Successful businesses recognize the value of redesigning their websites from simple brochureware into powerful lead generating machines. At the core of their website revision is the landing page. Landing pages play a special role on a modern website that is designed to convert anonymous web visitors into qualified sales prospects.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a web page designed with a form that a prospect can complete online in order to access an offer of premium content. This could be a downloadable ebook, software demo, free consultation or other offer that would be helpful to your typical customer. More importantly, the landing page form collects critical information that helps qualify the prospect, like name, email or company name. This is one of the first steps in a lead generation, nurturing, and management effort that is central to the inbound marketing methodology.
Well-designed landing pages are targeted at specific audiences, such as visitors who respond to a call to action on your website, click through from a pay-per-click (PPC) ad for a given campaign, or registrants to a webinar promoting a specific product or service.
The real value in a landing page is unlocked by creating unique pages for each offer. This enables you to follow and nurture the lead from the time they first engage with you until they convert and long after.
With a little programming wizardry, the landing page form can be connected to marketing automation software like Hubspot, and sales CRM software, like SalesForce, to provide a closed-loop marketing and sales process.
Why Are Landing Pages Important?
An optimized landing page makes it easier for visitors to your website to take advantage of the offers you’re providing them. Prospects and customers don’t have to navigate your website to locate relevant offers. That makes it fast and easy for them to get what they want.
The win for the web-savvy company is the opportunity to achieve a higher rate of conversions from anonymous website visitors to qualified sales leads.
How to Make an Optimized Landing Page
These fundamental methods for crafting a landing page optimized for lead conversion have stood the test of time:
- Give the landing page a title, description, and layout that clearly and quickly explain the value of your offer; include a strong incentive for users to take an action to download or sign up for your offer.
- Remove any distracting clutter, even navigation links. You want visitors focused on one thing: filling out your form.
- Social sharing links, while technically a distraction, do serve your cause by allowing users to spread the word about your offer to their social network. Include social sharing links to maximize exposure for your offers.
- Strike a balance in the structure of the form. Keep it short and nonintrusive from a user’s perspective, but capture enough information to make the lead useful to you for follow-up.
- Keep users engaged. After they’ve completed the form, direct them to a thank-you page or send an auto-response that suggests other offers they might find interesting or next steps they can take.
- Track, measure, and analyze your conversion rates regularly; use what you learn to improve your landing pages and thereby improve your conversion rates.
Well-designed and optimized landing pages help solidify budding customer relationships by giving prospects the content they want, and the business the ability to further nurture these new leads.
Image courtesy of jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
{{cta(‘cc439413-df24-4f9d-9fd1-59c38ac3b86a’)}}
{{cta(‘a3cdc066-5983-448d-8ae3-469379bdbd4d’)}}
Leave A Comment