Landing pages 101
What are landing pages?
Landing pages are web-pages that people “land” on when they click a link - typically from another website, or from within an email or an advertisement.
They’re the first surface of contact of your online traffic, and your only opportunity to make a great first-impression. Because of this, landing pages play a crucial role in your online sales. Landing pages help generate leads and in turn, drives revenue.
Conversion is king
If you’ve drawn visitors on your landing page, you’re off to a great start! Your ad/ email/ social post must have generated interest in their minds. Or else they won’t have clicked it. The job of your landing page is to convert this interest into engagement.
Conversion simply means your visitors taking some action towards a sale. Could be clicking a “Buy” button - in which case you have reached your goal, yay! Or leaving their contact details by submitting a form, so you can follow up trying to close the sale.
Home-page vs landing pages
While often used interchangeably, landing pages are quite different from homepages, based on the audience they serve.
A homepage, being the front page of your website, is wide open to everyone. In contrast, landing pages are served to a narrower, more-targeted traffic generated by your campaigns. As a result, landing pages typically contain targeted messaging in a conversion-oriented layout. If your homepage is your front-desk receptionist, landing pages are your sales guys.
That said, it’s quite common to create home-pages and even single-page-websites using landing-page builders because it’s easy to do so.
Traits of high-performance landing pages
Top landing-page platforms must deliver on all these three fronts. Something to keep in mind when shopping for one.
Fast page-loads: Slow pages are known to hurt businesses, as the average consumer has no patience to wait for them to load. Every second of added delay causes a 7% drop in conversion rates. So exactly how quick should your pages load? 3 seconds or less. Investing in a high-performance landing-page platform that can achieve such numbers will pay for itself many times over.
A/B test & iterate fast: Marketing experts & growth hackers will tell you that running campaigns is a continuous process of hypotheses-validation, discovery and adjusting to market reactions. And for that, your landing pages must let you A/B test, and make necessary design changes at a fast pace.
Good looks: Quite obviously, landing pages must be pleasant in order to score those invaluable first-impression points. While most landing pages start out with nice templates, what matters more is how the design holds up over time, as it goes through frequent changes. A great landing-page platform must provide a robust page-builder that allows iterations without breaking responsiveness and other functionalities.
Common use-cases
- Inbound marketing / Generating leads from
- Ad campaigns
- Email campaigns
- Social media campaigns
- Validating / Evaluating
- Business ideas, POCs and prototypes
- Alternate messaging
- Target market
- Pricing models
- Online presence / Showcasing / Promoting
- Portfolio
- Professional services
- Storefront
- Resume
- Non-profits
… and so on.
Where to begin
If you have read so far, you might be closer to deciding if you’ll adopt landing pages. If you do, the next chapter explores how to set it up.