The main aim of most marketing campaigns is to convert visitors into leads. Though the road to conversion is not easy, if you follow a few good practices, it can be done. Landing pages play a critical role in converting visitors to leads. It is also known as the lead capture page, static page or destination page. Though landing page optimization are essential for all kinds of marketing, it is especially vital for email marketing. Even if you create an excellent email campaign, the conversion rates might not be according to your expectations. This is where the landing page comes in. Yet many marketers still redirect customers to the homepage instead.
Here, we discuss why landing pages are critical for your campaigns to be successful and why landing page optimization is essential.
Definition of a landing page
First, you need to understand what a landing page means. It’s the page where the visitor arrives when they click on a link from an email or an advertisement. It usually has a form that captures information about the visitor. Landing pages can be custom-built, keeping in mind a particular kind of audience.
For example, if you are running an email campaign targeting an audience to promote an ebook, they might have a different landing page from those who have signed up to attend a webinar arranged by your company. It is a good practice to offer free trials or discounts for products on the landing page. This can lead to a higher conversion rate. It will also help you learn more about your customers better and give you insight that can improve your customer personas.
Landing pages aim to make your visitors sign up for your newsletter, shop at your website or download content that you are offering. While doing all of this, it also captures information about the customer that will help you to keep them engaged on your website. Despite being such an essential feature in every marketing campaign, yet they are not easy for everyone to set up. The pages can often be too complicated and not function the way they are supposed to. But, landing page optimization can help.
Why Landing Pages Are Important For Your Campaign
That brings us to all the reasons that your campaigns must make use of landing pages. Here are the best ones we could find.
Increase Leads
The best way to generate more leads is by creating a landing page following the best practices adopted by successful marketers worldwide. It has already been mentioned that marketers often redirect links to the home page of their business website. Unfortunately, that can throw away several leads generated from your email, social media or search traffic. Landing pages offer a fantastic opportunity to create, nurture and segment your leads and later distribute it to your sales team. If there is one thing you can do to increase your lead generation drastically right now, it would be to build a remarkable landing page.
Give Your Marketing Offers A Home
If you redirect your visitors to your home page, they will be seeing the usual offers that you provide for all your customers. Neither will you be able to collect any information for them or offer them something valuable in return. A landing page provides all these opportunities. You can build a customized page just for visitors that will have all the lucrative marketing offers that you can show them. All they need to do is share some information about themselves, including their email address to get those offers. Without a proper landing page, your suggestions will not do anything to support your lead-generation strategy.
Collect Contact Information And More About Your Prospects
When the visitors to your landing page fill up the conversion form, you are collecting valuable information about them that can help the marketing team to come up with new strategies to generate more leads. The information derived from the prospects help understand what kind of people visit your website, their age group, place of origin, gender, and the reasons that have brought them to your site. This will give your marketing team a heads up about the kind of person your customer is even before reaching out to them. Finally, you can customize your offer accordingly, which will help you to convert them into customers eventually.
Find Out More Engaged Customers
You can do a lot more with your landing pages than just convert them into leads. When your leads turn into customers, landing pages can track that too. This helps you find those leads who seem more engaged with your business. Understanding which prospects are better engaged and what makes them work is critical as this piece of information can help inform the sales department’s process.
Help Other Marketing Channels Grow Simultaneously
Landing pages can provide a space for all your fantastic content that can be shared via social media, be the focal point of your emails or linked to PPC ads and get found through organic searches. Content is a critical part of your inbound marketing strategy. They can also be used in lead nurturing campaigns. So, make the most of your landing pages.
Provides Scope For Tracking And Measuring
Don’t just create a landing page, also use the metrics associated with it to analyze and track all the data that is coming your way. The results will give you great insight as to how your marketing campaigns are doing and what you can do to make them even better. The things that you can find out are – how your marketing offers compare, how visitors are converting to leads over time, etc. Learning what works and what doesn’t will help you strategize your campaigns accordingly. You can eliminate things that are not working and do more of what is working.
How To Make The Most Of Your Landing Pages
Hopefully, you are convinced by now that landing pages are an essential part of your campaign. Now you need to learn how to optimize your landing pages for higher conversion rates.
Catchy Headlines
Just like the subject line of emails, headlines need to catch your eye on landing pages. However, do ensure that the headline should resonate the same sentiments as the source of traffic. Otherwise, it will confuse the audience and lead to a drop in the number of prospects. The headline is the first thing that the visitors will see on the landing page, and it must answer the question, “What will visitors who land on this page receive? Sum up the offer and keep it clear and concise.
Compelling Copy
The copy should not have any flowery language but should be written in a clear and straightforward language explaining the terms and conditions of the offer. If required use bullet points, multiple small paragraphs, but keep it brief.
Share Testimonials To Build Trust
When you are attracting new visitors, you need to take the time to build their trust. One way to make them believe you right away is by sharing testimonials from your existing customers and according to one study, 70% of people trust opinions from customers that have been posted online. So make sure your testimonials are visible on the landing page and you can use A/b testing to see where on the page is the most effective. If you have a lot of credibility on social media as well, this will go a long way in gaining their trust.
Follow Recommended SEO Practices
When you follow the SEO best practices, you end up getting a lot of organic traffic. Which means just by implementing a few strategies you can get the same results while spending less money to advertise. Here are a few best practices:
- Use Impactful Keywords – Keywords play a significant role in landing pages as well. Do extensive research and find the right words that users might search for when you want them to fall at your website. Optimize your page for search engines with keywords.
- Use Social Sharing Buttons And Links – Social sharing buttons and links enable users to share the landing page with their friends and family. This will mean more traffic for your business and help spread your offers beyond your own network.
- Use Images – Landing pages with images do a lot better than the ones without. It gives the users an idea of what to expect. Pictures also make the page more appealing, thus attracting the users to click on links and offers.
- Hide Page Navigation – Page navigation often causes a distraction for users, causing them to move away to other pages and thus increasing bounce rate. Hiding the navigation helps minimize distraction and lets the visitor stay on the landing page. This increases the conversion rate.
- Use Conversion Form – Using the lead capture form or the conversion form is imperative. It is an essential part of the landing page that receives information from the visitor and in exchange provides them with offers. This is how visitors turn into leads.
Create A Sense Of Urgency
Everybody wants to grab the most lucrative deals and since deals are offered only for a limited period, create a sense of urgency on your landing pages. The fear of missing out is big on social media and can be a strong motivator to get someone to take the action you want them to. Time-sensitive coupons or discount offers work well for this purpose. When your audience feels that if they do not take up the offer right now, they might be missing out on a great deal, they will take it.
How To Make Landing Pages Work For Your Email Campaign
It is not enough to just create a landing page. Marketers need to make sure that the landing pages are useful and help boost the conversion rate. So what makes landing pages work when it is tied with an email campaign? Landing pages associated with links on emails provide the user with information without any distraction. If there is a particular landing page for an email campaign, it helps the user to stay focused on deciding his next action. It increases the chances of the user turning into a lead.
But if there is no landing page and the users are directed to the homepage, they can be confused. A homepage will have several offers, images and links. It is easy to lose focus and forget about your next action when this happens. Hence a customized landing page is highly recommended. Here are some tips to make it even more useful.
Ensure Messages Match
Your content in the email must match exactly with the offer on the landing page. The landing page should be the continuation of the email. If the message changes even remotely, it will confuse the users, and the whole purpose of converting them into leads might be foiled. By keeping the message similar to that of the email, you will be helping the user to decide in your favour.
Keep The Same Look
If you have used a specific colour code and design in your email, then make sure to use the same look in your landing page. This will ensure familiarity and your users will know that they are in the right place. This visual cue helps users carry on the action.
Keep It Simple And Short
Too much text and complicated words or too many images might confuse the user. Cut out unnecessary copy and make sure that only the relevant information is on the page. Keep one background image or just one image for the product. Stick to the basics.
Have Only One CTA
Since the whole aim of the landing page is to keep the user, focussed, use only one CTA. You might want to add one more to redirect the users to your homepage, but it is best to concentrate on one task at a time. Also, keep the call to action clear and precise; make it stand out by using a different colour code.
Follow Up With A Thank You Page
Follow up the landing page with a thank you page. The “thank you page” confirms the user’s conversion and provides the link to the offer that was promised on the landing page. Usually, it is also accompanied by an automated email to the user explaining the next steps. This page is critical to help the user know what happens next.
Use your landing pages right and get the most out of your digital marketing campaigns. Not all landing pages are the same and might not have a high conversion rate. But if the best practices are followed, you will see results with time. You can have more than one landing page, and more pages would create more opportunities to convert visitors to leads. Master this powerful tool and use it in your campaigns to have better results.
If you are looking for more tips on landing pages, here is an article that might be useful.
