As we have spoken about before, landing pages are an increasingly effective way to increase the ROI of your online and offline promotions. They provide a great avenue to drive prospects to when you’re looking for a specific response, like filling out a form. Landing pages have become a staple with our clients, even those who market primarily with direct mail. For more about our personalized landing pages check out this earlier blog posting.
Through our experience with developing effective landing pages, I wanted to offer your some tips to keep in mind when you’re strategizing about your own campaigns. Hopefully you’ll look to us for help when you’re working on such a campaign, but nevertheless, here are some tips.
1. Always provide a clear call to action. This is a fundamental rule of marketing, but it applies especially to landing page design. The reason you don’t send prospects directly to your company website is you want a more focused experience for the user. Let them get in, perform the action you requested and get out. Having too many options only makes things more confusing to the visitor and will more likely result in abandoned visits.
2. Make sure the headline on your landing page matches or closely resembles the link or printed piece that drove them to the page. Continuity is important and it’s key that the visitor instantly identifies the page and that it is what they’re expecting to see.
3. People tend to read the beginning of the page and the end of the page for headlines or bullet points. Write your copy and lay it out in such a way that accommodates this behavior. Your best points on top, followed by a nice bulleted list. Wrap up with repeating what you want them to do and why, and send them on their way.
4. Limit navigation choices. Your goal is to keep them on the landing page until they perform an action, so try to limit or completely eliminate their ability to click off the page. Many pages I have seen offer a direct link to the company website. You’ll have to do your own testing, but in most cases this is not a good practice.
5. Don’t hide things. One of the biggest annoyances I have with landing pages are they become so focused that the publisher seems to be deliberately trying to hide something. Give the visitor all of the information they need to perform the call to action you’re requesting. For example, you may have seen a page that says something like, “Fill out this form and you’ll receive a gift worth $500 and a free ebook”… or whatever. It’s obvious to most people that there is more to it than just that. When I see something like that I am immediately skeptical and usually jump ship. Sure, I would like a $500 gift but I am not willing to gamble on what it’s going to cost me unless I know ahead of time.
If you would like to learn more about landing pages or discuss an upcoming project please give us a call or visit our website. Ironically, we don’t have a landing page setup to discuss landing pages, so our company website will have to do.
