landing pages
Above the fold
The first impression is important. The “above the fold” section is the first thing visitor sees after landing on your site. In this section, the visitor decides within seconds if he/she will take any action or bounce.
It’s the most critical part of your site.
Demand Curve wrote an article about the “above the fold” section. There are two main reasons why visitors bounce without scrolling site:
Weak messaging: Your product's purpose is unclear, uninteresting, or irrelevant.
Weak design: Your design is unprofessional, outdated, or ugly.
Finding good messaging that will work would take a lot of time and experiments. Actually, it never ends. What resonates with people changes over time. And the change is inevitable.
Few notes on design
Fixing weak design is a fast shortcut to strengthening the messaging. Aesthetic-Usability Effect from Laws of UX states that people favor aesthetically pleasing designs. And are more tolerant to minor issues.
An aesthetically pleasing design creates a positive response in people’s brains and leads them to believe the design actually works better.
People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
If you are not a designer but still want to improve the visual part of your site, here few things to keep in mind:
- Hierarchy is important. It helps to guide visitors on what to scan first, read or take action.
- Images should be visually appealing, modern, and clear.
- Product visuals should demonstrate it’s value. Show it in action.
- Negative space is your friend. Example Apple.
- Limit color use. If you are not experienced in design, it most likely will look bad.
Two takeaways on how to write header text from Demand Curve article:
Specificity is step one to strong ATF header writing.
Big brand names can let themselves be more abstract. Unfortunately, not new or small companies. But I see so many brands using abstraction in their messaging. The bad part they sound like many others. They are unclear about product purpose, and it’s the worst.
Don’t be afraid to be bold, but don’t sound too good to be true.
Don't try to address every objection
The header must intrigue, not answer every question or objection the visitor has. Focus on the most important things. Keep it short and sweet. Don’t kill the vibe with a long wall of text.
How to pick messaging for header text?
It’s a good idea to write more than one header message. But the problem then how do you pick one? Should you use the A/B test for your site? Yes, big companies use it, but that doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
Why? Without getting into details of conversion optimization. For most sites, traffic will be too low to get accurate results. There are many variables for this to work. And this would take a lot more time than most people understand to get that statistical significance.
Here few ideas to improve the choice of messaging:
- Choose up to 3 messages, call 5-10 friends, read them, ask for feedback and ignore what they say. Pay only close attention if it’s clear. If one of the messages is unclear for the majority, then you need to improve or remove it.
After 2-5 days call them again to see which message they remember. - It’s common practice to test messages using paid ADS first. Use the winner on the landing page.
If you decide to use A/B test, make sure messaging is really different from one to another. Testing small differences is a waste of time in the beginning.
Conclusion
If you need to write the “above the fold” messaging, start with the Demand Curve article. It has a couple of great exercises that should help you.
For those who don’t have enough experience in design, try to be simple. Have constraints for the design. The more, the better. Use only up to date high-quality examples for inspiration. Stay away from trends.
Messaging will change over time. Improvements will never end. Accept that. If you stop improving at some point, it will stop working, and the business will never reach its full potential.
