Why Landing Pages are Important

Sharing Is Caring

I'd like to take a moment, if I may, to share a little bit of what I have been doing over the past week. I was tasked in getting to know everything one can know learn about landing pages. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with landing pages, or unsure of exactly what they, allow me to elaborate a tad.

Landing pages are web pages that have been specifically optimized for web marketing purposes or campaigns. Incoming views can come from a wide variety of locations, such as pay-per-click ads, email marketing campaigns, etc.

"For example, with a pay-per-click campaign advertising something like 'blue widgets' it's very important that visitors get to information specifically about 'blue widgets' immediately (and not your home page). When someone clicks on an ad campaign about blue widgets the landing page is themed about blue widgets. This page is optimized to help increase an action such as capturing an email address in return for downloading information or an offer (in this case we would offer something about blue widgets)."

Parachutes and Preconceptions

There is a saying that everyone has heard a thousand times between grad ceremonies and cheesy "FW: inspirational!" chain emails… it goes something like "A mind is like a parachute, it works much better when it is open." Going into this exercise, I was in the mindset that landing pages were an old-school practice, spiralling into a painful death brought on by awful design decisions and suspicious looking content over the years. On top of that, the internet has trained me to be weary of coming across a page asking for any piece of my information… so my doubts were quite high about the relevancy of landing pages in this day and age. Are they?

Yes, landing pages are incredibly relevant.

They are, in fact, one of the best manners in converting your audience - or rather prospective audience - and generating leads. A good landing page will take users and intrigue, persuade, or confirm them, then invite them to dig further into your offerings. A successful landing page will be both beneficial for the publisher and the viewer; the publisher has gained a valuable lead, and the viewer has successfully found what they were looking for (or at is it pertinent to their request) and is happy with receiving something valuable.

Fix What Is Lacking, Remove the Rest

The problem with many of the landing pages out there comes down a simple answer: most landing pages out there are not being optimized or utilized to their full potential. Your everyday typical "download my stuff because just do it I dare you" landing page will lose more than half of its visitors within the first couple seconds. Apparently I am not the only one who has doubted landing pages…

Without delving too deep into the ultimate landing page strategy, let's go over four basic ideas that can help transform the average landing page into a conversion-maker.

1. Less Is More (usually): Just like all forms of design, using fewer elements and only including what is critical will give you the greatest results. By freeing up whitespace, you can strategically place the remaining text, images, forms, and/or buttons in the optimal location, drawing in the viewers to exactly where you desire. It is amazing how much design and psychology will intersect with one another. And remember, with so few people sticking around the check out what the page is about, is it absolutely important to let people exactly what they are looking at, and how clicking here was the correct decision.
2. Gather Only What You Need: People are suspicious of forms. Any time you are asking someone to divulge a piece of information about themselves, little red flags and bells sound off. Use only the information that directly pertains to your lead generation, and use on the necessary fields. 4 - 5 (this includes the "submit" button!) should be the absolute maximum number of fields required. This can be name (is their last name crucial to your collection needs?), email address, website, phone number (again, is this crucial for you to have? In some cases yes, but generally no.). Sending an email out thanking them for registering, as opposed to a redirection, will help establish a relationship.
3. Be Valuable: Exactly why  would someone want to give you their personal information? Why would they want to receive information from you? Honesty, value, and respect are not only treasured, but generally expected. Offer a reward for someone clicking through to your landing pages. Thank them. 
4. Analyze, Optimize, And Do It Again: For an optimal landing page, it is important to track and measure it's success. There are many ways to analyze how your landing page is doing (traffic, bounce rates, event tracking, etc.), but consider doing A/B testing, changing up the reward, and identifying your target base. Goal setting is a major asset as well. What? Finally, remember that the static page is (mostly) dead. You must be continuously changing, analyzing, and improving you website and landing pages. As industries change because of events, happenings, and trends, you must adapt to consider them.

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Web Marketing Team

At Custom Fit, we are doing a lot of work with landing pages. We are constantly trying to stay at the top of the curve for our clients, so that we can create the greatest conversion rate we possibly can. We are all about creating results for you, and can provide the data analysis to back it up.

Leave a comment down below if you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you.

Sep 07, 2012
From the Custom Fit Online team

Filed in // Content Development, Website Optimization, Search Engine Marketing