Tom Starley Consultancy

Taglines, trust and design for mobile.

Welcome back to my secrets behind the best converting landing pages mini-series. If you missed parts 1 & 2, you can find them here, otherwise roll on part 3 focussing on taglines, trust, design for mobile and whitespace. Grab a cuppa, here we go…


11. Create amazing taglines.

Creating great taglines is hard…but it gets a lot easier when you know your target audience  and the problem you’re trying solve. With this ammo you should be able to create lots of interesting, relevant, niche taglines for your product. Which also then becomes part of the problem! Which do you choose? And how do you know if it’s any good? Well, having a structure to work within is always useful, I use a great formula to aid in the creative process:

End result customer wants + Specific period of time + Address the objections

Eg. Fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 min or it’s free!

Mmmm pizza, see? It worked on me and I’m not even on a takeaway pizza site. Use this formula and you’ll find you can create 30 taglines in 5 minutes, stress free. Wait… did he just…

12. Combat lack of trust.

A prospect won’t convert if they don’t trust you. Trust can be earned in a variety of ways. The main obstacles that undermine trust are:
Website bugs – Fix these and check again regularly, like cars, websites need MOT’s as the tech around them updates.
A poor design in general – If it looks clunky, you won’t be doing yourself any favours.
No proof that you can deliver – How do I know that you can do what you claim if you don’t show me a case study or something similar?
No testimonials – I need to know what other people are thinking, show me now!
Spelling mistakes – Oh yeah, my fave… I’m dyslexic and struggle here but get a proofreader if you need to, I have 3.
Use and tone of language – If you start swearing or using “awesome” or “rockstar” every other word I’m out of there…

The majority of these points can be addressed by following the steps listed in my previous post (see 7. “Craft content that sells around a structure” section.) But the point that really stands out is no proof. And if your product isn’t up to scratch, how can you get proof? If you haven’t got any proof how will you get users? It’s a bit chicken and egg. The answer is to always go looking for the proof you need, there’s a good chance you’ve got more than you think and you just need to get a little inventive with how you access it. I’ve found the biggest barrier to a lack of proof is not actually that there is none, but just that the company does not want to ask for testimonials! Go looking for it and as you get more users and your product improves, refine your proof as it gets better and better.

13. SEO – Get the basics right, but not at the cost of your page goal.

Obviously a certain amount of SEO is good practice and necessary, researching the best keywords (including intent loaded long tailed keywords) to use on your pages is a good approach, respecting h1, h2, h3, hierarchy etc, but don’t go nuts. Don’t cram in lots of additional text to try and keep your page high in search engines rankings at the cost of making your page cluttered and confusing. If your page doesn’t follow a clean simple structure your prospect won’t convert regardless of your site’s position in Google. Build the page to convert first! Do not build a page to appear high in Google in the hope that they’ll convert because they most likely won’t.

14. Embrace white space.


I LOVE IT

Give your visual and written content space to breathe, open the window and let the light in! Don’t be scared of space. Embrace it! Space simplifies everything and reduces the cognitive load the user experiences when they view your page. The amount of times I’m asked to optimise a busy page! The misconception seems to be that the more elements you cram in or the more ways to you find to present something, the the easier it will be to find – it’s just not so.

“Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This quote says it all! If your page has one goal, remove everything that gets in the way of that goal. You’ll find this instantly creates more white space to play with. Do you really need all 10 menu buttons at the top of the page? …Probably not.

15. Don’t let mobile design be an afterthought.

Your mobile sales pages are massively important and play a huge role in converting individuals to using your product. I think it’s safe to say anyone who is anyone knows they need to have a responsive version of their site, however that’s not enough. More people now browse the internet on their phones than desktops and yet the main focus for many companies is how the desktop version of the site looks. Interestingly the main reason the mobile site is overlooked is a simple one – as a team or as the boss of your product, you probably look at the site more on a desktop at work than on your phone. The all important question to ask here is, will my prospective clients be doing the same? It’s unlikely! Give your responsive/mobile sales pages the time they deserve. They are a hugely powerful tool in your conversion arsenal and many still overlook this avenue, not committing the time needed to make them really work.

Users behave differently on mobile. The amount of information needed and the way that information is presented is a new challenge. Please whatever you DON’T just cram your entire desktop site into a mobile design and hope for the best. You need consider it a separate entity. Optimising your mobile site throws up a couple of unique opportunities, one of my favourites being that you have less space. This forces you to consider what is truly important and is a blessing in disguise. In fact, generally optimising your layout and content for mobile first is a good strategy as when you scale up and rework/create your design for desktop (or any larger screen size) you’ll find you already know the key elements needed for the page. It’s better than starting with desktop design then getting down to responsive and thinking… “How the hell am I going to fit all this in?!” This also goes for product UI design but that’s a topic for another time.


That’s all for today folks, hope you enjoyed part 3 of secrets behind the best converting landing pages! One final instalment to follow, so make sure you subscribe to get part 4.

Catch you again soon!

Hi, I'm Tom! A UX/UI specialist and founder. I'm passionate about increasing conversion and revenue for growing online companies through expert UX/UI design and consultancy.

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