Good Landing Pages = More Sales

…So what are landing pages and why do I need to use them?

Landing pages have been around for a long time. A landing page should not be confused with say your homepage or a standard page that exists on your Website. A Landing page is a web page dedicated to one very specific goal. If you are still sending your Pay-per-click traffic such as Google Adwords to your homepage or a standard web page then you need to learn more about Landing Pages right now…

The goal of a landing page is to persuade a visitor to that page to take action on something very specific, maybe sign up for a free trial, buy something or book a consultation. Whilst your homepage may have many different menus, buttons, articles and options – a landing page focuses on just one specific goal. So for example lets say you sell flowers online but for Valentines Day you know that roses are your biggest seller. Now rather than send traffic from your Google Adwords campaign or Facebook Ads to your homepage, which advertises many different types of flowers, it would be far more valuable for you to create a Valentines Day landing page. The potential customer has searched for “valentines day flowers”, they hit your site and they want to see that you sell flowers, specifically for Valentines Day. By creating a landing page specifically for this purpose you will undoubtedly increase your sales leads because as with everything online you have literally a few seconds to make your pitch and retain an impatient shopper who is one click from moving on.

Here is an example I have created to explain this:

Using the scenario above lets assume I have an online flower shop called “Leppard Flowers”. I want to run a promotion for Valentines Day to advertise a special offer we have on Roses. In the first scenario I have mocked up what my normal homepage may look like. It’s got plenty of options for flowers but the problem is it doesn’t instantly tell you about my Valentines Day offer.

Somebody looking closely may see the link in the header that’s always there to “Valentines” but there is no immediate details to the visitor specifically showing my Valentines Day offer.

Compare that now with this custom landing page which is designed specifically to convert sales for Roses on Valentines Day:

As you can see, if you had clicked on my Ad expecting to see an offer for Valentines Day you would have seen immediately what you were looking for with this page. Now I haven’t spent ages ages making this THE ideal landing page layout or design, for example I didn’t advertise a cost (Which you would normally in this case) but  instead I wanted to show you that with a small amount of time invested in creating  a separate page you can have a dramatic effect on your sales. And even with this quick example above there are a number of reasons it would work well if used in a campaign – I’ve covered those here – 5 essential Landing Page Elements. 

Landing pages can consist of many different layouts and designs and one landing page which works well for one product may not work so well for another. The key to perfecting a landing page is split testing, more commonly known as A/B testing which I will cover soon in a seperate post as well.