The best landing page design has one (and only one) clear goal for the user to take. The best landing pages have simple goals:

• Opt-in
• Buy now
• Share

A landing page is optimized to make the user take one action – and if you provide distracting alternatives to that one action, you dilute the effectiveness of your landing page.

Landing Page Design Best Practices

• Only one Call-to-Action
• No navigation bar or footer menu
• Solution to a pain point promised in the headline
• Test the entire sales funnel start-to-finish with a dummy user
• A/B test the landing page design monthly

Landing Page Design Checklist

If you are designing your own landing page, ask yourself these 12 questions:

1. Does your opening quickly offer or clearly imply a strong benefit?
2. Is everything instantly clear? If it’s funny, clever or obscure – beware.
3. Have you told the whole story? Unless you give every sensible reason to buy, answer obvious questions and overcome all reasonable objections, you’ll lose conversions.
4. Is what you sell fully and clearly described?
5. Is the tone right? Don’t be funny about serious things (e.g. charity, business or money).
6. Do you demonstrate the benefit – give examples, quantify it, compare it to alternatives? People want to know how and why you are better.
7. Do you prove your claim is true? Testimonials? Independent figures?
8. Do you ask firmly enough for a reply, telling people precisely what to do? Repeat your arguments at that point.
9. Is the coupon, order form or request to reply big enough, clear, simple and easy to use?
10. Does your copy, when read aloud, sound like someone talking? Good!
11. Have you shown it to someone uninvolved, preferably a likely prospect? Ask if they understand it – and if they would buy.
12. Do you have a plan in place to regularly test and modify this page? What converts well today may not convert in six months, as technology changes.

Best Landing Page Design Inspiration

These websites are good places to go when you are designing a landing page. Browse through the best of the best, notice what really grabs your attention, and take notes on how they structure their layout or their content flow.

• LandingFolio
• InstaPage Landing Page Examples
• Landing Page Course Critiques
• 99 Designs Landing Page Contests
• Dribbble Landing Pages

Recent Landing Pages Produced by Stellar Platforms:

• https://pages.holdenqigong.com/guided-healing-meditations
• http://len.life/shows/the-aware-show/derek-rydall/
• https://theawareshow.com/store/rainbow-daily-meditation-pack
• https://moneymanifestationsummit.com/

The best sales funnel strategy helps a stranger become a customer. That’s the purpose of your website, after all; if your website helps a stranger become a customer, it doesn’t matter how ugly it is, or what fonts you use, or what kind of CMS or fancy plugins you use. If your digital platform helps a stranger become a customer because of a solid online sales funnel strategy, your website is a win.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a series of steps that communicate to your customer in the language of the different stages that your customer goes through, from discovery all the way through to purchase.

Your online sales funnel strategy is a map of all the digital infrastructures that guide a stranger through the journey to becoming your customer.

How to Make an Online Sales Funnel Strategy

There are many different ways to map your sales funnel, based on the stages that your prospective customer goes through. Three typical methods we use at Stellar Platforms to map out these stages are:

• Actions the user takes
• Website URLs for each stage
• Emotional reactions that cause them to progress to the next stage

You can use any of these methods individually, but I like to look at my funnel through the lens of each of these three. The action, the page, and the emotion are all relevant pieces of each stage; by looking at the continuum of the sales funnel, from start to finish, through these frameworks, you can identify ways to smooth the transition from one stage to the next.

That’s the ultimate purpose of a sales funnel, in the end – identify and remove any friction that could keep a stranger from becoming a customer.

Stages of an Online Sales Funnel

Many digital sales funnels look like this:

• Landing page
• Opt-in incentive
• Thank-you page
• Email autoresponders
• Sales page
• Purchase page
• Access page

As I said before, there are infinite variations on this framework, but this is a general the outline to get you started.

If we are building a brand new website, the pages of the online sales funnel would look like this:

Website Pages of Sales Funnel Stages

Blog – Someone clicks on a link on social media, and they end up on your website, reading an article you’ve written. This is not the place to sell to them. This is the place to gain their interest.
About – When they are interested, they go the most highly trafficked page on your website – the About page. This is where people go when they wan to know more about you, and what you do.
Subscribe – Your qualified prospects find your call-to-action intriguing, because they face the major problem that your product or service solves. They agree to let you into their inbox.
Thanks – Whatever free PDF or opt-in incentive you’ve offered is delivered to them. This is the best place for introducing yourself in a deep and meaningful way, setting the stage, letting them know how often you will email them, and how to find and follow you on social media.
Services – after a few educational emails that deliver good value, they have a hunch that they could work with you. They open an email from you about your gateway offer, they decide to research you, and they read the specifics about your rates and terms.
Checkout – This is where they buy. Please note: they do not buy from you at earlier stages in the online sales funnel, so don’t sell to them there. You should reserve your sales messages for people who have advanced far enough in your sales funnel that they know, like, and trust you.

Online Sales Funnel Platforms

While you can make a sales funnel in your own WordPress website, there are online platforms that make page creation, email integration, and lead magnet delivery a breeze.

Here are three of our favorites sales funnel creation tools:

The top of your sales funnel offers a lead magnet to incentivize people to subscribe to your email newsletter, or to create an account on your membership website. A free ebook, an mp3 download, a whitepaper, or access to the resources section of your website, are all ‘opt-in incentives’ that encourage people to exchange their email address for the valuable information that you can give them. We call them ‘lead magnets’ because they attract the leads you want to put in your funnel – if your lead magnet design process was done correctly.

Let’s face it, you can stuff any kind of lead into your sales funnel, but the leads that you want are the ones that have the highest chance of becoming your customer.

Free lead magnets are opt-in bribes.

You are building your list, and the free ebook you offer above your email subscription form is your bribe to get people to subscribe.

Be sure you are bribing the right people.

Lead magnet design checklist

• Your lead magnet addresses a problem your customer avatar is facing right now
• The title is clear and descriptive (and maybe a little clickbait-y)
• The medium is digestible quickly (a 5-page report is better than a 7-hour video series)
• Delivery of the lead magnet is automated through your email service provider
• A professional graphic designer was either involved in the production, or was asked for their opinion about the lead magnet design
• The lead magnet ends with a call-to-action to move to the next stage of your sales funnel

Typical Lead Magnet Ideas

Being a lead magnet creator does not mean that you have to become a copywriter, graphic designer, and sales funnel strategist all at the same time. All you have to do is offer to solve a problem that would make a stranger thank you for providing them with an easy solution to the challenge they are facing.

Here are some ideas for creating a lead magnet for your website:

• A guide, report, or handbook converted from one of your longer blog posts
• A cheat sheet for easy reference
• A worksheet they can print and fill out, with questions that will give them valuable perspective on the biggest challenges or pain points their audience faces
• A resource list, with links and descriptions
• A video training or webinar replay you have given in the past
• A free trial or discount code to sample your service
• A survey, assessment, or quiz, to give them an interactive experience that leads to a customized recommendation
• Your pricing, rates, or service directory

What Makes The Best Lead Magnet?

After studying many digital marketers and sales funnel specialists over the years, I’ve found the most successful lead magnets have these attributes:

• The design is consistent with the overall brand strategy
• The material is thorough and in-depth
• There are many insider’s resources that are collected all into one place
• They are filled with affiliate links

Affiliate marketing has a questionable reputation in online marketing, because it is so easy to do it badly. The typical smarmy salesperson who everybody wants to avoid – they can get online and get real loud with all of their affiliate links, and drive potential customers away by brazenly pushing their affiliate links on everyone.

But when affiliate marketing is done well, it’s easy and seamless, and provides a solid revenue stream that can support your business.

Your lead magnet is the best cornerstone for your affiliate marketing strategy. This is where you can collect resources that you have spent time vetting, comparing, and studying; and if you use that opportunity to suggest a resource that your target customer would love to know about, an affiliate link isn’t unexpected, it’s the right and proper use of affiliate links.

For an example of lead magnets and list building done well, read Pat Flynn’s email list strategy and get his ebook, Ebooks the Smart Way.

You can also read ‘How To Wake Up Early (And Like It)‘ by Caelan Huntress. Note the CTA at the end – it’s the entire purpose of this ebook.