You’ve worked on social media campaigns, you’ve bought Google ads, you’ve worked on pay per click (PPC) campaigns, and you’ve sent out dozens of enticing emails to potential clients. They click on the link you’ve put in a blinking red box, and then land on your company’s home page. For months on end, you have a high click-through rate (CTR) but little to no conversions – why? You haven’t got a proper landing page in order, and it’s costing you more than you know.
What a Landing Page Can Do for You
1. Conversion Focus: Landing pages have been built to convert PPC ads and email campaigns. A call to action landing page is one of the better ways to ask for contact details in exchange for a demo download of some kind of software, or a download of a whitepaper. If you send people to your homepage instead of a well thought out landing page for PPC, they’d have to look for what they want, and they might lose interest.
2. Easy Metrics: With a single, conversion-targeted landing page, it becomes much easier for you to keep an eye on what’s working and what isn’t. For example, you might have a high bounce rate on your landing page, but a much lower time on page stat. This indicates that you need to tweak your landing page copy or design. On the other hand, a homepage has a lot of elements, making it difficult to pinpoint what needs to be improved.
3. Economical: By using a landing page, you end up saving money on your advertising campaign. As you get more and more conversions from focused pages, you end up generating more leads for more revenue. This helps in decreasing costs.
Some Examples to Learn From
Having a good landing page is just as important as having a landing page at all. If you’re looking for some inspiration, take a look at the Lyft and Codecademy pages, a couple of the best converting landing pages currently in use. Lyft focuses on the consumer’s motivation, and highlights just how much money drivers can earn by using their product. Codecademy is a great landing page design example. It has minimal imagery, drawing attention to the short form on the page, asking for an e-mail address, username, password and validation that your consumer is not a robot.
On the other hand, a few companies like Hermes and DirecTV, need to really work on their landing pages. Until recently, the Hermes landing page was cluttered with pictures of their products. It might have looked great, but functionally, it was confusing, and users had to think about where they needed to click. DirecTV on the other hand, offers users a whole load of information about why it is better than its competitors. It sells itself on the fact that it allows you to record shows, but their landing page has one crucial element missing –information on how to record a show, rendering the entire landing page useless.
Based on these landing page examples, we’ve come up with a guide for you to follow, to make the most of your landing page:
1. Light and Ready to Load: The lighter your landing page, the faster it loads. Prospective clients aren’t going to wait for your page to load, so make sure it loads quickly enough to hold their attention.
2. Make it Different: Use a different page structure for your landing page than what you use on your website. A landing page needs fewer resources than a whole website, so load only the necessary resources required to make it work.
3. Be Prepared: Your page may load quickly now, but what about when the traffic to your site increases? It’s always good to have an idea of how many people are likely to visit your landing page, and how much time your page takes to respond when at maximum capacity.
4. Avoid Delays: While tracking conversion data, you may have to route customers through a third-party website before they end up on your landing page. Avoid this as far as possible. It only increases the wait time, and also takes control away from you.
Before you decide to launch your landing page, why not look at landing page design examples of industries in a similar field to yours, to figure out what works for them and what doesn’t. With these tips under your belt, we’re sure your landing page will make your campaign a success!
