Landing Page
Quick definition: A landing page is a standalone page on your website that exists primarily to convert visitors into leads. A digital call to action – like in an email or an advertisement – directs visitors to the page.
Key takeaways:
- An effective landing page has one clear message and one obvious call to action.
- Marketers can use a landing page template for quick and simple deployment.
- Your landing page strategy should align with the overall customer journey, specifically with lead generation, engagement, and retention. You should adjust the landing page content accordingly.
- Because they are so common, landing pages aren’t a place to differentiate your brand. Instead, they are an effective baseline tactic that opens the door to a more unique customer experience.
- In the future, landing pages will become more integrated with a brand’s website. Marketers will approach them with a more holistic view of the user experience. Personalization for landing pages will become more advanced and refined.
The following questions were answered during an interview with Daniele Mariott, web product manager at Adobe.
What is the difference between a landing page and a homepage?
How do I create a landing page?
What are the elements of a landing page?
How do you optimize a landing page?
What are some landing page strategies?
What are the benefits of landing pages?
What are the disadvantages of landing pages?
How will landing pages evolve in the future?
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a standalone page on your website that exists primarily to convert visitors into leads. Visitors follow a digital call to action (CTA), like in an email or social media ad, and land on a page with an intentional message or offer.
What is the difference between a landing page and a homepage?
A website’s homepage is the catch-all for the website. It links out to more web pages that a visitor is free to navigate to. But unlike a landing page, it’s designed to speak to a broader audience.
A landing page has a specific purpose within the broader website. The marketing CTA directly routes visitors to the landing page, so they don’t have to enter the gateway of a homepage and figure out how to find the landing page themselves. A homepage has many different actions you could take and typically, a lot of competing goals — but a landing page has one clear goal and one obvious action.
How do I create a landing page?
To create a landing page, you first need to research your potential customers and find out what offer they’re interested in. The landing page is an opportunity to push them to conversion but you must figure out what singular message your landing page will communicate.
Next, you’ll need a content strategy framework to support this singular message. This can be done in a couple of ways. You can create a landing page template by working with a content management system (CMS), such as Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Having a template ready to go in your CMS makes creating basic landing pages much easier — you simply duplicate the template, insert fresh content, and go live.
However, there are times when creating a unique landing page from scratch with custom imagery and content may be the better choice, such as when you have a high-visibility campaign.
Once you have your landing page template, you’ll integrate your lead capture tools into the page. These could include forms like those available through Adobe Experience Manager and Marketo.
What are the elements of a landing page?
The most important element of a landing page is the main message. That message needs to be clear, concise, and succinct. The exception to this rule would be landing pages created for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes instead of conversion, where lengthy content may be necessary for page rankings.
Alongside your message should be the offer. This might be a special report, presentation, webinar, or an offer to join a newsletter mailing list.
The final element of a landing page is the user information form. This collects personal details and contact information from potential customers so marketers can bring the user into the sales funnel.
After a user submits the form, they’re taken to a confirmation page that thanks them for sharing their information and delivers an offer by sending an email, sharing a link, or initiating a download. The confirmation page may also offer curated next steps that navigate users to a new part of the website or another landing page for related content.
How do you optimize a landing page?
Personalization is one of the best ways to optimize landing pages, but marketers walk a fine line between showing that they value a user’s needs and showing that they’re abusing user data. Do you know something about the user that can deepen their relationship with your brand? Does the situation warrant exposing what you already know about potential customers? These are questions marketers must ask themselves as they personalize landing pages.
Marketers can also optimize landing page layouts by quickly running a simple A/B test to deliver the best user experience. With larger campaigns, user research can be more extensive. You can test even the smallest landing page elements, like headlines or button colors.
Finally, don’t forget to optimize your web content for accessibility. Do screen readers work on your site? Are you considering voice UX in your web elements as much as visuals? These can be good options.
What are some landing page strategies?
Your landing page strategy should align with your overall customer journey. Based on where customers are in the sales funnel, your approach will vary:
- Lead generation strategy. When users are beginning to interact with your brand and your content, a lead generation strategy is useful. It recognizes that customers are in the early stages of the sales funnel and focuses on providing them with offers that are intriguing and valuable enough that they will share their information and engage with your brand.
- Engagement strategy. Customers do not want to keep filling out form after form when they’ve already given you their information. A landing page strategy geared toward engagement would feature offers similar to the initial content that sparked the user’s interest but without requesting all their information again. The goal is to keep people coming back for more and continuing to add value.
- Retention strategy. Landing pages aimed at retention are a good idea if users haven’t been engaging with your brand. These feature messaging like, “We haven’t seen you in a while. Here’s an offer we think you’ll like.” Your job on these landing pages is to make engagement enticing and worth your less-active customers’ time so you can bring them back into the sales funnel.
What are the benefits of landing pages?
Marketers can quickly automate landing pages and create efficient vehicles for sharing targeted messaging with a variety of personas. Landing pages make marketing campaigns more manageable by breaking content into small, efficient pieces. It’s easier to launch many smaller boats than one large cruise ship.
Customers benefit from landing pages, too. The landing page format puts the power in the customers’ hands by letting them choose whether or not to opt in. If they receive a piece of content that is valuable to them, it starts them off on the right foot with your brand and opens the door to a mutually beneficial relationship.
What are the disadvantages of landing pages?
Because landing pages are so easy to duplicate and publish, the internet is over-saturated with pages that are starting to look the same. The industry has optimized and optimized landing page strategy until, now, an unspoken universal template has emerged.
But this doesn’t have to be a disadvantage. Marketers just need to realize that a landing page isn’t the place to differentiate your brand. Instead, it is the baseline tactic of customer engagement that opens the door to more unique experiences.
How will landing pages evolve in the future?
A common theme across landing page design is a distilled page with only practical requirements of the messaging and call to action. Even the navigation and footer that are common across the rest of the website are removed to make it difficult to bounce away.
That tactic is changing. In the future, landing pages will become more integrated with a brand’s website, and marketers will approach them with a more holistic view of the user experience. You want customers to engage with the landing page’s offer, but you also want to expose them to other valuable information on your website. Marketers will become less concerned with the landing page’s conversion rate and instead, they’ll allow customers the freedom to navigate as they choose.
Also, personalization for landing pages will become more finessed, detailed, and refined. Tools like Adobe Real-time Customer Data Platform (CDP) will give marketers a unified customer profile to inform advanced personalization. With that information at hand, landing pages won’t need to ask for all the customer’s details at once. Instead of being the destination for conversion, landing pages can act as one part of a broader data collection and engagement strategy.
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