Pilot the Perfect Landing Page
A well planned and designed landing page can greatly increase conversions in a marketing campaign. The emphasis here is on the word campaign (also conversion but we’ll come back to that). Landing pages, lead capture pages or even ‘landers’ should be built for the purpose of a specific campaign, they’re usually not navigable from your main site and act as a floating page, either on the same domain or one of their own.
Your landing pages will usually only receive traffic from marketing activities, including PPC, social (organic and paid) email but also on-pack promotions and traditional ads such as outdoor, tv and radio.
The creation of a landing page allows a brand to be single-minded with their message, highlight a product or service and most of all contain a huge call to action specific to the topic.
Reasoning
The purpose of a landing page will usually fall into one of these three categories:
- Capturing leads that enable you to market to people in the future – you can obtain this information through campaign promotions such as voucher codes, freebies and competitions as well as games and exclusive content such as reports and white-papers
- ‘Warming up’ potential customers and clients to new deals – the introduction of a new service or product or to simply showcase a very specific area of your offering to a refined target audience. You may also capture leads on this page to send information once they’re ready to buy further down the conversion funnel
- Sales – Your main call to action may well be to simply ‘sign up’ (you may want to offer a free week or month trial depending on your service), or to book a demo, receive a call or visit or for a free, no obligation consultation
Basecamp’s landing page above shows a clear call to action and provides the user with an alternative login in method.
Design
Your landing page should be clean and clear in terms of its design. It should be statement and image-led without huge reams of copy.
You want to remove as many stumbling blocks as possible to allow the user to convert. With a lead-gen campaign, it can be pretty tempting to include as many input cells as possible to gain rich information on your potential customer but keep your ask of the user to the minimum.
Shopify’s free trial landing page reminds the user of the offer and brings a very clear call to action at the top and centre of its clean and clear design.
Offer an alternative for signing up, you could use social media such as Facebook or Twitter which may pre-fill some of the data cells for the user’s ease. In terms of usability, the page doesn’t just want to be user-friendly, it needs to be a joy to use, if you do insist on making the user scroll to get to your call to action make sure the page moves smoothly and fluidly, you may even want to add in some moving elements or animations as the user scrolls
Last but not least make sure your landing page is optimised for mobile! If you’re using social media or PPC to bring your visitors to your page they are more than likely already using a mobile or tablet device.
Activation
Since your landing page is part of a marketing campaign that has one clear aim, your messaging and imagery should reflect this. As landing pages are digital, the use of digital marketing allows for ease of tracking ROI as you can analyse where users have come from and what platforms are performing best for you.
PPC and social media ads also allow you to A/B test and refine your campaign in real-time, allowing you to test different imagery, copy and calls to action on your ads. There are some powerful targeting tools when using social media. LinkedIn ads, for example, offer a huge range targeting capabilities from industry, company name and even job title. Targeting to this degree may decrease the number of users to your site but it will increase their relevance and consequently their value. Within the B2B sphere, this allows you to create social media calls to action that address the pain points of your target audience.
Reporting
Reporting on the effectiveness of a landing page should really come down to these simple KPIs:
- Number of sessions on-site
- Unique users
- Time on site
- Conversion rate
- Total conversions
- Total conversion value
The last point will allow you to create a figure for your ROI: simply subtract your activation and media spend from your total conversion value. If you’re offering a demo, a call or a free trial, your ROI may not be instant so it’s best to create ongoing reports on long-lead landing pages.
If you’re considering a landing page for your next campaign and have any questions on its aim, design or activation, please get in touch.