4 UX Trends You Should Be Implementing on Landing Pages

People are impatient. If your landing page doesn’t correspond to the ad they clicked or they can’t easily see the benefits offered and CTA, they’ll bounce. Not only are you losing leads, but you’re creating a bad first impression of your brand, and users today aren’t afraid to voice their displeasure.

That’s where landing page optimization comes into play because creating an enjoyable user experience will persuade visitors to fulfill the conversion goal.

User Experience: Why It Matters

The principles of a good user experience can be summed up in Henry Dreyfuss’ quote from the book, ‘Designing for people’:

“When the point of contact between the product and the people becomes a point of friction, then the designer has failed. On the other hand, if people are made safer, more comfortable, more eager to purchase, more efficient — or just plain happier — by contact with the product, then the designer has succeeded.”

This makes sense when you consider 50 milliseconds is all you get to form a first impression — so your landing page must be designed well and immediately resonate with visitors.

Designing a pleasurable landing page user experience involves exactly what Dreyfuss mentioned. Make visitors:

• Feel more comfortable e.g. a short lead capture form, or displaying security badges on your page)
• Eager to purchase (with attractive benefits and a compelling CTA)
• Time spent on your page more efficient (keep copy concise and to the point without distracting page elements like navigation links)
• Happy (with a beautifully designed page that makes converting easy)

Here we’ll go over UX trends that accomplish all of the above and help increase conversion rates.

Scrolling Over Navigation

ClickTale’s user scrolling behavior study analyzed a subset of 12,000 vertical scrolling page views over a month period and found that:

• 91% of page views occurred on pages with a scroll bar
• From that 91%, 76% included some scrolling action
• 22% scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the page

Conclusion: Most people scroll. There’s no need to stuff all your landing page elements above the page fold.

It’s up to you to create an engaging story — using your landing page elements — to convince visitors to stick around long enough to see all your benefits (even if they’re below the fold) and persuade them to act on your CTA.

Sticky CTA Buttons

Call-to-action buttons are the most important element because that is how you actually earn the conversion, so you want the button to be as noticeable as possible. A few ways to accomplish that is color contrast and crafting personalized, actionable copy to persuade visitors to take action.

Designing a prominent CTA button with color contrast is a landing page best practice and a key factor to earning conversions. To that end, a sticky CTA button is always prominent because it follows prospects as they scroll. It remains top of mind. So if at any point while a prospect is evaluating your landing page offer and wants to convert, they can take action easily.

The Campaign Monitor landing page has a sticky navigation CTA button that allows visitors to “Sign Up” wherever they are on the page:

Persuader Videos

Whereas explainer videos typically use animation to promote your offering, persuader videos use humans to explain how your product works, or feature customer testimonials highlighting how your product or service has benefited customers.

Persuader videos help establish a human connection with your visitors. Having a real person speak about your product benefits makes your offering more trustworthy, which leads to higher conversion rates.

Anchor Tag Visual Cues

Visual cues help guide visitors in a certain direction — or location — on your landing page. Most often, different types of visual cues, such as arrows and human line of sight, are used to point toward the CTA button on landing pages.

Visual cues can also prompt visitors to scroll down the page. One way to do this is with anchor tags at the end of page sections.

An anchor tag allows you to place links on your landing page to help visitors jump from one location on the page to another. They make it more efficient for visitors to navigate between page sections, ultimately creating a better user experience.

A Well-Designed Landing Page UX Increases Conversions

Landing pages should be designed with the visitor in mind because you want to make it as easy as possible for them to convert. Whether you include sticky CTA buttons, anchor tag visual cues, or something else in between, your goal is to provide an enjoyable user experience so visitors take action on your page.

From the headline, to the CTA copy, to the videos and images, everything should be focused on creating the best viewing experience for your prospects. A well-designed landing page UX ensures that your information is presented in a logical and compelling way. That way visitors can easily see the benefits of your offer and feel enticed to act, increasing conversions and creating a better brand experience overall.