Why Dedicated Landing Pages Matter

What role do landing pages play in your online campaigns? One important one really—to get your target customers to convert.

Period.

Exclamation point.

But here’s an interesting tidbit for you, the average B2C website has a conversion rate of less than 10%!

Confused? You should be. Landing pages only have one job, so why are they so bad at that job? More importantly, what can you do to get better results for your business?

The answer to these questions is simple: if you want more conversions, you need a high-quality landing page. Most businesses fail to get conversions because either they don’t have a landing page or if they do, it isn’t designed to do its job well. So, if you want better results for your business, you need to focus on getting a fabulous landing page designed for your business.

What are Landing Pages?

A landing page, as the name suggests, is the page your potential customers land on. Regardless of whether they come to your site from an online search, social media or an online marketing campaigns, your landing page is their first encounter with your business.

As a result, your land page is an entryway for your customers that you hope will get them to do something. This action usually involves inviting your target audience to conduct do something of value to your business—what marketers like to call a conversion.

Now, a conversion can be almost anything, but most of the time, you at least want to get some information about your visitors like an email address, which can allow you to contact them at some later time with a more enticing and/or customized offer.

Technically speaking, your landing page is whatever page your visitors first encounter on your site. However, if you are running paid online advertising campaigns, you have the ability to choose exactly which page your ads send people to.

This is important, because when you’re paying for clicks, you want to send people to the most compelling landing page possible.

With this in mind, it’s best to create specific landing pages for each online campaign dedicated to a offer. That way, your landing page is a great match for the expectations you set with your ads.

Given how important these campaign-specific landing pages are, let’s take a look at what you can do to get the most out of them:

What Makes Campaign-Specific Landing Pages Different

Here are a few distinct features of landing pages which make them an important as part of your online marketing campaign:

Landing pages are highly focused on a specific conversion action

Campaign-specific landing pages do not waste time with extra information, promotional material, etc. Rather they say, “Here is what our business has to offer and here is where you have to click in order to get it”.

If you do not have a specific page which does this, what will happen as a result of your marketing campaign? People will read through your site, get excited about what you do and get back to browsing. A landing page is what gets results from your marketing campaign.

Landing pages contain minimal distractions

The rest of your pages can have the fluff and the colors. Your landing page purely means business and is focused on getting potential customers to convert.

Landing pages are simple and intuitive

Landing pages make the whole process of converting visits into sales as simple as possible. They do not contain intimidating forms or ask for complicated information that the user may find to be a turn-off. Therefore, all your customers need to do is click and place an order for the offer.

Landing pages are highly targeted

A good landing page is designed with your target audience in mind. Therefore, they are unique in design and highly customized as well. The audience finds landing pages extremely relevant to what they are looking for, once again encouraging them to stay.

In addition, many landing pages interact with their audience, in the sense that they normally offer thanks to the audience for following through with what the online marketing campaign was offering. Therefore, they are courteous and show gratitude to your customers, making them feel appreciated.

FUN FACT

Did you know that about 80% percent of search traffic goes to the top 10% of the landing pages? What do the top 10% of landing pages have that the others don’t?

Creating Effective Landing Pages

When you read about landing pages and how to design top-notch landing pages, you will come across a lot of material about the font choice, the colors, the imaging, copy, etc. These are certainly all important ingredients of good quality landing pages, but the most important ingredient of all is your ‘offer’.

Most landing pages follow a similar strategy as the competitors and provide a boring offer which every other company is offering.

The result? Fewer conversions. Remember, your landing page has only one job to do—to get your customer to convert. So, regardless of how beautiful your images are or how great your copy is, your customers will only convert if you give them something valuable to buy.

For example, let’s say you have just launched a software which enhances IT systems’ security. Using display ads on social media, you get your target audience to reach your landing page, which you have designed specifically for the software.

On your landing page, you want them to sign up for a free trial of the new software. However, every other software company is doing the exact same thing. You may get some of the audience to convert, but to increase these numbers you need to do something different on your landing page.

Think about what else your landing page can offer to your target customers. How can you make your offer unique? What if—instead of offering a free trial of the software—you offer them a free evaluation of the security risk that their IT set-up may currently be facing?

After you present them a report, you can provide an offer to the customers to purchase your software for enhancing protection of their IT systems.

If your landing page offers something unique and irresistible, you are much more likely to get people to convert. A strong landing page, with a great flow and a unique user experience, is able to win conversions, grow your business and get you better results from your online marketing campaigns.

Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

Here are some elements that your landing pages shouldn’t have:

Too much information

Your customers already have enough information to have decided to give your offer a shot. That’s why they clicked on your online advert and reached your landing page in the first place.

In many cases, visitors to your landing page do not want more information about your offer. They just want to know how to get it. So, don’t waste their time by providing them more details or information on your landing page. Just show them how they can register and place an order.

Missing Call to Action button

If you get them on your landing page, but don’t give them a clear call to action button, how can you expect your landing page to convert?

Make sure there is a clear, visible call to action button on your page and also make sure that when your customers click the button, it doesn’t send them to another page which they need to go through. The simpler the call to action button, the more effective it will be at getting conversions.

Long load times

If the elements on your landing page take a long time to load, chances are your online audience will walk away without even viewing your page. In today’s competitive online environment, speed wins business.

If your landing page takes too long to load, your audience will not wait and instead close the page. So, while it’s a good idea to include interesting elements, if a page element dramatically adds to your load time, you may want to get rid of it.

Failing to test various versions

There is no “one hit solution” as far as your landing page is concerned. Whenever you make a landing page for a particular marketing campaign, be sure to test differnt versions of it and then focus on developing and enhancing the one or ones that are getting better response. No use investing in a landing page which isn’t effective.

Failing to establish credibility

Everyone is scared of online marketing scams. Therefore, you need to make your offer sound credible.

One of the most effective ways to establish credibilitty is to add testimonials on your landing page. Just a few words from your satisfied customers or some customer feedback statistics can greatly strengthen your landing page and the credibility of your offer, thereby increasing the chances of conversions.

Conclusion

A high-quality landing page can be the difference between a successful online campaign and a failure. But, to create a landing page with a decent conversion rate, you need to understand how to create a high-quality landing page.

In this article, we’ve talked about some of the do’s and don’ts behind effective landing page design. Applying these principles will help get you started, but it may be worth your while to also check out the 3Ws of a good lead generation landing page; What, Why and hoW.

By the way, if you’d like help designing a fantastic landing page, let the folks here at Disruptive Advertising know here or in the comments. Trust me, it will be worth it.

How have you seen effective landing pages make or break an online campaign?What do you think the most important elements of a well-designed landing page?