4 visual principles for creating more persuasive landing pages

A well-optimized landing page is crucial to the success of a marketing strategy. Check out some tips to improve your conversions.

Investing in digital marketing can pay off and increase your sales through a range of strategies, each with different objectives. Landing pages are extremely important in an attraction and conversion plan because they are the “rite of passage” for the action that turns a visitor into a lead. 

That’s why this tool needs to be created with that goal clearly in mind: conversion. To achieve this, visitors need to know exactly what they should do and what action is expected of them. 

These actions might include clicking a specific CTA, downloading a resource or actually buying your product. 

Landing pages need to be well optimized to fulfill their role of converting visitors. Here are some design tips to help you get your LPs right and increase your chances of conversion. 

Principles for creating more persuasive LPs

Making a landing page visually simpler makes it easier to understand and, consequently, to convert. 

The Attention Ratio is an important factor to consider. It refers to the number of elements available on a page and the number of actions visitors should take. In digital marketing campaigns, the ideal is to have just one goal, which means the recommended Attention Ratio is 1:1. 

Keep in mind that there are three aspects of attention to focus on: 

• Capture/attract attention: this should be the goal of your post or ad headline
• Hold/keep attention: to do this, you need to deliver on the promise made in your headline. 
• Focus attention: this is the role of your LP design.

Here are 4 principles that can teach you how to communicate visually. 

1. Direction

Direction is one of the important visual principles to consider. The tools you use to guide the reader’s eye should be chosen carefully. Here are a few examples of visual cues used in everyday life to guide actions based on specific objectives: 

• Lines on the floor in a hospital emergency room. You can follow them if you’re bleeding heavily or feeling confused. 
• An arrow on an airport map indicating “you are here”. This helps you figure out how far you are from your departure gate. 
• Parking lot entrance and exit signs.

The goal of applying the principle of direction to a landing page is to guide visitors until they reach their final goal. It should show them the way forward. Examples of directional cues on a landing page include arrows or a person looking or pointing toward the form. As a result, our eyes naturally follow these cues.  

2. White space

White elements, also called “negative space,” are used to give your page some “breathing room.” When you lower the Attention Ratio to 1:1, extra space almost always appears, making your page design feel more relaxed. 

White space is also used to draw attention to a specific element. When you create space around something, that element automatically stands out. 

3. Recognition

Recognition happens through visual cues that show that a particular element is meant to be used. Buttons highlighted on a page are one example. 

Here’s an illustration showing how recognition works:

Notice the difference: the first button has a shadow that gives it a 3D effect. The second is rounder and flatter, and still looks like a button. As you can see, the last two examples are less clickable, and the final one doesn’t even look like a button. 

Proximity can also help with recognition. Elements at the top of the page can provide recognition, even implicitly, even if they don’t stand out much. 

4. Emphasis

Emphasis should be used wisely. Bold text is an emphasis tool because readers tend to pay less attention to the content around the emphasized text. 

However, if you overuse bold or underlined text, for example, it loses its effectiveness. A study published in the International Journal of Man-Machine by researcher Martin Maguire concluded that, for bold text to be effective, it should make up no more than 10% of the content. 

In conclusion

These design principles will help you highlight the most important points on your landing pages, showing readers what you want them to see and click, even if they don’t scroll through the entire page or read all the content. 

While you’re here, check out these 10 design tips for creating the perfect landing page.