Often while managing your website you might have heard about a Landing Page. Ever wondered what it is? A Landing page in Digital Marketing is a standalone webpage that has been created for marketing/advertising campaigns. This is the page on which the viewer lands after clicking on either some link on e-mail or ads from any other external websites like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Unlike normal webpages that have Multiple goals and information for letting the users explore the website, the Landing pages are specifically designed with a precise goal, generally termed as the Call to Action.
This focussed view makes the Landing pages the most suitable option to increase the conversion rates of the marketing campaigns. It significantly decreases the cost of acquiring a perfect lead or a sale. Well, the landing page has its existence just after the page an advertisement is viewed through which the user is prompted to be prepared for the conversions like some purchase, subscription, or registration.
Not all destination pages are served equal demand. Let’s talk about the major difference between the Homepages and a Landing page which makes them undeniably good at converting.
Difference between Homepage and Landing Page
The Homepage usually contains multiple links prompted to be clicked. The Landing page completely lies on the other side of its existence and has only a single link. The Bulky proposals where on one hand lying on the Homepage can be intentionally distracting. The customers will take a lot pain in choosing a particular product you want them to focus on. The more usually they just leave than naturally proceeding with the conversions.
These are usually termed leaks instead of being links. The Landing page on the other hand is precisely focussed. Having a reduced number of links on the landing page increases the possibilities of successful conversions for your website. With the lesser amount of links that usually pull your visitors from the actual call to action, the efficiency of the campaign is significantly increased. This is the reason that proficient marketers always use the landing pages as a dedicated page, as the destination of all their traffic.
The Homepage undeniably looks attractive. It shows off your brand and lets the visitors explore a defined range of your products, and certain additional info about your business and its motto. The visitor is free to go anywhere once he is on the Homepage. This can be applying for the subscription trials, signing up for your newsletter, or just review your terms of service. But in the end, they will have a lot of paths to follow ahead and the chances of making a purchase will reduce significantly and that’s a major loss for the advertiser.
How is a landing page important?
The landing pages serve a different purpose for different customers. It serves as a mode of attraction for an individual customer rather than focussing on multiple persons. Landing pages have many advertisements over them but just have a single proposal which just focusses on converts all these visitors to valid customers.
Landing pages can be seen with a lot of variation according to the purpose and the business they serve, but usually, two types of landing pages exist defined by their goals.
The Lead Generation Landing Page often termed as the ‘Lead gen’ or a ‘Lead capture’ page, generally uses forms as the call to action. The form collects the lead data, such as the names, email addresses, and contact details of the customers.
The Business to Business marketing companies selling Highly-priced items uses this type to build a list of forthcoming customers. Sometimes some gifts as a return to a contact form are served as free e-book, webinars, or trial subscriptions for advertiser’s services. E-commerce websites sometimes use their pages for offering specials deals and offers like free shipping, or special discounts.
Click-through landing pages are frequently used by the ‘E-commerce’ and the ‘Software as a Service’ marketers as they lead directly to the sales or subscription package purchase. Generally, they consist of a normal button as the call to action that guides the visitors into a purchase payment portal like app stores.
How to Drive the Traffic to your Landing Pages?
You have plenty of options if you have got a list full of visitors to let dive into your catalog. Some commonly used sources are defined below:
Traffic using a Paid Search:
Almost every search engine includes paid advertising. If a search of normal phrases leading to null relevant information is carried out. The ads still appear on the search to some or other connected string related to keywords from the searched phrase.
Unlike major relevant search results, the Clickable ads are put by the marketers by paying for them. These ads are termed as ‘Pay per Click ads’. They could have targeted you using a particular search term, browsing interests, browsing history, etc.
Whenever you create an ad you will be asked to choose the destination where the link will take your customer to. An aspect of the choice could be sending the customer to your Home page. We will learn why Standalone Landing pages are better to choose over the Home pages as a destination for your visitors.
You can find here how to set up a paid search campaign How to Generate Leads Using Google Adwords?
Interest-based paid social traffic:
Though running your ads on Social media like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter is a great way to approach your audience. Those will be interested in your service regardless of whether they have other options to go with as well. Instead of tracking the Search phrases used by people, we track the list of the interests they might already have added to their Social media profile.
The elegance of this approach is that the customers who haven’t started to look for products can also be focussed on even before the urge to need for it. Apart from the advanced offered targeting features, every social media platform has its unique set of audience. Instagram works well with the brands and products with a bold visual appeal. But Business to Business marketers prefers using LinkedIn to approach the Professionals.
E-mail driven campaigns:
Due to low costs and extensive reach of e-mails they’re often chosen as the most efficient way to enhance the marketing reach. The e-mail and the landing page altogether can be used as a great potential to look after your customers and improve the existing relationships with them. When you have a noteworthy list of contacts, you can politely approach your customers through e-mails. This lets you attract customers to your services, and the landing page here helps you get those contact details that direct the customers towards a call to action.
Organic (or unpaid) Search Traffic:
This refers to any customer who came to you through an unpaid source like bottom links from a Search engine like Google or Bing. If you have legitimate and compelling content on your business website or the landing pages, you can likely ensure your business appears in these related searches.
The better your content ranks, the better for your reach. Although, calling it unpaid might be misleading to some extent but it does not mean that there is no time and money invested in such rankings. All this becomes possible by converging all the organic traffic from the search engines through a fine balance of cautious strategies. Speaking a summary all this comes into existence due to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Find here difference between Organic Leads vs Paid Leads
The Structure of a Landing Page:
All remarkable landing pages are composed of some core groups of elements which are the building blocks. These serve the purpose of a guide while the creation of your content. You need to keep in mind to have a unique and comfortable layout while building a Landing page. This doesn’t mean that you need to stay within the boundaries of the already existing templates.
It has turned out that almost all the landing pages that help to enhance conversions can do so because they contain the foundations of proficiency. Their Conversion Goals, audience type, prices they offer, and the campaign type they run do not matter. The fact that helps them rise is that the anatomy they focus on their landing page aligns their ideas is a more comfortable way to be understood by the customers attracting them to convert.
Modules of a Landing Page:
The Landing pages are unique and no two different kinds of Landing pages can have a similarity. There are usually five essential elements which every highly converting landing page must include:
- USP or a Unique selling proposition
- A Hero image or a video
- The utility of your offerings
- Your social existence proofs
- A single Goal for conversion (Call to action)
Unique Selling Proposition or your USP
Your unique content is your power that will help you highlight your services in the crowd of competitions all around. The proposal should portray the actuality of your services which turn them special for the customer and different from the ways the other service providers do. Your landing page should concisely communicate your proposal so that the customers easily understand what makes your service so captivating. The chain of elements on your page defines the summary of your service being so distinctive.
The Head Line
Your main Headline will be the first thing that your customers will see. So, it becomes crucial to precisely define what benefit the customers will receive from the services you are offering. The Headline must be vivid and should directly be emphasizing your Unique Selling Proposition.
The Supporting Headline
The Headline can not comprise a complete meaning being short and concise. You will be needing a supportive heading to empower your Headline. The Headline if is better being shorter, the subheadline can have two aspects. It can fulfill the completion of the meaning from your Headline or it can offer a secondary compelling message that is eventually related to your Head Line.
The Closing Statement
This will grab the attention of the customer at the end of the proposal. Also providing a backup for your conversion ensuring that the customer does take a chance at last even if until the last point he had confusion.
It becomes most essential even more than your Headline provided that even after reading your headline the customer was in total confusion. It can also be a repeating call to action click-through link to take the customer directly upwards so that he decides to take a stake into registering for your service.
The contrasting Hero Image
The text becomes dull when there is a vibrant image present to grab the attention of the customer. So, it becomes very essential to make that bold first impression on the customer. The Hero image must portray the context of your proposal, which might differ from business to business.
Benefits
Who does not love offers and deals? Your landing page should sketch the benefits and features your service will provide to the customers. Sometimes people say that we should write the positive impacts and not a specific quality of service. However, if you are looking to benefit yourself with the conversions you must put on all the aspects that show off your product or service, as different people might have different tastes. Remember not to show off so much.
Social Proofs of your existence
The people around you influence the decisions you make. Social proof is undeniably the most essential tool for you to use. But, there are some points you need to keep in mind. You must not fake it, as once the trust is lost in the market it will be so hard to win it back. Also, you must be very specific about the ambiguous details you define to identify the identity providing it.
On your landing page, social proof can take many perspectives:
- Direct quotes from customers you served earlier
- Case studies or some links to the case studies you performed
- Video interviews or testimonials that articulate your portfolio
- Review scores from popular websites
The Conversion Goal (Call to Action)
Your proposals should not boast off too much and should have just one conversion goal, or you will fail to highlight a landing page. This will be presented as a Call to Action to your customers and can be a clickable standalone button, a contact form, or simply a click-through page created for the lead generation. You must keep the forms as short as possible to avoid your customers losing their interest.
Why should you be using a Landing page?
A typical Homepage is designed with the purpose of the customers to explore your catalog of services. It consists of navigation to different areas in your website, info about your business, social media handles, and much more. But you won’t receive much benefit when it comes to successful conversions for your services.
This is where a landing page comes into action, having a single purpose of just converting customers of your website into leads. Two factors differentiate the landing pages apart from everything else on your website.
The Attention Ratio
All the links and irrelevant information that creates a distraction from the actual Conversion Goal will reduce the profit to your business and will reduce the efficacy of your proposal. The attention ratio is the total things you could do on the webpage vs the total number of things you must resiliently perform to convert. The Homepage where will provide a 25:1 or higher Attention Ratio, an effective landing page should provide you with a 1:1 attention ratio.
The Landing Page Navigation
The more links you put to navigate within the website and away from the Call to action the fewer conversions you will receive and will pull your customers from the thought of purchasing to exploring your Website. So, keep in mind to disable all navigations on your landing page unless very necessary. Although this will bar the customers to visit your website, the focus of our proposal is to convert them successfully.
The Message Match
When your landing page fails to meet the satisfactory expectations of the customer, he will not proceed to convert for becoming a leader. The ability of the Landing page of meeting such expectations is known as the Message Match. People often leave the exploration after the first impressions of the business which promised so much but failed to stand out on the expectations of the audience. It becomes crucial to provide a smooth drive for the customers from the advertisement to the Landing page. Ensuring an impactful message match, you will win their trust in believing that they chose a path. This again defines that your message must not have a shot into the air and have a clear aim to serve.
Best practices for a successful Landing Page
Creating a landing page can be super easy especially while using a drag and drop building platform like the Unbounce. This lets you explore even if you are not a professional developer and it is just a matter of a few hours to create one. Still, to have a better kick start you must know some of the best practices that have been proven to enhance the conversion rates.
Best Practices to enhance Conversion rates
- Ensure that your message matches the context of your advertisement. The customer must feel satisfied when you land him over a webpage matching his expectations.
- Keep your main Headline highly visible. The customer should not scroll so much before getting to an actual point. Your focussed proposal message should highlight when it comes to making an impact.
- You need to clearly emphasize the cues prompting to scroll the page. These can be in the form of arrows, pointers, or any other shape and image.
- Show the real-life usage of your services and products. This will help the customers understand the benefits and usability of your proposal. You can use animations, images, or videos that capture the broad vision of your product or service. The Hero image will do good in this section.
- Always try disabling and removing all the navigations and other distractions. Let the page focus on one and only one specific conversion goal.
- No matter how original you are, some people will always disapprove of you. SO, always try including your satisfied customers’ videos, images, and several other samples that prove your authenticity.
- Never use a bulky design as the longer your page takes to load the more. There will be chances for the customers to lose their interest gradually.
- You must focus on the major audience. Most users use smartphones to access the internet. You must focus clearly on how your website looks like on different devices.
- Testing is as necessary as doing the whole process we have been reading since the start. Keep testing and updating the page as per the requirements and needs.
- You can begin by choosing an already existing template. The more time you will take to start from scratch the lesser time you will manage to fulfill the other needs.
Best Practices for Lead generation pages
These all points are valid for almost every landing page you will come across. But, the lead generation pages will need a special touch of clarity to enhance the precision towards customer attraction.
- No one prefers to fill in the details until there is an actual benefit, they see in receiving by doing it. So, never make the forms too lengthy that the customers eventually lose all their interest. Never go too fast and always start with normal questions.
- Never make users enter manually. An option to choose is always better than manual typing. It will also help you manage the statistics of the data you provide and not what the customers type in.
- Lead generation forms take in personal information, always give the users an option to read your privacy policy.
- Acknowledge the time and value your customers managed for you. It is the beginning and if this starts well then, the future will be adaptable.
How will the video on the Landing page benefit you?
Videos are more mesmerizing and engaging than any other visual element. It will always provide an immersive environment to the customer and moreover. It’s less tiring to scroll through the pictures or symbols. Expert marketers have studied that their campaigns having videos in them have experienced 34% higher conversion rates. 60% of both Business to Business and Business to Customer marketers might be using video for marketing so you have a tight competition.
What do you understand from Video Landing Pages?
Video landing pages are exactly what they sound like, the landing pages which include videos in them to some extent for grabbing the attention of the audience. Most often the videos are placed on the center of your page. Videos must only be used if they have a direct relation with your context. There are different aspects you can approach while deciding the style you want to include the video with. Creating a genuine video asks for demanding resources and takes much longer than what one can think of. Some commonly used Video on the landing pages are:
- An Explainer video: A summarized message to your proposal comprised of a video not more than 2 minutes long.
- The Testimonial videos: The videos of your already served customers which tempt the new customers to have the same service for them too.
- The Video Backgrounds: A video running in the background of the prompted screen can surely grab the attention of the customer to dive into more of your services. A video or atmosphere is more contrasting if presented through a video.
How to create more effective Videos for your landing pages?
- Add some call to action in your video which is permanently visible throughout the video.
- Try suiting the commercial need by adjusting the length of videos. Some products do not need lengthy explanations, but some crave for some lengthy derivation.
- Always try to write a script before recording to run it more flawlessly with proficiency.
- Overlay the audio later if you need to demo an online product. Recording the visuals should be the priority and then the audio should be focussed.
- Always test your videos about how they perform with Autoplay on or off. Sometimes it can be engaging but many times it can lead to distraction. Test your scenarios once before taking off.
- Never rely completely on the videos as the play rates are not high. Always mention the same message as text too.
Why should you not use videos on landing pages?
Videos can significantly slow down your landing pages which might result in the customers to lose their interest in your proposal. They can also often distract the Customers from the actual call to action and therefore the call to action is often embedded into the video itself.
Conversion and Optimization of a Landing Page
Most marketers have limited time, money, and other resources which might make them think once that whether they should focus on the traffic or the Conversion rates. In the end, the only thing you should focus on is the fact that which approach promises you a better return on your investment. Investing a lot of money into paid traffics such as Google ads or Instagram is a great opportunity. But it generates predictable and beneficial outcomes but the return on your investment will almost remain constant during long runs. However, increasing conversion rates will help you acquire more conversions without investing much in gathering the traffic. Creating an optimized highly performing landing page will allow you to increase your gains with the same budget as with no optimization.
What is A/B testing for Landing Pages?
A Simultaneous experiment runs on two or more variants of a landing page to observe which performs well is known as A/B testing.
The terminology of A/B Testing
- A variant is a term for any newer versions of the landing page which you include in the A/B test.
- Champion describes the landing page which suited best for your needs dominating over all other competitors.
- Challenger is a newer version of the page that is created to challenge your existing champion landing page.
Assigning the Traffic weight in the A/B test
In any typical test, the traffic is randomly assigned to each landing page variant based upon the predetermined weighting. Let’s say you are performing a test with two variants of a page you might split the traffic unbiased between the two, let’s say 50/50 or 55/45.
Starting a new Campaign from the Scratch
You might be having several ideas while starting for a new campaign. In such cases, you must assign balanced weights to each variant of the landing pages. Then you are free to test them accordingly and choose a champion.
Testing the already existing Landing pages
If you already have a landing page and you want to test some changes over it then you must make sure to assign a smaller percentage of traffic into the newer version to avoid the risk of failures. Although this will be slower than normal, taking a risk is not good at all.
What to be tested on the landing pages?
Headline
- Try comparing long and short headlines
- Try experimenting negative over positive emotions
- Asking a question in the Headline might seem good in some scenarios.
- Try some other Unique selling points
Call to action
You can experiment with the size or visuals either by shifting the colors, symbols, etc.
Hero shot
What suits the best for your ultimate Hero image? You might use Humans emphasizing your products or a standalone product image is sometimes better.
Forms
The basic details might do good to help your business find the right ones for your audience. You may try different variations of your form simultaneously to check which performs better.
Copy
A shorter copy is usually better than a longer copy but you must test it out according to your needs and requirements.
Layout
Change and experiment with your layout about where the components suit better and how your page looks neater to enhance the conversions.
A/B testing your landing pages can surely be a powerful way to converge your conversions out of the already existing campaigns and increasing your overall return on the investment.
Conclusion
The landing page plays the most crucial part of your business profits. It provides just one Goal or a call to action, has the minimal distractions on the webpage, the content matches perfectly to a campaign or an advertisement, and targets the audience proficiently.
The major aspect which differentiates the Homepage and the landing page is the ability of the Landing page to completely customize the customer’s experience through an ad, to a click-through event, to the final conversion. Driving the customers to the Landing page which has been customized to match the ad, email or a social media post with precisely targeted messaging, tailored information and cohesive design nurtures the interest of the customers. This matters because they have already expressed giving them the exact experience which they would have been expecting right after the first click.
