In the ‘old’ days of the web, all of a brand’s web traffic would be funneled into their website home page, or to deep links within the site. Drop an email, land those clicks on the home page. Launch a display ad, drive those visitors into the main product category page. Run a print ad with your main website URL.
While this worked at getting lots of hits & eyeballs to a site, it wasn’t as efficient at getting those hits & eyeballs to take action that turned into business results. At some point, early in the days of the web, some smart marketer woke up and said to themselves, “Hey, if 1% of our site traffic is converting into a lead or a sale, what’s going on with the other 99%? How can we get more visitors to take action on our site?”
Technically, any page a web visitor might land on after clicking any web link is a landing page. But the term quickly came to mean an offer-specific page created exclusively for a single stream of campaign traffic.
By removing the distraction of main site navigation and focusing page content on the offer or campaign message, landing pages were effective at getting far more campaign visitors to land and convert into a lead or sale. Landing pages quickly became the defacto type of digital experience deployed for most paid campaigns—working particularly well for pay-per-click, display and affiliate traffic.
That ‘smart’ marketer who first asked how to get more site visitors to take action was probably Seth Godin.
A landing page is any page you direct campaign traffic to, and it works incredibly well at getting more of your web visitors to land & take action—it’s the mechanism by which you can turn your 1% conversion rate into 2%, or your 15% conversion rate into 30%. Seth Godin coined the term ‘landing page’, perhaps as far back as 1991, and said of landing pages...
Specific to the ad or message that the visitor clicked
Without extraneous content, navigation and calls to action, singularly focused on a single offer or topic
Indicating, both visually with content and calls to action, what action the visitor should take
Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s.)
Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.
Get a visitor to buy.
Get a visitor to tell a friend.
Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback.
As effective as landing pages originally were at converting campaign web traffic into leads & sales, they came to represent a fairly static, formulaic experience. A typical landing page designed to capture leads contains basic elements like headline, subheadline, content blurbs (and maybe a video), images, calls to action and a form. A typical ecommerce landing page fares no better with product & shipping information and an ‘add to cart’ button.
These formulaic pages can be effective, but they only work up to a point. As user expectations on the web rapidly evolve, the landing page hasn’t kept up. So what do users want? What makes that experience with your landing page a positive one? It’s probably not some copy and a form slapped together on a page hastily. Nor is it a big, flashing “buy now” image. Users expect useful, meaningful digital experiences every time they interact with your brand. According to Forrester Research:
The landing page is often your very first digital touchpoint, providing a critical opportunity to meet (or exceed) visitor expectations through easy, differentiated, useful experiences. The fact that it is so frequently a visitor’s first impression of your brand makes it all the more critical to elevate your landing page into a truly effective digital experience.