🧑‍💻 How to Make a Pre-Launch Waitlist Landing Page

At GetWaitlist.com, we've carved out a niche as experts in the domain of waitlist landing pages, having supported thousands of businesses in their critical pre-launch stages. Our experience has taught us how to create waitlist landing pages that not only capture the imagination of potential customers, but also channel their excitement into a pre-launch viral hype. We've crafted this guide to share our insights and best practices on how to create amazing pre-launch landing pages, and to go viral with a waitlist before you go live.

Great question! This is the right place to start. Too many people make a landing page straight away. While it's great to make a landing page so you can immediately start gauging interest with a Waitlist, you've got to make sure the landing page has the strongest possible chances of resonating with your audience. To do so, it's really important that you've got well-thought-through designs and mockups, maybe even some simple voiceover demo videos that you can use to illustrate your product vision to potential users. We've written about this at length in our How to Test Startup Ideas blog post. Section 2 ("Second Step") is all about how and why you should design your product in Figma. If you don't have polished designs already, then take a quick look at that section!

You've got tons of great options. Landing page builders such as Framer, Typedream, and Squarespace (among dozens of others) have democratized the creation of high-quality, attractive landing pages, making it accessible for startups to establish an online presence swiftly and cost-effectively. These platforms eliminate the need for coding expertise, enabling you to design and launch professional-looking pages with intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces. With an array of customizable templates and design elements, users can craft a page that resonates with their brand identity and appeals to their target audience in a matter of hours, not days. This low barrier to entry, combined with affordable pricing plans, ensures that even startups with limited resources can create a compelling pre-launch waitlist landing page, reducing time to market and allowing founders to focus on other critical aspects of their business.

Does it matter which landing page builder you pick? No, not really. All the major ones on the first page of Google research results are just fine, and we at Waitlist support pretty much every one of them. They're easy to integrate with, and all of them have affordable entry-level prices (think in the range of $20/month). You should pick whichever looks the most suitable for you to get started.

Think about the overarching purpose: building a pre-launch waitlist landing page is an important step in validating demand for your startup idea while generating viral hype. This digital experience serves as your initial touchpoint with potential customers, offering a glimpse into your product's vision, value proposition, and its potential impact on their lives or businesses. To achieve this, your landing page must be well-designed to capture interest and encourage users to sign up for more information. This entails a clear, compelling headline, a succinct description of the product's benefits, and a straightforward call-to-action (CTA) such as "Sign Up for Early Access." You'll want to have such CTAs everywhere: basically, even as the user scrolls down the page, there should always be a "Sign Up", "Get Started", "Join the Mailing List", or similar pre-launch CTA for registering the user's interest and them giving you their email address.

Visual elements are super important for your landing page. A picture tells a thousand words, a video tells a thousand more. You should incorporate those high-quality Figma graphics that we mentioned earlier for your actual product overview, along with great stock photography or AI-generated illustrations that match your brand and vibe. For instance, if your product is a tech tool designed for creative professionals, featuring sleek, modern design elements and subtle, cool illustrations will likely capture their interest. Examples like Bookkeeper AI, below, demonstrate how effectively simple visuals can convey the product's essence, making it tangible and relatable for the audience even before its official launch.

Social proof is another critical component that should not be overlooked. Including testimonials from beta testers or industry experts can lend credibility to your offering. If possible, showcase any recognitions, or press mentions your startup has received. A section dedicated to frequently asked questions (FAQs) can also address common concerns or objections, making the decision to join the waitlist easier for potential users. Some people love to be sceptics, especially while a product is pre-launch and hasn't been released yet, so all the discussion is theoretical and it's easy for them to doubt and nitpick. By listing a few testimonials that show how important the problem is, and how great your product will be for solving it, you can nip in the bud many of those product-strategy questions and encourage users to engage.

To foster a sense of exclusivity and urgency, consider implementing referral programs or limited-time offers for early sign-ups. Tactics such as "Invite friends and move up the waitlist" can tap into the natural human tendency towards competition and social sharing, thus amplifying your reach organically. This is what we know best here at GetWaitlist.com, and the success of our platform can be partly attributed to such viral mechanisms. At the time of writing, our waitlists have referred more than 3 million signups: this stuff really works. Your earliest adopters are the people who most want your product. They want to be your biggest supporters! They will totally spread the word in exchange for early or enhanced access.

All the above is good information on how to set up a nice-looking pre-launch landing page. But now let's go into detail on creating the Waitlist component and integrating it into your landing page. We're going to use GetWaitlist.com, which makes it easy to create a customized waitlist widget and add it to your website. You can use the Widget Builder to customize the colors, styles, and text of the Widget to align the Waitlist Widget's aesthetics with your brand identity and your website's visual design. There are several Widget types available , small and large, so you can have the right style to fit into your website.

Moreover, GetWaitlist.com provides many advanced features such as custom email configuration, allowing businesses to communicate with their waitlist subscribers in a manner that's consistent with their branding and messaging tone. We also support the creation of custom questions within the sign-up process, enabling businesses to gather specific insights about their audience. Furthermore, with robust email validation, verification, and security options, GetWaitlist.com can help you ensure that only genuine emails are registered, maintaining the integrity of the waitlist and protecting against spam or fraudulent sign-ups. These comprehensive features collectively empower businesses to build a highly engaged and qualified pre-launch audience.

To get a full feeling for what you can do with your Waitlist Widget, log into your dashboard. Getting started is free, and you have access to the vast majority of our features. Otherwise, if you want to keep reading, you can also check out our article on How to Use Waitlist as a Signup Form, our documentation, platforms and features overview. We've got tons of great features to make your launch a success. If you have niche requirements like wanting to show leaderboards or hide the number of signups or only allow people with certain email addreses to sign up -- don't worry, we've got those, too. In the years of building out GetWaitlist.com as the leading pre-launch waitlist provider, we've built features to cover most use cases. If there's something that you need that we don't have already, you can always let us know.

his is the thing we're all here for! Now that you've got your landing page designed and beautifully up and running, and you've got your Waitlist Widget, too, how do you put your Waitlist Widget into your Landing Page? Thankfully, this is super easy. No matter which website builder you're using to make your landing page, we've got a guide for it. Whether it's Carrd or Wix or Weebly or Squarespace or any other service — it's easy to do. Our Widget will integrate in any website builder, especially because it can be wrapped in an iframe, which is a universal standard for including one webpage in another webpage. Check out our documentation and you'll find the steps for your website builder in no time.

The integration steps themselves are super easy: integrating the waitlist widget into your landing page only ever requires copy-pasting a few lines of code. You don't need to code anything up yourself, it's just copy-and-paste. Again, if you need any help integrating your waitlist widget into your landing page, you can chat with us and we will help you get it done. We're here to help you have a fantastic pre-launch experience, and then an even better product launch afterwards.

Integrating analytics tools from the outset is crucial for tracking the performance of your landing page. This includes monitoring key metrics such as visit-to-sign-up conversion rates, bounce rates, and the effectiveness of different acquisition channels. Tools like Google Analytics or more sophisticated platforms like Mixpanel can provide invaluable insights, helping you refine your approach based on real user data. The nice thing about GetWaitlist.com is that we've got some pretty sophisticated integrated Analytics, even things like UTM Parameter Tracking built in. We make it easy for you to see how much traffic is going to your pre-launch list, where it's coming from, who's making referrals, etc. We're here to help you figure out which of your marketing channels are most effective.

Getting people on your Waitlist is only half the battle! Of course you want to keep them engaged as well, and to buy your product and tell their friends once you launch. Maintaining engagement with those who have signed up is essential for keeping the momentum going. Automated email sequences can nurture this relationship, providing regular updates on your progress, sharing relevant content, and building anticipation for the launch. This continuous engagement not only validates your concept further but also solidifies your early adopter base, setting a strong foundation for your startup's market entry. Again, here at Waitlist, we've endeavored to be a full-service, white-glove solution for your pre-launch waitlisting experience. We've got not just referral marketing, but also email marketing built in. Our custom emails provide a powerful solution for sending newsletters and staying in touch with your audience.

In sum, a well-crafted pre-launch waitlist landing page is more than just a tool for capturing emails; it's an opportunity to validate demand, build anticipation, and lay the groundwork for a community of early adopters. By combining high-quality content, well-prepared mockups and designs, and Waitlist's combination of email and referral marketing, startups can use GetWaitlist.com to create viral loops for their product long before they launch. If you're building new products and trying to start up something new, you not only want to validate demand for your idea, but you also want to use your community of early adopters and evangelists to get the word out for you. That viral growth marketing is the most powerful thing that you can do in the early days of building your business. We are here to help!