A landing page is a standalone webpage that a visitor to a website first lands on. It is not a part of your website, but a separate standalone webpage created to guide the visitor towards an intended conversional goal. The goal may be to direct the visitor to a webpage in the main website where the visitor is expected to make an order or a purchase or to capture data for lead generation.
Landing pages are extensively used in e-commerce for the purpose of marketing and advertisement. You have probably landed on several of them when searching for information on products and services. Their main purposes are to get the visitors to buy a product, sign up for a website or service, or to extract information from them for the purpose of lead generation.
Types of landing pages:
There are basically two types of landing pages: (1) Click through, and (2) Lead generation.
1. Click Through Landing Page: Typically used in e-commerce, a click through landing page attempts to persuade the visitor to register or make a purchase. It contains detailed descriptions of products or offers to tempt them to take the next step. The destination page is typically a registration form or a sales page with a shopping cart. Once the visitors arrive at the destination page, they usually sign up for the offered service or make a purchase.
2. Lead Generation Landing Page: As the name suggests, a lead generation landing page is used to gather information to generate leads. Its sole purpose is to collect data that you can use to identify and connect with a possible client at a future date. As such, it usually contains a data capture form that asks the visitors to enter their name, e-mail address, phone number and other relevant information. The data thus collected can be valuable for businesses.
How important is a landing page?
Visitors are usually hesitant to give their personal information, sign up for a service or purchase a product without sufficient information about the service or product being offered. Before making any decision, they want to know the product’s description, photos from different angles, price, discounts, whether there is a money-back guarantee or not and what benefits they can get from it. By answering all the questions that customers may ask, it acts as a bridge between the states of “indecision” and “decision”.
How do visitors get to your landing page?
As mentioned earlier, a landing page is not a part of your website, but a standalone webpage. Most of the time, visitors do not even know its URL. So how do they find your landing page? They find it from the links given in e-mails, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others) and other websites. The links to landing pages usually appear in the form of advertisements that interested users can click. Once visitors arrive at the landing page, several clever techniques are employed to tempt them to go to the destination page, which is where you want them to go.
Do you have a landing page? If so, has your landing page helped you to increase your business?
Picture by Kars Alfrink