not 100% ready. I feel guilty collecting an email address when I do not have something ready.

> ...because I have been working head down on the project.

Sounds like you are doing it right.

When I see a "landing page" collecting email addresses, I assume that there is no product, there is just someone doing some half-assed marketing. On the other hand, when a page shows an actual products, demos, and a way to create an account and start using the product, I'll take it seriously.

Some other comments have kind of covered this, but the biggest mistake I see is focusing on your product/company/self instead of the audience.

The audience cares much more about themselves than you. So talk about the audience first, then introduce yourself by connecting to their interests. Like other comments mentioned, the audience's problems/pains is a good place to start. (Then introduce yourself by showing how you provide benefit by solving that pain.)

Also prefer a casual, friendly tone (talking in 2nd person) over a formal, official tone (talking in 3rd person.) People think a formal, official tone makes them look more prestigious, but people tend to trust the casual friendly tone more. The best, strongest recommendations are from your closest friends, so use the same tone you would use talking to one of them.

As for the headline, it is probably the most important component because none of the other content matters if the headline doesn't grab their attention. The best headlines get the audience to ask themselves a burning question in their head.

The main call-to-action should be to exchange something of value for contact information. Most people will need more information before they are converted. You can't continue the conversation without contact information. Those who are really interested will find a way to sign up/buy even if the CTA for that isn't directly in front of them.

This type of writing is called direct response marketing. It has been used successfully long before the internet was a thing: mail, newspapers, radio, tv, etc... The landing page is just another medium/communication channel.

I have no tips, no hacks, no shortcuts. Honestly this is such a big topic, that I am tempted to just share v1 of a guide to landing pages I made. However before I do...

So, one thing that would make a real difference to a landing page. An appreciation of the foundational blocks of a landing page, which are:

1. The contextual factors: business, market, your solution, target audience, positioning, tactic, financial.

2. The Key Narratives: basically where they are now, and where they will be in the future with your solution.

3. The Overall Narrative:

a. What Are You?

b. Who Are You For?

c. What Do You Know About Me?

d. What Do You Do?

e. How Do You Do It?

f. What’s In It For Me?

g. Why Should I Believe You?

h. How Do I Get It?

I'll share the link now, but like I said, this is just v1, not had a chance to put up v2 yet: https://startizer.com/blog/startup-landing-page-guide

I agree that landing pages should be content packed and that some serious thinking should go into them, but this rubric risks overwhelming both the landing page creator and visitor.

Often you don't know who the visitor is, for instance, and even if you did, having an answer to "what do you know about me?" might just creep people out. That's one case where "show not tell" is the answer.

Hello Paul.

At the bottom of that guide is a link, alongside the following copy: When less is more: Empirical study of the relation between consumer behavior and information provision on commercial landing pages. In a nutshell, less information increased conversion rate. Lack of context, but still interesting:https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324965555_When_less...

Landing pages are not meant to be done and dusted, they are meant to evolve. Landing pages are not meant for all, so visitors do need to be based on a persona. A persona has to be based on facts, therefore you should know the visitors to a certain degree.

"What do you know about me?"; if too many people are creeped out, then the landing page needs working on. If there is an acceptable conversion rate, and a small percentage are creeped out, then that may or may not be acceptable. You can't win them all, so you win the ones you can and see what can or should be done to attain more.

What is important is that there needs to be understanding and appreciation of the internal dialogue, and you show and/or to tell to whatever degree.

If the landing page creator is overwhelmed, so be it. If the visitor is overwhelmed, then either the visitor was the wrong persona or the landing page needs working on. The guide is not meant for all, it is meant for a specific persona.

Edit: To clarify my last line: If the specific persona is overwhelmed, then yes it will need working on, but based on showing it to them. Some have said it is heavy, and it took a bit of time to get their head round it. That's acceptable. However, there is a v2 that covers a lot more, but it will have to wait.

Cheers, Ace.

I see what you did there ;)

Mum's the word mate, haha.

I don't know what your building but i just started testing this - https://teslatracker.com/ I wrote the copy and didn't waste time thinking too much about it and I already have people signing up and i plan to test charging $50/year . Don't think too much put something up and list the benefits your service provides ( save time) whatever. Get to it! life is in the doing :-)

There’s a huge amount of psychology in landing page design to show credibility, proof points, address common rejections, etc. I found this udemy course helpful but I’m sure there’s other resources out there. https://www.udemy.com/share/101vOq3@44_8ioaD2oSBpElrM5_5UfPj...

do you have a landing page you built after taking this course?

This is my "before" landing page...

https://www.apicanary.com/l/beta_program_signup/

I'm in the middle of the landing page course right now, haven't applied much of it yet.

You need to tell me what you do and why I might care; then you need to make it obvious what I could do about that.

Everything else is superfluous.

Here's a tweet I found while trying to work on a landing page. https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ/status/13388222017730560...

The best way of creating a landing page is making research and look throught 100-1000 great landing examples that are already work and look pretty good.

Just spend few day here at this curated and inspiration platforms:

1. SinteInspire

2. Land-Book

3. Lapa Ninja

4. GodlyWebsites

5. SaaSlandingPage

After that you will understand what type/structure/design/features/texts you need for your own product.

Good luck!

Be honest, say exactly what your product does and does not, address customer concerns. Also, keep it as simple as possible and make all information easy to find, no need to hide the pricing or other "sensitive" information, this way you build trust.

When and why did "home page" become "landing page"? (At least I think that the latter refers to what was meant by the former.)

In my mind, a "landing page" is an advertisement. A "home page" is a useful (to readers) page that is the place from which you access the rest of the site.

But how do you "land" on a landing page, if it isn’t the main entry point ("home page") of the site? Edit: Or are landing pages just a specific kind of home page, with particular objectives?

You get there via links in ads, social media promotions, marketing emails, etc.

Landing pages are for marketing and they tend to be focused on a specific product, have calls to action, sales copy, etc. They often have a clear goal, such as getting visitors to sign-up or leave contact information. They're the page that adverts, marketing emails, and social media promotions link to.

Home pages are more diffuse and serve a different purpose—linking to multiple products, blogs, about us pages, customer support, and so on. If you only have one product, like an app, or it's a microsite dedicated to a single product, your home page might be a landing page, but it doesn't have to be and usually isn't for bigger companies.

It didn't, a landing page is where the user lands after marketing drives them there.

usatoday.com is the home page, usatoday.com/subscribe is a landing page.

Home Page is not always the same as Landing Page. A Landing Page can be any page with a specific purpose and is driven by Marketing. For example, you have a landing page about a specific feature and you are driving traffic to it from sources that may be interested in that feature. In some cases, the home page is the landing page.

If I see a call-to-action or a subscription form I hit the back button faster than Doc Holliday could draw his Colt.

How does a landing page work if it doesn’t offer a next step?

Maybe we’re not aligned on what a “call-to-action” is, but sort of tautologically a landing page should direct me to how I can try out / buy / learn more / etc. If it doesn’t do that, what’s the premise? I see a thing that looks interesting and then it’s my job to go on a hunt to figure out how to get it?

There's nothing wrong with a contact link.

Collecting email addresses for the sake of collecting email addresses is a mug's game. (It's the royal road to having your emails end up in a spam folder.) Collecting email addresses of people who are deeply interested in your service or product is golden. Doing the first is the enemy of the last.

That's moving the goal posts.

Of course you'd rather have good than bad lead qualification/generation. But you still need calls to action to collect those leads somewhere, which was the parent's point.

> How does a landing page work if it doesn’t offer a next step?

Does the front page not have links to other pages on the site? If not, then whoever built it fucked up. I don't want to be "directed". I don't want anything that resembles a hard sell. As far as I'm concerned, a website's front page should be a menu, not a "call to action".

> I see a thing that looks interesting and then it’s my job to go on a hunt to figure out how to get it?

Exactly, and what's wrong with that?

Not like you want to make people work too hard, but a person who works a bit will be motivated, self-selected and "drawn in" to the situation. Rather than you working to sell them they work to sell themselves, and they are more effective at that than you will ever be.

> Exactly, and what's wrong with that?

It’s entirely opposite to the whole field of good user interface design?

It seems pretty uncontroversial that the goal of a user interface ought to be making it easier for the user to do what they want to do. If I load up a site for some product, there’s basically 3 possible outcomes of reading the page:

1. I don’t want the thing

2. I might want the thing, but I need more info

3. I want the thing

In the 1st case, the close tab button works great. In the 2nd and 3rd case, I want to either get more info or get the thing. So a site with a good user experience will provide an obvious indicator that says “click here to learn more” and “click here to get the thing”.

The problem is that landing pages are often sales jobs, and the presence of call-to-action items, email harvesting, etc., confirm that it's a hard-sell job.

Such pages tend not to be useful to people who have not already decided to buy, because the "learn more" links usually don't really inform you about the product, but instead lead you to another sales pitch.

> It’s entirely opposite to the whole field of good user interface design?

Good for whom? Good by what standard? The older I get the more I've come to suspect that most UI and UX designers come from the Temple Grandin school. They seem to think that users, website visitors, etc. are just human cattle and that their job is to design better cattle chutes.

I don't want a "better user interface". I want web apps that work, and I have yet to find one. Even dict.org reports errors when run through wave.webaim.org.

- If your web app doesn't work in Lynx, it doesn't work.

- If your web app doesn't work on a 56K dialup connection, it doesn't work.

- If your web app isn't WCAG 2.0 AAA compliant, it doesn't work.

> If I load up a site for some product, there’s basically 3 possible outcomes of reading the page:

No, there are four outcomes. You forgot one:

4. This website is so obnoxious that I've forgotten why I bothered accessing it in the first place.

If even one of your users asks, "Why am I doing this to myself," when visiting your website or using your web app, you've messed up.

Reading this response made me think “why am I doing this to myself”.

No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering.

It's not an automatic back-button press for me (I mean, hell, most sites do that these days), but I do find pages that yell at me to BUY IT! first thing to be really gross. Like having a salesman run up to me on the street, pen and contract in hand, yelling BUY BUY BUY! Like, WTF. I don't know you, and I don't even know what you're selling yet, but you're shoving a contract in my face already? "Crass" is too mild a term.

The only time it's convenient to have those buttons front and center, and the only time I click them very soon after first visiting a site, is when I already know what the service is and I'm at least 90% sure I'm buying it before I even load the site (tenth visit, already used the service at a previous company, buying a product/account for a family member, that kind of thing)

Yes, many companies have bad lead qualification and try to sell their product too early. But that's orthogonal to the concept of having a landing page or a call to action in itself.

The problem is not having or not having calls to action, it's to figure out which call to action is relevant at what step of the funnel.

What's worst is the pages that hit you with several pop-ups before you can even read the content: sometimes they ask for your email address twice and also ask if you want to get push notifications.

As they say in Germany, "Bitte Keine!"

Seriously, the "call-to-action" that doesn't flow naturally from the content is a scourge of the web in 2021. There's the audiophile blog that pops up a dialog asking if you are "confused" and want to book an appointment (Pro tip: that's why I haven't been to a stereo store since 1999) There's nothing you can do that makes you look more inauthentic than that.

I do this as well. Those are red flag items.

one of the first goals of a landing page is to pixel you so they can retarget you with ads elsewhere. If you've visited the landing page in the first place it shows the business that you've at least heard of the company, which moves you into another stage of their sales funnel.

If you actually fill out the form or take whatever action is shown on the page, that's gravy for them but a savvy marketer knows it takes at least seven touches to a lead before they're ready to convert. Landing pages are very top-of-funnel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com