One of the most powerful business generation techniques for your website is the landing page, sometimes known as a “lead capture page” or a “lander”. A landing page is an incredibly useful tool in itself or as part of a wider promotion or marketing campaign; it carries a message targeted for that promotion and helps to measure ROI.
Here is our pre-Landing page check list:
Focus
A landing page is a single web page that is focused on one specific message and clearly focuses on one message for one type of visitor. For example you might have a landing page for a particular special offer or for a particular, narrow market segment.
One Call to Action
A successful Landing page must have one, single, very clear call to action. This could be a booking, purchase or joining a mailing list; the key is to give your user a single, tempting option to interact with you.
Control
In many cases the Landing Page is not part of the main web site. It is not linked from other pages on the site (i.e. your users will not find the landing page when browsing your main site). Thus you have considerable control over how people find the page, be it by search engines, offline marketing, emails, Twitter or any other channel you use.
Measure
This is the foundation to success with any Landing page. You can gather statistics on how much traffic the page gets, on where they come from and, crucially, the conversion rates (i.e. % who took up your call to action) that is all focused on this one message. This gives you an obvious measure of ROI.
Test
If measurement is the foundation then testing is the real power of Landing Pages. You can test different Landing pages for differing designs, different promotions, different market segments, different times, different communication channels or basically any combination you wish!
One important testing tool to be aware of is split or A/B testing. This basically means you create two different Landing pages and one is randomly displayed to different users allowing you to discover which is more effective. This type of testing does have caveats; but it can be a useful tool.
Rinse & Repeat
Now you have a formulae to proceed with confidence, you are not stabbing in the dark, rather each step gives you a little more insight and a chance to tweak your marketing for ever increasing effectiveness.