C H A P T E R  1

The Tried and True Landing Page

— A Marketer’s Best Friend

The Tried and True Landing Page

— A Marketer’s Best Friend

In the Old Days...

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?”

In the old days - all web traffic would go to the website homepage
The Landing Page - an offer specific page created for a single stream of traffic

Get More Site Visitors to Take Action

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...

“Landing pages are not wandering generalities. They are specific, measurable offers. You can tell if they’re working or not. You can improve the metrics and make them work better. Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone...is a direct marketer.”

- Seth Godin

A Landing Page Should Be....

A landing page should be relevant

RELEVANT

Specific to the ad or message that the visitor clicked

A landing page should be focused

FOCUSED

Without extraneous content, navigation and calls to action, singularly focused on a single offer or topic

A landing page should be directional

DIRECTIONAL

Indicating, both visually with content and calls to action, what action the visitor should take

5 Actions

Seth Said a Landing Page Can Cause One of Five Actions:

1

Landing page action - get a visitor to click

Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else’s.)

2

Landing page action - get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up

Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration of course.

3

Landing page action - get a visitor to buy

Get a visitor to buy.

4

Landing page action - get a visitor to tell a friend

Get a visitor to tell a friend.

5

Landing page action - get a visitor to learn something

Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback.

Effective but Formulaic

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:

“Digital touchpoints can drive revenue, lower costs, build brands, and engender customer loyalty. But to achieve these potential benefits, companies must deliver digital interactions that meet their customers’ needs in easy and enjoyable ways.”

- Top 10 Ways to Improve Digital Experiences, Forrester Research
The landing page is often the very first digital touchpoint

Your First Digital Touchpoint

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.

©i-on interactive, inc.