Informative and lead capturing landing pages have been used by start-ups and established businesses alike for decades.

Businesses use landing pages for a wide variety of reasons, but perhaps the main ones are to gauge market interest in advance of major investments into a new product, to direct people towards a certain part of the website or product, and to start building interest in something – even before it’s launched.

A landing page has to work hard for your business, capturing the attention of the customer/visitor enough to make them take an action, which could be as simple as a click to somewhere else on your website, or you might need them to fill in a form, or maybe even make a purchase.

The page should give the user enough justification to sign-up. With so many apps, social media channels and websites vying for people’s attention, downloading yet another of any of these, or getting them to act on yours, is not as simple as it used to be. People want less noise, not more.

People won’t sign up just because you have taken the trouble to make a page - there needs to be a compelling reason.

So, what is a landing page? 

It’s not so much a homepage as a standalone web page, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. 

The landing page is, quite literally, where a visitor “lands” after they click on a link in an email, or on ads from social media… basically anywhere you have placed an ad directing them to it.

When it comes to what you want from a web page, the list is endless. They can have many goals, depending on what your business or product is or does.

They should all encourage the user to ‘explore’. Landing pages, however, are designed with a single goal or focus, known as a ‘call to action’ (CTA).

Landing pages lead customers to a specific product, offer, or service, and encourage them to take your chosen action. This is a golden opportunity to create conversions and build your customer base.

According to HubSpot, the best thing you can do to increase your ROI is to create a landing page. They say that nearly 1 in 10 people who make it to a landing page will become potential customers or leads. 

“If you’re new to the world of converting web traffic, that number might not seem impressive, but when you do the math, there’s reason to believe that 1,000 people could become leads on your landing page if 10,000 people visit it.” (HubSpot)

What are the benefits of implementing landing pages?

In short, the benefits can be endless and landing pages as a lead generation tool should be thought of, in most cases, as being indispensable to your business.

• To increase customer conversions
• To lower the cost of lead/sales acquisition
• Provide additional insights into your target audience and their behaviors
• Grow your email subscriber list
• They’re testable – giving you valuable results/data
• You can measure metrics directly linked to your business goals
• They add ‘context’ to your offer – explaining what your marketing idea can do for the consumer and why they need it 
• They increase your brand value and give you credibility by building trust

Quick facts about landing pages:

• 68% of B2B businesses use landing pages to generate leads for future conversion (Marketing Sherpa)
• The average conversion rate for search ads is 2.7%. The average conversion rate for a landing page is 5-15%. (HubSpot).
• Businesses using optimization software for their landing pages see an average conversion lift of 30% (Unbounce).
• Addressing buyer fears on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80% (e.g. you won’t send spam to their email, or use their personal data) (Gripped).
• Personalized landing page CTAs convert up to 202% better (A “smart” CTA that changes dynamically to suit the customer based on the cookies on their browser achieves the highest conversion results.) (HubSpot).

Landing page case studies:

1. Love Child Organics

Love Child Organics went from approximately 2,000 email subscribers to 16,000+ in less than 12 months. 

Kelsey Rostad, the Marketing Manager, refined ad targeting and used A/B Testing to minimize cost-per-email-acquisitions. 

“The coupon landing page started with a conversion rate of 43% and an average CPA of $2.00, but eight months later ended up converting at 69% with a CPA of $1.30".

This indicates that the conversion rate increased by 60%.

2. CD Baby

Daniel Parscale, the marketing specialist for CD Baby said: “Landing pages allow you to diversify and scale your messaging, so you can have custom conversations with specific audiences.”

There’s really no better way to segment your messaging for your ads, especially for lead generation or SaaS campaigns. 

Websites are fundamental, but it can be hard to formulate a perfect sales pitch that will appeal to every prospect. 

As one of his most successful campaigns, this has been running for six months, with conversion rate stability being maintained at 37.17%.

3. A Prominent Cleaning Service 

After seeing new landing pages, 55% of leads had called, 24% had completed forms within the landing page, and approximately 20% came from ads - all within four months. 

$30,000 in annual ad spend was reduced through the addition of negative keywords and elimination of non-performing keywords within the AdWords account.

This resulted in a 40.7% reduction of the cost per lead within three months of implementing these changes. 

When additional markets need to be added, a new landing page wouldn’t be required. All that is needed is to “add dynamic text insertion with new phone numbers and local text.”

This progress was only possible because the company simplified their landing page collection first, then clarified metrics. 

Only after this was completed could efforts be directed toward optimizing the AdWords account.

Next steps for your landing page:

Overall, once someone has landed on your landing page, they are far more likely to take the action you have set up for them.

Done well, your pre-marketing of a landing page should pique someone’s interest enough to get them to said page. Here, they are about as in the palm of your hand as they are going to be. 

Within the landing page, you have a captive audience, who you know is at the very least interested in your business, offer, or product, because that’s what got them there in the first place.

Make sure your landing page is attention-grabbing – the text, graphics, and imagery you choose should be well thought out for the specific target audience.

The action you want your audience to then take should be meaningful to them and, preferably, take very little of their time. The very fact that the action is simple for them to make, unlike all the complex noise others are making, can be enough of an incentive to get them to buy into your brand.

Last but not least, don’t forget to correctly track the activity on your landing page. Adding your Google Analytics and Google Ads tracking codes as well as any other ad or CRM trackers will ensure a clear view on advertising effectiveness and gets the lead to the right system or person.

Some further reading on tips for developing a landing page from HubSpot can be found here.