Anatomy of a Winning SaaS Landing Page: Key Sections and Elements

If you're in the SaaS business, your landing page needs to be a conversion machine.

Why? Because the goal of any SaaS landing page is to turn website visitors into leads and paying customers.

The good news is that there's a proven formula to creating high-converting SaaS landing pages. One that's battle-tested by companies.

In this post, I'll share the must-have sections and elements that go into crafting a winning SaaS landing page structure. I'll also give you real-world examples along the way.

But before we dive into the landing page anatomy, there's something important you need to understand first...

Know Thy Audience

The #1 key to a high-converting SaaS landing page? Know your target audience inside and out.

You need to deeply understand:

• What goals they're trying to accomplish
• The specific problems keeping them from their goal
• The vocabulary they use to describe their problems
• The barriers that might keep them from buying your solution

When you nail your audience's hopes, dreams and pain points, you can craft landing page copy that speaks directly to them. This makes your SaaS offering feel like the obvious solution to their problem.

For example, let's say you have a project management SaaS for digital marketing agencies. You'd want your landing page to use terms like "client requests", "missed deadlines" and other vocabulary familiar to that audience.

And if you know what barriers might keep them from purchasing, you can be proactive and remove those obstacles.

With that out of the way, here are the sections and elements you need on your SaaS landing page.

Hero Section

The hero section is the first thing people see when they hit your landing page. As the name suggests, this section needs to be a home run.

Your hero section needs to:

• Briefly explain what your SaaS is
• Highlight the core benefit
• Be compelling enough to make people scroll

Usually that’s done with a short headline and a supportive subhead. Less is more: you want to drive your point home in fewer words.

And don’t forget to add a call to action (CTA) to this section. Some users might be returning to your landing page because they want to take the next step. Don’t make them scroll to the bottom of your page to do it.

Example Hero Sections:

Here's a great example of a well-crafted hero section from the fintech Dave:

Headline: Your ultimate Financial Friend
Supportive Subhead: Manage your money with products designed to make finances easier

Dave has products that allow users to track savings towards personal goals, and earn extra cash.

But instead of talking in-depth about the product, their homepage starts with a line about the benefit to the visitor. He’s your friend. He’s going to help you manage your money.

The details on how he’ll do that can come later.

In addition to a great opening line, Dave also has amazing branding.

Dave’s mascot looks like a nerdy teddy bear - something that looks huggable AND will give you good advice. And that sells the message of a “financial friend” even better.

But you don’t need exceptional branding to craft a great hero.

Here’s another great hero from Wise:

Headline: Send Money Globally for Less
Supportive Subhead: Save on super fast transfers worldwide. Wise is up to 3x cheaper than the banks, and free from hidden fees.

This hero is a lot more straight-forward than Dave’s. No teddy bear here. Just a view of their app to illustrate how it looks.

But it does have one BIG thing in common with Dave - it clearly explains the benefit to the user. You can transfer money globally for less. Up to 3x cheaper than a bank. And it will be super fast, too.

How you approach your header will depend heavily on that target audience. So make sure you understand their problems and goals.

Show Your Product

After hooking people with your hero section, you can get into the details of your SaaS.

Give people a high-level overview of your product. Don’t get too in the weeds here, just give customers an idea of how the product looks and feels.

Your overview should do the following:

• Give users a visual on what the product is.
• Show the product solving their problem.

Remember, an image is worth a thousand words. You can solidify your product in your user’s mind with a good image or animation of your product in action.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to show your product directly after the hero. You can mix and match these next few sections depending on how you want to introduce your product.

Example Product Sections:

Let’s look at Wise’s hero again for a moment, because they also show their product in the same section:

This is a great high-level overview of their product. It does a few things:

• Shows the user it’s an application
• Shows the user it will send money to a recipient in another country
• Shows how fast that recipient will get their money
• Gives the user an idea of what they’d pay in fees
• Even more important - shows how much money they could save in fees

But what if your SaaS works with a real world product like a smartwatch or credit card?

Go ahead and show that too. Here’s Dave again, showing their app on a mobile phone, with their credit card:

What if your SaaS is more technical? Perhaps something that designers or developers would use to create professional products of their own?

In that case, feel free to show off the product in a little more depth. Bubble has an animation that shows how quickly users can create applications with their drag & drop features:

And Webflow has an image showing how its design interface looks, with some features highlighted in the image:

Product Features

Showing your SaaS’s features is a great way to hammer home your product.

Don't simply list out features for the sake of features. Instead, focus on how each feature directly benefits your customer.

And don’t include every feature here. Curate it down to the big selling points.

Example Features:

Hotjar records user sessions on your website. You can watch those recordings and see how they’re interacting with it.

But when Hotjar talks about this feature, it doesn’t lead with talking about the recorded sessions. It leads with what you can do with those recordings.

You can uncover opportunities for optimization. You can spot problems with your user’s experience. You can use the recordings to illustrate the problem for coworkers so you can get buy-in to fix it.

The feature is the ability to record. But what they can do with the recordings is where the gold is.

Here’s another example:

Dave has features that allow users to earn extra money. They can do things like take surveys or apply for small jobs.

But again, Dave doesn’t lead with the feature. They lead with the benefit: you can earn extra money quickly.

Social Proof

Social proof can take many forms, but their goal is always the same: Build trust.

You want your social proof to show visitors that your SaaS works for others.

Here are some great examples of social proof on landing pages:

Show big numbers

Just knowing that your SaaS has been used by others is social proof.

For example, Bubble shows that over 3 millions apps have been built using their platform:

These don’t necessarily have to be paying customers, either. If you have a free product launch and many users get the chance to try your app for free, that can be a number that you publish.

Showcase what people have done with your SaaS

Let’s say users are successfully creating things using your SaaS.

Maybe it’s a video editor, or a website designer.

Showing examples of those finished products is a great way to show social proof.

It gives site visitors a solid idea of what they could create using your product by showing what other customers have made.

And this doesn’t have to be in-depth. Webflow does this by showing several screenshots of webpages their users have created:

Reviews

Reviews are so common because they work.

People want to know another person’s experience using a product. If it’s a shirt, they go to reviews to hear how it fit, how the cloth felt, and see how it looks on a regular person.

If it’s an app, they go to reviews to see if the app crashes, or deletes their information, or if they can’t figure out how to use it.

So collecting and putting reviews on your landing page is a great way to show social proof.

Education:

Even apps with a low barrier to entry still has its own hurdles to get over. Dave is a fintech company, so users might be worried about the following:

• Security: Users are sharing financial data with the app. They want to know their information won’t get stolen.
• Running into fees: Banks have used fees (like overdraft fees) to take money from users accounts. They want to know Dave won’t do that
• Support: Money is important. Users want to know they can get help if they are having trouble with their account.

Dave gets in front of all these hurdles in 1 section:

Coverage:

It’s important for visitors to know what your product covers.

For example, Firebase helps users build and scale applications, but users need to know what it works with.

After all, most businesses are working with a suite of products. And they want to make sure that they’ll all place nicely together.

So Firebase shows them just that:

Wise also shows their coverage. A visitor knows that they will send money to other countries. But what currencies does it work with, exactly?

Luckily, they have a section that tells you:

FAQs:

Still have objections? Knock 'em down with an FAQ section.

FAQs anticipate and proactively answer any lingering questions or concerns your visitors may have. This helps build additional authority and credibility around your SaaS.

Finally, you can use a Frequently Asked Questions section, or FAQ, to answer specific questions that you get often.

TalkSpace uses an FAQ section to answer site visitor’s biggest questions, like if their insurance will cover online therapy.

Call-to-Action

You've made your case. Now it's time to ask your site visitors to take action.

But which action should you ask them to take?

It might be too early to ask visitors to open their wallets.

Luckily, there are a few options, depending on how expensive your product is and who your audience is.

You could have a free plan or free trial for visitors to start with.

Or for B2B enterprise software, you could ask users to schedule a demo.

Optimize, Rinse, Repeat

The work doesn't stop once your landing page is live.

You'll want to continually test different landing page elements to see what performs best.

Here are the landing page metrics to keep an eye on:

• Conversion Rate: Did more users click on your CTA?
• Bounce Rate: Did fewer visitors leave the site quickly (aka bounced)?
• Time on Page: Did visitors stay on the page longer?
• Scroll Depth: How far down to visitors get before they leave?

Split-test headlines and CTAs against control versions. Then swap out the winners and test again.

It's an endless cycle of optimization to maximize your SaaS conversion rates.