Sales & Conversion
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
I once watched a client spend two weeks debating whether every heading on their landing page should start with a verb. Two weeks. While competitors were launching campaigns and capturing leads, this team was stuck in grammatical paralysis.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most business landing pages fail not because they're ugly, but because they follow the same tired playbook everyone else uses. When I started building landing pages for SaaS and ecommerce businesses, I noticed a pattern – the "best practices" weren't creating the best results.
After 7 years and hundreds of landing pages later, I've learned that breaking conventions often works better than following them. The most successful pages I've built deliberately ignored industry standards and focused on what actually converts visitors into customers.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why following landing page "best practices" keeps you mediocre
The exact framework I use to build high-converting business landing pages
Real examples of unconventional approaches that doubled conversion rates
How to test bold design decisions without risking your business
When to break rules vs when to follow them
Ready to stop building landing pages that look like everyone else's? Let's dive into what actually works in 2025.
Industry Reality
What every business owner has been told about landing pages
Walk into any marketing conference or open any "conversion optimization" blog, and you'll hear the same landing page gospel repeated endlessly:
Keep it simple and clean – Minimal design with lots of white space
One clear call-to-action – Never confuse visitors with multiple options
Benefits over features – Focus on what it does for them, not what it is
Social proof above the fold – Testimonials and trust badges prominently displayed
Mobile-first design – Optimize for mobile users first
This conventional wisdom exists because it's safe. It's what worked for some companies in controlled case studies. It's what gets taught in courses and regurgitated in blog posts. The problem? When everyone follows the same playbook, every landing page starts looking identical.
I've seen countless businesses implement these "proven" strategies only to achieve mediocre results. Their pages convert, sure, but they're swimming in a red ocean of sameness. They're optimizing for best practices instead of optimizing for their specific audience and unique value proposition.
The biggest issue with following landing page orthodoxy is that it assumes all businesses, all audiences, and all contexts are the same. A B2B SaaS selling to enterprise clients shouldn't use the same approach as an ecommerce store selling handmade goods. Yet most "best practice" advice treats them identically.
That's where my contrarian approach comes in.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
The wake-up call came during a project with a B2B SaaS client. They wanted a landing page for their free trial, and like any good designer, I built exactly what the textbooks recommend: clean layout, single CTA, benefit-focused copy, testimonials above the fold.
The page looked professional. It followed every best practice. And it converted at a depressing 0.8%.
Meanwhile, I noticed their biggest competitor had this chaotic-looking page with multiple CTAs, dense copy, and what appeared to be every design sin in the book. But here's the kicker – it was working. Their competitor was growing faster, getting more signups, and dominating the market.
That's when I realized I'd been optimizing for design awards, not business results. I was creating pages that looked good in my portfolio but failed in the real world where businesses need leads, not likes.
The problem became clear: I was treating landing pages like digital brochures instead of sales tools. I was designing for other designers, not for the people who actually needed to buy the product.
This experience forced me to question everything. What if the "best practices" were actually holding my clients back? What if being different was more valuable than being "correct"?
I started looking at landing pages from completely different industries. I studied direct response ads, infomercials, and even old-school sales letters. The pattern that emerged was fascinating: the highest-converting pages often broke traditional design rules but followed psychological principles.
That's when I developed what I now call the "Marketing Laboratory" approach to landing page design.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of following design best practices, I started treating every landing page as a marketing experiment. The goal shifted from creating beautiful pages to creating pages that actually moved the business forward.
The Foundation: Audience-First Design
I stopped asking "What does a good landing page look like?" and started asking "What does my specific audience need to see to take action?" This meant diving deep into customer research before touching design tools.
For one ecommerce client with over 1,000 products, I discovered their homepage was being used as a doorway to the catalog. Instead of fighting this behavior, I embraced it. I turned their homepage into a product gallery, breaking the cardinal rule of "one clear CTA." The result? Conversion rate doubled.
The CTVP Framework
I developed a framework I call CTVP: Channel, Target, Value Proposition. Every landing page element gets optimized for these three variables:
Channel – Where is the traffic coming from? (Facebook ads vs. Google search vs. email)
Target – Who exactly is clicking? (First-time visitors vs. returning customers)
Value Proposition – What specific promise matches their intent?
This meant creating multiple landing page variations instead of one "perfect" page. For Facebook ad traffic, I'd create pages that immediately reinforced the ad's message. For Google search traffic, I'd build pages that answered the specific query.
The E-commerce Style Experiment
My biggest breakthrough came with a SaaS client who wasn't converting trial signups. Instead of optimizing their traditional SaaS landing page, I tried something radical: I designed it like an e-commerce product page.
Instead of walls of text explaining benefits, I created:
A slideshow of product screenshots (like product photos)
Minimal descriptive text
One prominent "Start Free Trial" button (positioned like "Add to Cart")
Zero feature lists, zero testimonials above the fold
My client was skeptical. This violated everything they'd learned about SaaS marketing. But after a 30-day A/B test, the e-commerce style page converted significantly better than their traditional layout.
The Psychology Behind Breaking Rules
The success wasn't random. When everyone in your industry follows the same design patterns, those patterns become invisible to your audience. Being different isn't just creative – it's strategic attention-grabbing.
I started applying this principle systematically: What does everyone in this industry do? How can we do the opposite while still serving the user's needs?
The Framework
Design for your audience's context and expectations
Testing Strategy
Always validate bold design decisions with data
Visual Hierarchy
Make the most important elements impossible to miss
Iteration Process
Build, test, learn, and improve continuously
The results spoke for themselves. The ecommerce-style SaaS landing page didn't just convert better – it converted 2.3x better than the traditional version. But more importantly, it changed how I approached every subsequent project.
For the client with 1,000+ products, turning their homepage into a product catalog increased their conversion rate from 1.2% to 2.4%. They went from struggling with navigation issues to having their most-viewed page become their most-converting page.
The CTVP framework resulted in an average conversion lift of 40-80% across different client projects. By matching landing page design to specific traffic sources and audience segments, we eliminated the guesswork and started designing with intention.
But the most surprising result was how these "unconventional" pages performed long-term. Traditional best-practice pages often saw conversion rates decline over time as audiences became banner-blind to common patterns. The pages that broke conventions maintained their performance because they stood out in a sea of sameness.
Timeline-wise, most experiments showed results within 2-4 weeks. The key was having enough traffic volume to reach statistical significance quickly. Smaller tests needed 6-8 weeks to gather meaningful data.
These results taught me that the best landing page isn't the one that follows rules – it's the one that serves your specific business goals and audience needs most effectively.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the key lessons learned from building hundreds of unconventional landing pages:
Context beats convention every time. Your audience's expectations and behavior matter more than design trends.
Different is more valuable than perfect. Standing out from competitors often trumps following best practices.
Test boldly, but measure carefully. Wild experiments need solid data to validate or invalidate assumptions.
Industry doesn't matter as much as psychology. Sometimes the best inspiration comes from completely different sectors.
One size fits nobody. The most successful businesses create multiple landing pages for different traffic sources and audiences.
Speed beats perfection. It's better to test three "good enough" variations than spend months perfecting one page.
Question everything, but serve users first. Break rules that don't serve your audience, but never break usability fundamentals.
What I'd do differently: I'd start with even bolder experiments from day one. Many of my best-performing pages came from ideas that initially seemed "too risky" to try.
Common pitfalls to avoid: Don't break rules just to be different. Every design decision should have a strategic reason behind it. Also, make sure you have enough traffic to test properly – small sample sizes lead to false conclusions.
This approach works best for businesses in competitive markets where differentiation matters. It's less effective for highly regulated industries where trust and credibility outweigh attention-grabbing design.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Create separate landing pages for each acquisition channel (organic, paid, referral)
Test product demo screenshots in slideshow format vs. traditional feature lists
Use trial signup flow as primary CTA, not "Learn More"
A/B test industry-unconventional layouts against standard SaaS templates
For your Ecommerce store
Design product pages that feel more like shopping experiences than brochures
Test homepage-as-catalog approach for stores with large inventories
Optimize for mobile shopping behavior first, desktop second
Create landing pages that match your ad creative style and messaging exactly