How I’m getting a 15% email signup rate for a product that doesn’t exist

I launched a landing page for Cicero.ly back on March 29th to gauge interest before building. I’ve done little marketing since the only purpose of this landing page was to get validation from just a few people. We don’t have a product yet and I didn’t want people waiting too long and getting annoyed that they can’t test anything.

There is a science to UX/UI and Design in general. All you need to do is follow the science and tell a good story to optimize conversion rates. Here is how we’re doing it at Cicero.

How did we optimize our landing page to maximize conversion?

Optimize Copy:

• Used these 21 damn good copywriting tips. Just please avoid marketing jargon and make the product clear
• Interviewed 22 people about the copy on our website. This is key! Just walk them through the website and ask them to read out loud + give a stream of consciousness on what they are reading.

Design principles:

• These UX audit checklist templates are incredible. I recommend you copy this to your own Notion and follow along. I can’t recommend this enough!
• I also recommend Laws of UX. Another incredible evidence-based goad to design.
• The basic premise of the design is to keep it as similar to other websites as possible. Reduce cognitive load on your user
• Make signing up super easy!

Interview:

• I mentioned this earlier but keep interviewing people. Friends, family, and those that sign up. Do not start marketing until you have talked to a dozen people and kept iterating on your website. This YC combinator interview guide is more for product validation, but it gets the point across.
• A key insight we got from interviews was, “Sounds good, but I still don’t get it”. So we had two choices:
• Either create Mockups to show our product will look OR create other visual elements.

Give an idea of how the app functions:

• I did not want to insert a half-assed Mockup without doing a lot of validation on it. So instead we focused on getting value across in the easiest way possible.
• That’s where Lottie comes in. Think of Lottie as a really nice gif maker that is friendly for websites.
• We hired someone from upwork.com to make 3 Lotties for just $150! And they are the ones you see on the website. This helped people understand the value much better.

Watch users use your website:

• Install something like hotjar.com and tag people who click on elements, scroll all the way down, stop and read sections, etc. Look at your numbers. Does this match industry standards? If not, interview people and figure out why they are not reading, scrolling, or clicking.