Closing The Deal: The Power of The Landing Page

If you are involved in marketing a business, then undoubtedly you put a lot of time, effort, and money towards driving potential customers to your website. Once that hot prospect arrives, why just turn them loose? Why not take the sales cycle all the way to the finish line?

A landing page is a page of a website that specifically corresponds to a marketing campaign and is designed to elicit an action from a visitor, like filling out a form, making a phone call, or purchasing a particular good or service.

Because a landing page lies at the end of a marketing campaign, it will typically be much more oriented to converting, rather than informing, the visitor, and is therefore rarely included in the website’s navigation. More often than not, it is only accessible through an ad or more elaborate marketing campaign. Despite it not being included in the navigation, it can be one of the most important parts of a website.

The Call To Action

Landing pages are all about sales conversion. By the time a potential customer has reached a landing page on your website, he or she should have already gotten the information they need from your marketing efforts to make a decision about taking the next step. The goal of a landing page is not about providing additional information. It is about asking that informed potential customer to do something.

The most important thing to consider before getting into the nuts and bolts of designing a landing page for a specific campaign is to determine what action you want the visitor of your landing page to take. Whatever that action is, it should be clear that you are asking them to do it. This Call To Action (often referred to as a CTA) can be as simple as “Call Now!” or “Fill out the form below.”

Offering other possible actions on a landing page (like social media buttons or navigation to other pages) is perfectly fine, but there should only be one Call To Action on a landing page. Always make it clear what you want from your visitor.

Keep It Simple

We’ve all heard the expression, “Don’t beat around the bush.” This should be your credo when creating a landing page. While the content of your landing page will be determined by the marketing that leads to it, rarely should the page feature much more than a few lines of text and a single video or image. In many cases, anything beyond the one focused CTA will be a distraction to the visitor. Likewise, if you have multiple promotions running, only offer one per landing page. Offering the visitor a choice can be just as distracting as redundant sales information.

Show the Benefit

There are, however, a few things you can add to a landing page that have been proven to be effective and don’t distract from the CTA. The most common of these is to show the benefit of taking action. You’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “If you act now…. ” in a TV ad. This is not about the overall benefit of the product or service being offered, but the benefit of responding to the CTA. How will it benefit a landing page visitor if he or she picks up the phone or fills out a web form?

Make A Connection

One great way to show the benefit of responding to the CTA is a testimonial of a satisfied customer. This helps your visitor make a human connection to others who have taken the next step, but even if you don’t have a quote handy, alluding to a large following on a social platform can be equally compelling.

Introduce Urgency

Above, we mention the age old ad slogan, “if you act now….”  Another approach is to explain what happens if the visitor doesn’t “act now.” This could be either an element of time (“This offer expires soon!”) or scarcity (“While supplies last!”). Adding a sense of urgency into your promotion can go a long way when introducing a Call To Action, and the landing page is the perfect place to do this.

Track Your Target

Every successful hunter is also an excellent tracker. Web marketing should be no different. Adding tracking codes to promotions and conversion codes to forms and “thank you” pages is critical in evaluating the effectiveness of any modern sales promotion or marketing campaign. Without analytics to guide your efforts, it is impossible to accurately gauge your success or failure and make the needed adjustments to continue to improve your results. To be done correctly, tracking codes often require coding which is outside the realm of most marketing experts. It’s an additional step, however, that should never be overlooked.