A landing page can be a game-changer. In fact, if there was one thing that you could dramatically increase your conversion rate, it would be to use a creatively designed landing page on your website. Why settle for one? Why not have more than one landing page dedicated to specific customer interests?
Contrary to common belief, a landing page is not necessarily your website’s homepage. Generally speaking, it is a webpage that someone “lands” on after clicking an online “call-to-action” link. Call-to-action is a broad term relating to any prompt that the user gets, telling the user to make a specific decision. However, for this article, we will focus only on promotion-specific landing pages.
Landing pages are also known as “Lead Generation Pages” are usually standalone and don’t necessarily provide global navigation within your website. They are the destination to your online marketing efforts ranging from SEO Optimized Search Results, marketing promotions, online advertisements, or an online marketing campaign.
To fully understand what makes a landing page unique compared to your website, let’s dive deeper.
Home Page Vs. Landing Page
A well-designed homepage can be compared to a regular newspaper. It has just the right mix of information about your area of interest while still leaving “links” to further details, which you can follow on other pages. Similarly, a website’s homepage not only has the relevant information displayed right on top but also has several links for the user to follow, giving them multiple options for action.
Landing pages are inherently different, and they don’t have vast amounts of the information displayed, nor do they have a plethora of links for you to follow. A well-designed landing page will have a very discreet look, giving the visitor only a targeted amount of information, keeping the visitor distraction-free. Ideally, the landing page will have only a single link for the user to follow, i.e., generating a lead.
Studies have shown that having minimal links on a landing page increases the chances of generating a lead. Expert marketers always use dedicated and standalone landing pages as the destination for their ad-related traffic.
Types of Landing Pages
Landing pages are separated structurally into two categories. Now let’s see what these types are and how they are different from each other.
1. Lead Generation Landing Pages
This type of page is used generally by the B2B Marketer, focused on gathering relevant information about the customer like name, address, email, and other contact details. These are also the most widely used type of landing pages out of the two.
2. Click-Through Landing Page
Click-through landing pages are used in e-commerce and don’t contain any forms for user information. These pages usually have a single button as a call to action.
How a landing page can be a game-changer
Now that we have a general grasp on what a landing page is, let’s see some scenarios where a landing page comes in handy.
1. Increasing your subscribers’ return rate
Let’s assume that you have a lot of visitors to your cooking website. A good idea to keep those visitors interested would be to share your newest content as soon as you upload it. However, without their details, this task would be quite hard to accomplish. The wiser way would be to create an email newsletter that they can subscribe to for the latest content.
You can easily embed your Call-to-action on your webpages/posts. This link would take the visitor to a well-designed landing page, showing them the benefits of enrolling and asking for their contact details to be added to your e-mailing list.
2. Make the best first impression
As the age-old saying goes, “the first impression is the last impression,” you might agree or disagree with the accuracy of the saying, but the criticality of a first impression is nonetheless essential. In today’s fast-moving world, we have trained our minds to make decisions in mere seconds and sometimes even less. According to a research done by Gitte Lindgaard, Gary Fernandes, Cathy Dudek & J. Brown, it only takes us only 50 milliseconds to identify a specific area of interest and for that to leave a mark. Another study by Google showed similar results.
It means you have literally 0 seconds to show your visitor why they should invest their irreversible time with you. A well designed, targeted, and concise landing page show’s the visitor all they need to know in a single glance, increasing your chances of conversion very high.
3. Take Advantage of Visuals
A widespread mistake that marketers make is to add a bunch of informational text all-around on their landing pages. No doubt that the information you add there would be relevant and quite useful for your visitors; however, as discussed earlier, we are time-constrained. Instead, if you use a creative little infographic or even a simple graphic to convey your message, the results will surprise you.
In fact, according to the web marketing group, 40% of users respond in a much more pleasant way to infographics compared to text. Generally speaking, if your landing page has a strong message accompanied by a reasonably crafted Infographic, your conversion rates will have a considerable boost.
4. Simple yet compelling text – a winning combination.
Time is short, and the readers are too quick to judge the quality of your work. In mere milliseconds the fate of your business is to be decided. Strong narrative building visuals combined with a compelling narrative, is the only way to succeed.
Yes, you can use a whole lot of technical jargon to show off your knowledge. Your landing page will be a strong one, but none of the visitors will understand what on earth are you talking about. The solution! Writing a simplified, easily understandable piece of text to go off with your infographic gives the customer a sense of security.
Final Thoughts
Always remember having a killer landing page doesn’t mean a sale is finalized, it’s the more like the first contact. Once the customer has taken their first step of clicking or fulfilling the Call-to-action form on your landing page, it’s that time that your actual sales skills come into play. Even if you have a very high lead generating conversion rate on your landing page, final sales figures can be drastically different.
As always, keep trying different things to see how your customers react and how you can tweak and trigger more sales and conversion rates. Another option can also be to hire someone who has vast experience in the field. We at Help Square have a dedicated team that carries out detailed research before creating a bespoke solution for your site. Once created, our team offers further future support to enhance your final results. Drop us a message to find out more!
