Landing Pages
Landing pages can serve various purposes. It is important to remember that while you may want a landing page to compare your site statistics or advertising statistics, this is the first impression you will make on certain clients. It is important to make a good first impression.
There are different types of landing pages.
Information based landing pages: This landing page is provided as a source of information for your visitor. For example if someone does a search for the term “garden hoses” and you have a page with information regarding garden hoses, the visitor would be taken right to the source (the landing page) of the information they are in search of. The link would not take the visitor to a home page and make them search for the topic from there. Many website publishers will sell advertising space on these landing pages as a means of generating revenue. This is not a typical page found on a retail website. Information based landing pages are to inform your visitor well and to sell ad space.
Transaction based landing pages: These landing pages are put in place because you want to have some sort of interaction with the visitor. This can be a contact form where you get their information for a lead or you want them to purchase something. These landing pages are something all of us have come upon. Perhaps you have come to a landing page that tells you that you can go on to get the free clip art or free information you want if you just fill out this form (with your information of course) before you continue. These landing pages are a great way to generate leads and get the go ahead to email someone without fear of sending “spam”. Realtors for example may offer MLS listings if a user registers to use their site. On this landing page the realtor will have the visitor fill out their information including contact information and then once the form is submitted they can search for homes. The realtor is then free to contact this person using that information that they willingly gave on the landing page.
Successful landing pages: One way to tell if your landing page is successful is to look at your “conversion rate”. You want to see how many visitors you are bringing in to your landing page. You should also be aware of how the visitor is coming to that landing page by having proper coding in place. Then you want to see how many of those visitors gave the information requested on the landing page. For those that fill out the information and it is submitted from that landing page you have a successful conversion. Using this conversion rate you can measure the level of success you are having with your landing page and the marketing means you are using to get your customers to that landing page.
There are many ways to generate traffic to your landing pages.
1. Pay Per Click advertising is a common method used to generate traffic to landing pages.
2. Banner ads or other advertising on web sites. A visitor clicks on the ad and ends up on your landing pages.
3. Email newsletters are a great source of traffic to landing pages. You can talk about a product or information you have online and provide a link inside the newsletter. You customer clicks on the link and is taken directly to the landing page. These make very solid leads because the visitor must already be interested or they would not have even gotten to your landing page.
4. Social blogs and other social media methods can be used to send visitors to your landing page. You may post links in a blog post, on a Twitter update and the link goes to the landing page.
As you can see you now have very qualified leads that are on your landing pages because they deliberately came to you. It must then be very clear how crucial this page is to you for your business to succeed or to have a high conversion rate. It isn’t enough to just drive the traffic to the landing page, you now need to get information or make a sale. Many landing pages can literally kill off a marketing campaign if not done well.
Successful landing pages give credibility to you or your business. You need to earn the trust of the visitor either through your ad (which is hard unless you are talking about the newsletter method) or on the landing page. It is crucial that you make a positive impact on your landing page visitors.