Landing pages
Landing pages are one of the most powerful techniques in the online marketer’s repertoire. Instead of sending people from a promotion to your website home page or a generic product page, you can send them to a specially designed page, called a landing page.
By tailoring their content and presentation closely to the offer or call-to-action that led a visitor to the page, landing pages can improve sign-ups and conversions compared to generic pages on a website.
Image credit: HubSpot
How landing pages work
A landing page:
- Has a single, specific marketing goal.
- It’s often tied to a single ad campaign or buyer group.
- Walks the visitor through a carefully-crafted and narrowly-focused presentation.
- Leads them to a specific call-to-action (for instance, ‘buy this book’ or ‘sign up for this newsletter’).
By taking this approach, you’ll convert more visitors. A well-crafted landing page can talk to the precise offer that sent visitors there, giving them clear, relevant reasons to sign-up. You can’t do this on a more general page, like your home page, because it has to work for all visitors.
Good landing page copywriters use techniques borrowed heavily from traditional direct mail marketing. And like the great direct marketers, they test extensively, and refine each element of their sales copy.
Resources
Here’s a series of excellent, short tutorials on the theory and practice of landing pages: Copyblogger Landing Page Tutorials
And from the same source, here’s an excellent checklist on how to optimize online copy for your landing pages and other online sales pages.
Find out more about this topic on our Digital Publishing 101 useful resources site.
