So, you’ve got your Pay Per Click or Email Marketing campaign up and running, and you’re looking for ways to maximize the results of either or both. You know people are clicking on your ads or visiting your site, but you’re not sure why they aren’t converting. You should ask yourself: “Where am I sending my website visitors? Where are my potential customers directed when they click on my ad/email?” If they are being sent to your website’s homepage, that could be the problem. What you may need is a landing page.
What Are Landing Pages?
When it comes to online marketing, a landing page is a page specifically designed to receive the inbound traffic from a particular advertisement. Often used to enhance the conversion results of a PPC or email marketing campaign, the landing page is generally a brief, optimized, sparsely designed page seeking one of five particular actions:
1. To get a visitor to click a link
2. To get a visitor to make a purchase
3. To collect a lead (usually achieved by encouraging a visitor to fill out a contact form leaving phone, email address, etc.)
4. To get a visitor to tell a friend about an offer
5. To get a visitor to learn something (can also be used as a lead generation tool, possibly by soliciting commenting/feedback)
For the purposes of collecting information, the landing page can make it easier to track and analyze visitor actions. In addition, the page will feature content that is closely related to the advertisement or link that leads to it, thus increasing your chance of success with conversions.
Making the Most of Your Landing Page
Two elements combine to help you make the most of your landing page: content and design. While this is true of nearly any webpage, it is particularly important when working with landing pages because they are specifically designed to move a potential customer quickly toward a conversion behavior. While other pages on your site (contact page, about us page) serve more purely informational purposes, the landing page is there solely to drive conversions. For this reason, content and design must work in concert to catch the eye without distracting the visitor, and lead the visitor toward the desired result.
Keep it Simple
An effective landing page will be simple in both its design and its message.
If using the template of the larger site, you can remove unnecessary navigation from the headers and sidebars—these can be distracting to a visitor, and lead them away from the particular desired conversion behavior. Keep everything above the fold. There should be no vertical scrolling, and absolutely no horizontal scrolling, required on a landing page.
Include all of the elements necessary for conversion. If you are seeking to collect information or leads, present a short, simple and self-explanatory contact form above the fold, likely to the right of the text content. If you are seeking a purchase, make your BUY button visible and easily distinguishable.
Include a Prominent Call to Action
Both the design and the content of the site should be based around this principle.
Keep text short and to the point. Use keywords related to the ads that led the visitor here in headers and subheaders. Make use of bulleted lists and short paragraphs, using action-oriented language, to move visitors quickly through the text.
Text should be easily scanned. Use headers, subheads, bulleted lists, and other web-friendly techniques to make the text easily digestible.
Include your call to action in the first sentence, as well as the first header.
Build Confidence
Think of a landing page as a quick sales pitch. Think about possible roadblocks, anticipate them, and lead visitors past them. Utilize testimonials, favorable statistics, and other information you might bring up when speaking to a client face-to-face or on the phone. Make sure the design highlights these elements.
Test, Test, Test…
Once you have built your initial landing page, test it on friends and family. Make sure people of varied levels of Web expertise can perform the desired conversion behavior using your landing page. Once your landing page has passed what many in the industry lovingly call “The Mom Test,” perform A-B testing once it is live. Remove certain elements, add in others, and see which version of your page performs the best. Once you have a reliable formula, go with it on subsequent landing pages, but don’t be afraid to continue testing and looking for an even more optimized user experience.
Conclusion
Using a landing page can greatly increase the success of your PPC or email marketing campaign, simply by providing potential customers the doorway to conversion.