Creating Effective Landing Pages
Internet Marketing for Optimum Effectiveness

When you advertise your online business using Web ads or email messages, your goal is to increase site traffic. But you also want to convert the new visitors into loyal customers. To get the most from every visitor, you need a good landing page that builds on the ad copy.

Targeted Landing Pages Work Best
The best landing pages are targeted to specific advertising campaigns. Suppose we launched two internet marketing campaigns: one targeted to people who need golf balls and one targeted to people needing golf clubs. Each landing page would discuss the appropriate products and emphasize their features and benefits.

That's the essence of a landing page: it's where visitors "land" when they jump to your site from an email or online ad. Visitors expect the content of the landing page to reflect the ad content. If not, you've wasted their time and your ad budget.

Components Of A Good Landing Page
A good landing page builds upon the brief ad copy to give visitors more information. It works best when you create a separate landing page for each promotion campaign. You spend time, effort, and money creating online ads. Doesn't it make sense to also consider what visitors find once the ads bring them to the site?

Get to the point. Make your points quickly and directly. The landing page content should be easy to scan and contain the information promised in the ad. If the ad text offers "3 simple tips to increase site traffic," then the landing page should keep the promise. This relevance helps build trust with visitors.

Include a call to action. Use a prominent text link or button to encourage the visitor to go deeper into the site and find out how purchasing your product or service can help them even more.

The "promised 3 tips to increase site traffic" should whet the appetite of visitors and make them want even more great information. This is where you include what marketing professionals term the "call to action."

Something like: "Learn even more search engine secrets with our Web Site Promotion Package!" That link would take visitors to the full information and signup page - resulting in new customers.

Keep a consistent look and feel. Visitors should never click on a page in your site and wonder: "Where am I?" Use the same look and feel (colors, layout, fonts, images, navigation, etc.) in your ads and landing pages as on the main site pages.

This is particularly important when you're sending out HTML email. Because you can format an HTML email anyway you want, it's a great opportunity to emphasize your site's brand and create an integrated visual connection between the ad and the Web site.

Don't try to collect too much personal information. Be careful what you ask for, or you may get nothing. If you have a free, downloadable white paper or research report, it's ok to collect a name and contact information. Most online visitors don't expect you to share really valuable data completely for free.

Naturally, you want to know who's responding to your ad and it would be nice to be able to follow up with them with more information or additional non-invasive ads (adware and spyware certainly don't count!).

A visitor may be willing to fill out a survey in order to receive other benefits, but keep that optional unless the ad specifically listed it as a condition. Always include a link to your privacy policy so visitors will know how and when you plan to use their personal data.

Feed the spiders. Get a double benefit from your landing pages by submitting them to search engines. Search engine spiders love landing pages that contain lots of good, keyword-rich test.

In fact, landing pages are obvious targets for search engine promotion because they are so targeted. Search engine visitors love them because they get taken directly to the relevant information they were searching for.

When you deep submit landing pages, you bring in traffic from visitors who may not have seen your ad, but are good, targeted traffic just the same because they've been searching on your targeted keywords. You get the benefit of advertising without the expense!

Good content is critical to your success, but you also need an attractive design to keep and hold human visitors.

Establish Trust Through Superior Visual Design
Your landing page should be just as attractive and carefully designed as your home page. It's the first page a visitor sees when he clicks on your ad, so it has as much impact as your home page.

A good design helps establish credibility. Without it, visitors just won't take your online business seriously. Remember that you aren't just selling a generic product or service. You also have to convince online customers that it's safe to buy from your site. Visitors equate a good-looking site with a trustworthy site.

Test And Evaluate Before Launch
Study your server logs to determine how many visitors arrived via the email or online ad. That's where too many analyses stop: "Hey, we got 5,000 new visitors after that last PPC ad went up!" That's seems like a success until you look deeper and find out that only 15 out of 5,000 visitors actually bought your product.

Increase your chance of success by conducting usability testing on the landing pages before you begin the marketing campaign.

You can catch errors that break page display and experiment with different text and layouts before you spend your money on a marketing campaign.

Call Covenant Designs
We provide all the elements for success - from integrated marketing campaigns with web site components, to effective web design and attractive copy writing, to proactive search engine marketing and metrics analysis. Reach a web site professional who is trained to build your business at 214-703-0360.

Adapted from an article by Larisa Thomason.

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