What is a Landing Page?
A landing page, not to be confused with a web page, is a page that has been created purely for the purpose of gathering leads. They contain no links, minimal information and most importantly, a contact form.
They live separately from your main website and are designed only to receive targeted campaign traffic. By separating your landing pages from your website, analytics and reporting becomes a lot easier.
Why create landing pages?
There are two reasons:
- to get leads – called a lead generation page OR
- to ‘warm up’ potential customers to your product or service before sending them further into the sales funnel – called a click-through page.
Lead Generation Landing Pages
The most valuable piece of information that you can get from a lead generation page is someone’s email address. By getting someone to provide you with their email, it gives you permission to continue talking and marketing to them. You can then use the most powerful 1-to-1 communication tool, email.
Click-through landing pages
These are designed as a channel between a marketing ad and it’s final destination. The goal is to ‘warm up’ the potential customer by giving them a bit more information about your product or service. Click-through landing pages are usually used for e-commerce sites to ready a customer, just before they make a purchase.
What are landing pages used for?
The uses for landing pages are almost limitless, but here are some of the most common:
- To collect personal information (to generate leads) in exchange for: Reports, e-books, e-courses, newsletters, podcasts, checklists, blog subscriptions, webinar registrations, presentations, videos, slides or consultation services. Basically they’re filling in their information because you’re offering them something that they want.
- To ‘warm up’ potential customers to your offering to: Purchase your product or service, become a customer or subscriber, or any of the lead generation uses listed above to use an an introductory page before sending them to your lead generation form.
Landing pages can, and should be used for all of your marketing campaign needs.
How to create an effective landing page
No coding skills? No worries. There are lots of programs available that allow you to create landing pages easily as a subdomain of your main website. The good thing is that these programs usually offer analytics tracking for really insightful stats of how your landing pages are doing. Some of the most popular systems include LeadPages and Unbounce. They link up with WordPress, include A/B Split testing, easy to embed and share links, and almost all the data that you’d get from Google Analytics.
This is a tough one as every business is different and will have a different purpose and offering, however these are the basics that every landing page should have:
- Simplicity – Remove all navigation and extra links so that there is only one clear thing for users to do, click your call to action (CTA).
- Message match – You need to reinforce the messaging they read in order to click the link that leads to your landing page. Visitors are impatient, so you only have a couple of seconds to grab their attention quickly and clearly, by matching your messages.
An example of a good and bad message match on a landing page:
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By creating landing pages with a good message match, its assuring the customer that they made a good choice to click. A weak message match will result in a higher bounce rate and a lower conversion rate. No one wants to spend their advertising dollars on a wasted click, so make your landing pages relevant, clear and concise.
- Test, test and test again – You wouldn’t keep baking lots of vanilla cupcakes for your bakery if the chocolate ones always sold out first; landing pages are the same. Have at least two tests going at once and use a program like Lead Pages or Unbounce mentioned earlier. Or try Optimizely for free.
- Provide an Incentive – the majority of visitors to landing pages are first time visitors, so give them a reason to stay. Rather than your call to action saying ‘Contact Us’, try ‘Speak with a xyz expert today. FREE no obligation quotes’ or, ‘I want to learn xyz’, this will provide them with more of an incentive to fill in the form. For e-commerce sites, provide first time users with a discount like, ‘10% off xyz for all 1st time buyers today’.
- Optimize your ‘thankyou’ page – once users have filled in your form, does it just say, ‘thanks for your submission’, or ‘we will be in contact soon’?. These pages need to be clear, tell the user when they can expect to hear from you, who will contact them and how. Encourage users to stick around by providing them with links to your social media pages or main website.
- Connect with users at every stage of the sales funnel –
So now that you know what landing pages are and how they can help you, try implementing them with your next sales and marketing campaign.
And if you’re serious about creating a killer landing page, check out TheLandingPageCourse for a free 11-part course.