Landing Page Design & Microsite Design
Best Practices for Landing Page Design
If you’ve read enough on this website to understand our inbound marketing approach, you will understand the idea behind landing pages and microsites. Everything we do is designed to attract prospects to your website (or blog) where you can present a compelling offer that “converts” your prospect into a lead. Where these “conversions” take place is through a landing page.
In reality, a landing page is any page your visitor lands on when accessing your website from a search engine, pay-per-click ad, email campaign, directory listing, social media profile, or any other place where a visitor may follow a link to you. As such, any page really can be a landing page. For our purposes, however, landing pages and their close cousins, microsites, are pages that are specifically designed to “convert” a visitor based on the link, keyword, or email campaign that referred them to your site.
Seth Godin describes the 5 actions a landing page can create:
1. Click: Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, on your site or someone else's)
2. Buy: Get a visitor to buy
3. Permission: Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up (by email, phone, etc.). This includes registration.
4. Tell: Get a visitor to tell a friend
5. Learn: Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback
Examples of How Landing Pages Are Used for Inbound Internet Marketing:
- Run a Pay Per Click ad campaign related to an upcoming webinar on a topic related to your business. Rather than linking to your home page where your visitor may be distracted from your goal, you link from your PPC ad directly to a landing page on your website that promotes all of the reasons why your prospects should attend your webinar and includes a registration form to attend. Result? You’ve just captured a new email subscriber and potential new customer.
- Send an email campaign to your subscribers announcing a free trial of your new product. Your email links directly to a landing page where visitors are directed to provide their name, email address, phone number in order to download the free trial. Result? You’ve just captured valuable lead information from an interested prospect that your sales reps can follow up with.
- Write a blog post about XYZ topic and include a call-to-action at the end of the blog post directing readers to download a whitepaper related to XYZ. The offer links to a landing page with some “teaser” content from the whitepaper along with a lead capture form. Result? Another potential lead in the hopper.
Qualities of an Effective Landing Page:
A great deal of research has gone into forming best practices for landing page design and writing.
On the writing end, we follow Copyblogger’s 10 Tips for Writing the Ultimate Landing Page. For landing page design, we adhere to the following landing page design best practices:
1. Remove Navigation – Why give your visitor a reason to go somewhere else on your site? Your goal is to convert them here.
2. Stay Focused on the Conversion Goal – Don’t give them too many other options or offers. Stay focused on the single offer you have advertised, which is relevant to the link they arrived here from.
3. Match the Look and Feel of Your Website – Don’t send your visitor to a landing page that looks nothing like your brand. Help them feel that they’re still in the “right place.”
4. Place Important Elements “Above the Fold” – Don’t make your visitors scroll down to find the most important message on your landing page.
5. Make it Easy to Convert – Don’t ask more for more information than you need, the better the offer, the more you can ask for. If the landing page is geared toward a purchase, let the visitor purchase right here.
6. Test It – Landing pages are great testing grounds. Create two different landing pages, run an A/B split test, and eliminate the losing page.
Increase Your Conversions with Better Landing Pages:
We will help you build landing pages that convert visitors to leads and leads to sales.
