How do you view your landing page? It is the gateway to your business.
While a landing page is a key entryway to a product or service, it is so much more than this. It is the secret tool your business should optimize to strike into the heart of your customers, to give them the need to purchase from you.
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A landing page is the culmination of brand development and your entire business, and you need to make it appealing to the eye, but strike the right tone.
Here is your one-stop-shop for landing page trends to utilize in 2021.
But first, we need to talk about a couple of basics.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is, very simply, a webpage that any customer can “land” on. In the context of marketing, it is a stand-alone page and tends to serve a single purpose.
It is considered the next step for a prospect, ensuring a visitor becomes a customer. Design trends keep on changing, and so do the landing page trends.
Source: Dribbble
A landing page could be classed as a “click-through,” which leads to another page, like your website. Or it can be lead generation based.
There are numerous types of landing page categories, such as the website homepage, click-through landing page, sales page, squeeze page, slash page, and viral landing page.
A landing page is any web page that is a “door” to your website, and you must use them well by incorporating a number of techniques.
Conversion Rates Vs. Other Metrics
The conversion rate is classed as the number of conversions divided by the number of visitors. So, for example, if a website receives 200 visitors in the space of a month, and out of these 1000 visitors, there are 50 sales, the conversion rate is 5%.
This is because 50 divided by 200 is 5. This is important because it allows you to measure the performance of web pages.
By understanding the percentage of your users that are actually purchasing your product will help you gain insight so you can drive your website or business forward.
Comparing this to other metrics, it is vital to understand that conversion rates are not the be-all and end-all.
There are other analytics metrics that we may need to incorporate to get a better understanding, and these can include the following:
Average time on page. This is the amount of time that users spend on your website. Sessions. This is the volume of visits to your website. Entrance and exit rates. These measure the places such as your homepage that grants access to your website, but also how many visitors leave your website from certain pages. Time to Interactive (TTI). This measures the time a page takes before a user can interact.
Landing Page Trends For 2021
1. A More Visible Call-To-Action
A Call To Action is the part of your advertisement that tells your audience what they should be doing when they click on your ad. The very simplest example would be something like “click here now!”
The more information you can give your customers with your CTA, the better it is. The intent is about giving the power to your customer and imploring them visitors to take action, turning them from a visitor into a customer.
It is something you see in any form of advertising now, predominantly because a CTA is a perfect way to finish up any form of promotion.
You see them at the bottom of a blog, or at the end of the YouTube video, where the presenter is asking viewers to like and subscribe.
In the context of a landing page, a CTA is a great ending, but placing a block of text at the end of a long piece of copy is dull and uninspiring.
Using design and making sure that your CTA eye-catching will make it stand out, rather than just blending it into the webpage. You can make it stand out with some of the following components:
Make the CTA match the ad or link. If the customers are served with an ad or click on a backlink, this will result in a higher conversion rate as the customers have a strong intent-match. Using copy that matches the ad or marketing material ensures that users know they are in the right location and this consistency of message evokes feelings of trust, crucial to a cold audience. Create a separate mobile landing page that matches the speed of the website. It is so important to guarantee a speedy website as users are likely to click away. 1 in 4 visitors would abandon a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load. And customer satisfaction is reduced by 16% when there is a one-second delay in your website loading. Ensuring your page load times are down and making sure that your webpage is optimized for mobile is essential.
2. Organic Intent
Source: WIX website builder
Getting better organic intent is not just about one component, but there are a variety of factors. Search Engine Optimization is crucial, and the way your webpage is optimized has a massive impact on how it ranks.
On-page SEO is the general practice of optimizing an individual webpage so it generates more relevant traffic and ranks higher. On-page refers to the HTML source code of a webpage as well as the content.
How Can You Optimize Your On-page SEO?
Examine the competition
To create an SEO-friendly landing page, you should look at your competitors. Generating the right traffic is super important, and determining your keywords is an essential practice that ensures you rank for the relevant topics.
But one way to shortcut this is to look at your competitors and the keywords they use.
Remember, it is not about lifting the approaches undetected by other landing pages, but about staying true to your core idea.
If you become distracted by keywords, and pepper your website with the variations of long-tail keywords that will rank, you will navigate up that search engine results page, but you will invariably target searches that don't want your product.
Avoid using walls of text
While we hear that search engines prefer long content over shorts, this can contradict what we believe about creating great landing pages.
The importance of well-researched content is important for ranking, but using small amounts of text will still yield good results in search engine rankings, just as long as there are enough backlinks to the webpage.
3. Custom Illustrations And Animations
Source: Way
To make a landing page appealing to the eye, you can add animations and use illustration software to create an extra dimension. These illustrations should match your existing design system, and can also go on to be echoed on social media content, ecommerce packaging, letterheads and business cards.
Incorporating a design concept that has a clear visual hierarchy isn't just appealing to the eye, but it can increase customer engagement.
Add into this the fact that interaction is a key component to enticing customers to click into your landing page, the better the analytics may be and can result in a higher likelihood of scoring leads.
Having more analytics gives you a better insight into your customer and their unique intent.
For example, you can incorporate more information into a customer by looking at the number of hover events, the number of people that click on a certain product, but also look at the length of time they view a video.
Content engagement is vital so you can retarget and remarket. If somebody has interacted with your products, they are more likely to convert.
Consider using personalised images on your landing pages, a survey found that using personalised images around the CTA on a website more than doubled conversions.
4. Retro Themes
Another way to make your website look professional but also stand out is to incorporate themes from the past. Call it “retro” or “vintage,” but for striking visuals, you can incorporate different styles of typography to change the brand perception.
Headings with old school typography can create a very striking contrast, especially if you use new fonts for your main body of the text.
Take inspiration from classic typography fonts such as Baskerville, Rockwell, and Futura to give your content a vintage facelift.
You can also contrast this with contemporary typefaces like Dosis (which incorporates a sci-fi quality) or something like Playfair Display, which is a very elegant typeface.
You can also use off-white textures and colors. Paper-like sensations make the website look more than just a digital storefront.
And when we're talking about harking back to more retro approaches, using muted or dull colors that evoke the 1950’s and 1960’s advertising is a fantastic approach to do something different, but also trigger nostalgia.
There are so many elements of vintage advertising that capitalize on the power of nostalgia and memory, and your landing page can benefit from these.
To create something striking, bringing back the old in combination with the new can make the most of your landing page.
For example, the idea of “space” in your web page is a fundamental part of your web design; and you may think that space with nothing in it is underutilized real estate on a webpage. But you can use white space to make it visually appealing.
The most popular example is the Google search engine page; there is a lot of white space, and the daily animation covering a theme is a simple and striking component. After, all if it ain't broke...
Another thing to consider is oversized typography. Large typography is one of the most popular trends right now.
Using large typefaces adds drama to a webpage and grabs attention instantly. And sending these messages in a “loud” manner with crisp graphics can add that instant “wow factor.”
Oversized custom typography is a very artistic setup, and its volume and style can take the place of actual illustrations.
It is a very simple way to take the place of animations and illustrations, especially when a company doesn't have the budget to invest in a piece of art
5. Full Page Light-boxes And Email Invites
Source: The New Yorker
The simple square has been striking in popular art and culture for some time, from Malevich’s “Black Square,” to David Bowie’s “The Next Day,” and it is a very en vogue component of landing page designs right now.
It is a very familiar scene; a pop-up that comes right across the center of our screen may be frustrating, but light-box pop-ups can be a fantastic way to notify users about promotions and is a great way to obtain customers’ email addresses.
Lest we forget, automated email marketing is still a key component to get your business substantial traffic. When it comes to customer acquisition, email is still the most important marketing strategy, even more so than social media.
And as email marketing is a very cost-effective, customizable, not to mention measurable component, using a full-page light-box is a fantastic way to grab the attention of potential customers while also utilizing this pillar of marketing tactics.
6. Flat Neomorphism And Depth
Source: Paullini
A very on-trend design trend component right now is neomorphism. A modern iteration of what is known as “skeuomorphism,” it blends the words “new” and “skeuomorphism.”
In essence, it is a minimal way to design a webpage with a soft, almost plastic, look. This visual style combines to display a soft extruded plastic look with a slight 3D styling, and it is a very popular way to add depth to your website.
We have to remember that a well-designed landing page will invoke an emotion in the customer. Motivating a customer to purchase a product is to do with some simple, yet pivotal human emotions.
The affluence or status of the products, or giving peace of mind, as well as giving pleasure to a customer will translate to providing your customers with something meaningful.
Conclusion
Whether it is about changing your approach to the layout of the webpage, making the most of SEO, or going back to basics, the design of a landing page is not about one approach.
It is a cumulative effort that devolves the designer striving hard to innovate, take risks, but also keep the ear to the ground for contemporary trends.
Molding a landing page from a collection of images and ideas into something that is truly stylistic, beautiful, and honest work of art can pique the interest of a customer.
It can turn a business into something that truly rewards the customer journey, resulting in happier customers.
Author
Darya Jandossova Troncoso is a photographer, artist, and writer working on her first novel and managing a digital marketing blog - MarketSplash. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her family, cooking, creating art, and learning everything there is to know about digital marketing.
