Oh, landing pages! The little sales magnets that work for you day and night, seven days a week, fishing your perfect leads from the world wide web.
Landing pages have the potential to make the audience hunger for your product, to build them in lines as new Apple releases do. But more often they go no further than handing out flyers near the subway so that people ignore their offer and rush away.
Even though we instantly feel the difference between a boring landing page and a magnetic one, formulating this difference is no easier than explaining the gap between printed fliers and Apple’s marketing strategy.
So we applied for professional assistance in this challenging job. We asked our designers from Eleken agency to point us out to great SaaS landing pages, and explain what makes them outstanding.
Here we have the list of the best SaaS landing page examples according to Eleken’s designers — Daria, Kseniya, Maksym, and Ilya. That’s saying something considering these people make SaaS landing pages for a living.
Let’s take a quick dose of landing page design best practices.
Visual language for visual people, by Miro
Miro is a collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams, and their landing page is noted by Daria as a best practice, for a variety of reasons.
Use case presentation that doesn’t make you lift a finger
“I like the way they show the use cases and automatically switch between them,” Daria says when considering the page.
It is supposed to be a “how it works” part, explaining six different ways to use the app. Sounds like six blocks of text expecting users to figure everything out on their own.
But the company doesn’t tell how the app can work, it just makes the use case presentation that shows it working in six screenshots, obvious at a glance.
The secret of never boring but consistent brand identity
The real reason Daria loves this design isn't superficial; it's because of the look— “the site is never boring to scroll because on each page some unusual little tricks are used,” she explains, and what is more important, “those tricks are perfectly suited for Miro, it makes the landing page look awesome.”
This effect of consistent brand identity is achieved by a set of shapes that Miro developed in line with its key values — spatiality, fluidity, agility, and distribution.
On its landing page, Miro features their shapes as photo frames, background elements and illustration patterns, creating a consistent visual language out of those details.
Digital whiteboard users are people who prefer visuals to express their ideas. I’m pretty sure they enjoy discovering those little visual touches appearing as you drill into the web page.
Putting the app in the center (in a gentle way)
Software products’ landing pages usually show interfaces on a specific device like a phone or laptop, and this approach can hardly capture your imagination.
Miro shows the product in a different way. As Daria remarked, “they incorporated app interface elements into the landing page.”
The pointers and the stickers you see above are the elements of the whiteboard that suddenly became a part of a new product landing page design.
The team introduces their brilliant app to viewers literally on every step they go, but in a gentle way. As the app interface elements are organically included into the website design system, you don’t feel like you're being sold the app.
Figma’s recipe on how to steal designers’ hearts
Figma is a browser-based UI and UX design application that enables the entire team's design process to happen in one online tool. Kseniya uses Figma in her everyday design tasks and names its landing page as her favorite. And here’s why.
The best font for landing page chosen to grab the attention
As you open the page, you see how a team designs together the headline “Where teams design together.” Looking at that charming header animation, Kseniya appreciates the "large typography," and "the interesting font."
She also notes the effect the typefaces and the animation had on hers: "It makes you feel that the design was made for designers. Once you open the page, you’re hooked and want to explore it further."
Figma added a pinch of an oddity to their typography to reach that catchy effect. As Tori Hinn, Creative Director at Figma explains, they “wanted to achieve a seamless flex between nonconforming and reserved.”
For oddities is the Whyte Inctrap font, that references ink traps in design history. In the good old days, when people were using metal plates for printing, ink traps were cut in those plates to create a place for the ink to pool.
Thus, the typeface becomes an eye-catching illustrative element that highlights the part of the type’s design that is usually invisible.
Best landing page call to action is the landing page itself
In design, there’s a tendency to share a thing only when it’s complete and perfect. Figma, by contrast, wanted its illustrations to feel like they’re still in process.
The illustrations on the landing page have at least one element being manipulated or edited. Therefore, Figma also incorporates app interface elements into the landing page, just like Miro does.
Tori Hinn says they “wanted to highlight the work that goes into making — often messy, imperfect, changing all the time just like people are.” And it worked.
"The site feels bold, it speaks your language," Kseniya says when considering the page overall. "It’s kind of waiting for experiments" she explains, "and thus, all the design embodies a call to action — like, let’s open Figma and start creating whatever.”
Feels like a good alternative to vague, impersonal, and frankly, a little bit domineering “Click here” or “Buy Now” clichés.
Perfect B2B SaaS landing pages example from PandaDoc
PandaDoc is automating the way B2B companies create proposals, close contracts, and get paid. This landing page was chosen for us by Maksym.
The siren call for busy people
This member in our list of great product landing pages may seem simple and plain at first, especially after the previous two landing page design examples with vibrant colors and bold designs — all because this site was made with the thought of a completely different audience.
PandaDoc speaks to B2B people buried in work and immediately recognizes its potential customers’ pain point: the overcomplicated process of having deals done. They answer this with a calm and confident design that simply states how they can help — by automating every stage of the deal cycle.
The credible look of this page is being established thanks to "the logical site structure" and “strong value proposition,” Maksym explains.
The call to action is clear, and the benefits are immediately visible before you even scroll down.
How to build brand authority
Maksym notes “the catchy visual style that benefits from the mix of photos and illustrations” and “pastel tones that look great when they're mixed.”
Another remarkable feat in PandaDocs design refers to client audio testimonials, that provide prospective customers with the face, voice, enthusiasm and personality of existing customers.
All those important for trustability details are unavailable through plain text, and more expressive video testimonials are usually submitted in poor quality and look inconsistent on a page. The PandaDoc’s audio gets the best of both text and video format.
How to show value proposition: learning from Pipe
Pipe’s landing page was provided by Ilya, the founder of Eleken. Ilya pays more attention to the business dimension of the website rather than to the visual design — a good chance for us to look at our landing page best practices examples from another angle.
“Pipe presents a novel investing option for SaaS,” Ilya explains.
They trade your monthly subscriptions to investors. As if all their customers converted into annual plans overnight, you get money for annual subscriptions upfront, paying to Pipe a small present of the annual subscription. That’s a good deal for you — usually you spend more on discounts trying to push subscribers to annual plans.
That’s not an easy concept to explain, yet not impossible. Ilya notes that “Pipe is doing a great job illustrating their value” with both copywriting and visuals.
In the animation below, you can see an example of such an illustration. The company shows the difference between a barely visible cash flow you’ve got without Pipe and a forceful wave of money you gain as soon as you adopt their solution.
Learn how to reposition your brand with Intercom
Another example from Ilya — he pointed to Intercom’s landing page as his second favorite. He is impressed by the way Intercom uses its website to reposition itself in customers’ minds from one-trick pony app to multifunctional toolkit: “Intercom is known as an expensive chat app, and it seeks to show that the app can do much more than that.”
This expressive message you see above jumps out at you from the very beginning with no chances to be misunderstood. As you click on a feature among the words in blue, Intercom shows you how it works via the animation on the right. And again, the maximum effect is reached with minimum words.
How to design a great landing page
If you like the way we talk about top SaaS landing pages, you may also like the way we design them. But first, let’s summarize good landing page design tips we’ve learned today:
- Сut the crap if you can do it — you don’t always need a bunch of words to explain complex ideas. Proved by Pipe, Intercom and PandaDoc.
- We need to maintain a consistent brand image to establish a clear identity. But we don’t need to do it in a boring way. Develop flexible visual identity instead of rigid brand guidelines, following the example of Miro.
- If you get tired from smartphone screens looking at you from every second SaaS landing page, there’s a native way to show your app interface — learn from Figma and Miro.
- To grab users’ attention, don’t make the page too smooth and clean — add a bit of oddity like Figma does with its typography.
- To turn all your landing into a call to action, make users feel like they are already using your app. If they like the experience, your product-led growth will start even sooner than they try the product.
- Appealing to busy B2B people, be straightforward and show the value proposition without making them scroll.
Top Stories
Adobe Buys Figma for $20B, and Pisses Off an Entire Profession
Figma CEO Dylan Field: “Figma to be acquired by Adobe.”
UX designers everywhere: “God damn it!”
A bit of background
A design software juggernaut with a bad reputation that runs a dozen apps nobody really likes buys the most beloved tool in the design community for an insane $20 billion.
Since 2016, Figma has boomed thanks to its collaborative innovation, free access for beginners and attention to user experience. Eleken UI/UX designers are huge fans of Figma — the app tops our list of best UI/UX tools. You can see how we praised the app here, here, and also here.
Now we all are a bit… concerned about the future of a platform we rely on every day.
We are concerned because Adobe is making a monopoly
Our experiences on the internet are now dominated by a steadily declining handful of giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft. Adobe is following their footsteps — now it controls four out of five UI design tools. The only competitor left is Stripe with a market share of about 10%.
Do you remember when was the last time monopoly spawned something good for end-users?
Adobe’s $20 billion deal for Figma is more than 50 times the startup’s revenue. That sounds crazy unless they are just trying to ruin the product that undermines the success of their cash cows called Photoshop and Illustrator.
Something similar Facebook did to Instagram ten years ago, paying way too much. But retroactively we can see it as a successful attempt to preserve Facebook's monopoly.
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We are concerned because previous Adobe takeovers ended badly
Dylan Field says Adobe doesn’t want to break anything.
But we know that this line belongs to the top 5 things they say about every single tech acquisition. It's never been true before, so why would it be now?
At the beginning of any corporate takeover, they promise you nothing will change. And then — voila — “you have to pay more, but you get a useless new feature in return.”
Maksym, Design Director at Eleken
You won’t have any illusions about Adobe’s acquisitions if you question the fate of products it merged before.
- Many years ago, Adobe bought Macromedia’s Fireworks, a cheap and powerful graphic editor that was hugely ahead of its time. Adobe cut off its resources, left major bugs and eventually closed the product.
- Adobe acquired portfolio service Behance, which worked as LinkedIn for designers. Now there are hardly any interactions on Behance.
- Adobe dropped $1.3 billion on the video collaboration app Frame.io. Since then, Frame.io has had constant problems with usability.
We want to believe Adobe’s promises, but deep down we know this merge is going to harm Figma. High chances are that the app will get progressively harder to use, buggier, and more expensive. The pricing concern deserves special attention.
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We are concerned due to Adobe’s monetization strategy
One of Figma’s advantages is freemium pricing. That's awesome — you have all you need to start with design freelancing for free till the point you make a decent living through it. Many successful designers I’m following on Twitter say they owe their careers to cracked Photoshop. Because you can’t afford to pay for Adobe subscriptions as a beginner.
Maksym, Design Director at Eleken
Sure, you can’t. Adobe charges over $30 per month. That is quite an investment for a person that only learns how to design. Figma makes professionals pay $12 per month, and for beginners, it’s completely free.
Dylan Field says that “currently they have no plan to alter Figma’s pricing”. Of course, not for the next 2 months, then things will change, right? Because Figma’s “making design accessible to all” motto is an antithesis to Adobe’s pricing strategy.
We are concerned due to Adobe’s Suite management strategy
Another thing Dylan Field says is that Figma plans to incorporate Adobe’s expertise in illustration, video, 3D, and other fields.
Sounds like they are going to promote Adobe products through Figma, integrating them into the app. That’s Adobe’s standard strategy, but does it make apps easier to learn and use? Definitely not.
But the worst thing is that acquisition feels like a betrayal
From the moment of its birth, Figma declared war on Adobe. Where the design giant was too pricey, Figma decided to be accessible to everyone. Where Adobe’s tools denied teamwork, Figma built its business around collaboration. Where Photoshop was sluggish, Figma worked in real time.
Figma started with a definite goal of taking on Adobe, and gained its significant market share thanks to massive user frustration with their previous experiences. It was a success story of David and Goliath, where we all rooted for an innovative and humane underdog.
And then, one fateful day, our underdog took the side of its ideological enemy. If you were tired of things, why not sell your claim to someone on your team? Instead, you passed it to the corporation you were competing against.
Legend has it that Dylan Field once bet a bunch of fellows he could make them cry with a short story 280 characters long. He won the bet.
Few moments later:
Fastest Growing SaaS Companies That Drive Remote Work Revolution
Six years ago HP made a fantasy commercial about their 4G internet that was good enough to run a board meeting from a beach.
Who would have thought this fantasy would become a reality where you can work from Bermuda or Barbados without hiding from your boss, without even wearing an office background imitation on your back — there’s a feature for that in Zoom and Google Meet.
Remote work fantasy is rapidly becoming a reality
It’s been over a year since the pandemic hit and the corporate world shifted to remote working. With the vaccination drive, everything seems to go back to normal. Everything except the labor market.
Most people who have tasted the freedom of working from home want to keep a flexible schedule forever. Saying this on behalf of 90% of Eleken’s team.
One recent study found that even bosses don’t necessarily want to pull their staff back — nearly 80% of companies plan to keep some degree of remote work post-pandemic. For business, a flexible schedule brings its own pros: greater employee satisfaction, increased productivity, lower operational costs, and a larger pool of global job applicants.
Dozens of tech companies already offer flexible work models. Just to illustrate the point:
- Jack Dorsey, the dual CEO of both Twitter and Square, said his employees can continue working remotely forever.
- Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook people may also work from home.
- Ford has recently approved a work-office “hybrid” model for its 30,000 employees.
Sounds like a remote work revolution, and cloud technologies are in the vanguard.
How enterprise SaaS companies saved remote workers
In March 2020, almost overnight, everyone who had a kind of job that could be done remotely started working remotely.
Locked at homes, people had to somehow communicate with the outside world and defend themselves from scammers looking to cash in on this most miserable of moments in our lives. Needless to say, that on-premise business software, locked away together with offices, couldn’t help.
Before I tell you how SaaS apps came to the rescue, you should meet Okta.
Okta is a company that provides 10,000+ enterprises with an SSO gateway — a tool that enables users to securely access multiple apps with just one set of credentials. Simply put, Okta’s line of work allows the company to see what SaaS apps enterprise users prefer.
That’s perfect optics to see the underlying trends across the entire cloud, and thankfully, this optics is available to everyone through Okta’s yearly reports.
Okta’s reports show that telecommuting was on-trend long before the lockdown. Zoom, for instance, has belonged to the top growing SaaS companies since 2016. But then in March 2020, the normal usage curve of SaaS apps reared up.
In no time, Zoom rocketed from #10 to #1 fastest growing SaaS company with a mindblowing 110% growth in unique users in March over February 2020. For comparison, Zoom grew only 6% during that same month-over-month period in 2019.
And it wasn’t just Zoom — three of the top seven fastest growing software companies were video conferencing apps. RingCentral ranked at #6 with 39% growth and Cisco Webex took #7 with 37% growth.
Network security was another concern for organizations moving workforces to the cloud, that’s why VPN tools were on fire. GlobalProtect by Palo Alto Networks ranked as #2 fastest growing with the audience broadening by 94% in March over February. Cisco AnyConnect finished close behind with 86% growth. Citrix ADC, a tool that improves application performance and secures apps from attacks, had 56% growth and the #4 spot.
The #5 app also belonged to a wide array of work-from-home security services — it was Security Awareness Training by Proofpoint.
Fastest growing B2B SaaS companies after a year of remoting
Once you eliminate your number one problem, number two gets a promotion. We’ve got the most basic remote necessities of security and communication covered just to figure out there are a ton of other issues with working from home:
- overthinking makes you stir crazy
- multitasking kills your productivity
- dining chair kills your back
As new problems arrive, changes happen with the list of top SaaS companies. The first thing you notice in the new Okta’s report summarizing the usage in the year 2020 is that Zoom has dropped down to #15.
The pandemic has accelerated the life cycle of telecommuting services so that they reached maturity and slowed down their traction. Most people who need an app for video calls already have one. The market is split between a few major players like Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams who are now copying each other's features and poaching each other's customers.
The list of SaaS companies with the fastest growth after a year working remotely differs completely from what we’ve seen at the very early part of the pandemic. If the first wave of Covid-related technology adoption was to support the very possibility of working from home, the second wave came to make remoting easier and more productive.
The list of high-growth SaaS companies is now dominated by Amazon Business. According to Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, last year the average worker in the US invested “15 hours of time and $561 in home equipment” to facilitate their workplaces. Looks like dining chairs killing their backs pissed Americans off just enough to spend an astonishing 1% of the annual GDP on better equipment.
Three hottest SaaS collaboration tools share the spotlight with Amazon Business — Miro, Figma and Monday take the #2, #3 and #4 spots respectively.
A people management platform Lattice got ranked as the #6 fastest growing app in 2020, and that’s the first time since 2016 when an HR brand got to the list — looks like companies are more than ever interested in developing teams and keeping employees engaged as they are working remotely.
During the pandemic, consumers have moved dramatically toward online channels, and companies had to respond by increasing the share of digital products in their portfolios. No wonder that the #9 fastest growing app became Sentry, the service for developers to diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of their code.
The last thematic cluster is security apps that provide a full range of protection. At #5 appeared Fortinet FortiGate with its firewalls against outside cyber attackers. Spot #8 belongs to the endpoint security service VMware Carbon Black. And rounding out our top ten password manager 1Password.
What is the future of SaaS in the work-from-home economy
In just a few months, the pandemic has brought years of change in the way companies do business. The possibility to work from anywhere has taken a quantum leap, thanks to the largest SaaS companies in particular.
The big expansion of fully remote or hybrid work models seems inevitable in the post-Covid era. But mixing remote and on-site work in the long term might be more challenging than it looks, despite its success during lockdowns.
Consider previous experiments in this field. Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, finished the company’s virtual-working attempt in 2013 because the team needed to “become one Yahoo! again”. HP Inc. failed with their remote experiment the same that year, to create a more connected workforce and drive greater collaboration and innovation.
Specific reasons may vary, but it’s clear that remoting brings both positive and negative effects. Some things simply become more difficult when you are not working altogether. It’s getting hard for newcomers to blend in, to teach and to learn, to build inclusivity and corporate culture.
All those difficulties are coming and we don’t know how to address them yet. So the SaaS startups that will launch to offer worthy solutions will probably ride the following wave of the most successful SaaS startups.
Except for the stellar problem-solving idea, a successful SaaS startup needs stellar product design. And if the idea is the task for an entrepreneur, in everything related to design you can count on Eleken.
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