What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a webpage that users can ‘land’ on when they click on a link from an email, advert or other digital location.
It is usually a standalone page that encourages users to take an action. Actions may include buying your products, joining your mailing list, or making an enquiry. The landing page is successful if the customer has completed the action you set up on the landing page. It is a great marketing channel if you have a specific short-term goal that you want to help guide buyers towards.
It is even possible to build a whole website from a landing page by linking multiple pages. The various landing pages can market a variety of products and services that you are looking to sell. You can additionally tailor each landing page towards the product you want users to focus on or the demographic you want to reach. However, you will need to make sure that the various landing pages aren’t competing.
Types of Landing Pages
There are two main types of landing pages available for businesses:
Lead Generation landing page: a Lead Generation landing page focuses on collecting lead data from users, giving you information about the demographic that is clicking on your landing page. One feature of a lead generation landing page is a form, which is the CTA. This form usually asks customers to leave their name, email, contact number, and sometimes date of birth or address. Businesses use this information to build up a demographic profile that they can target in future advertising campaigns. Lead Generation is a valuable type of landing page, helping businesses to learn more about potential clients.
Click-through landing page: a click-through landing page has a CTA button (rather than a form) that users can click on. This link will direct the user to the service or product the company is trying to sell. These landing pages are usually used by e-commerce or marketing websites, whose aim is to immediately sell after collecting user information. Click-through landing pages generally contain more marketing or persuasive language to encourage potential customers to spend.
Landing page vs homepage
So, you may be wondering: what’s the difference between a landing page and a homepage?
Homepages provide a general overview of a business, with links to other services and areas of the webpage. Landing pages only offer limited options, as their purpose is to direct customers to the item they want to sell. Therefore, the main benefit of a landing page is that it can be used to sell a specific product or service, rather than customers getting distracted with different options or links that would be available on a homepage.
The main focus for landing pages are specific, short-term goals that increase conversions, improve paid ad campaigns and yield new audience insights. You can additionally add testimonials and user reviews about products or services, providing potential customers with plenty of product-specific information.
From a visual aspect, a well-designed and professional-looking landing page will boost credibility and help to reinforce your brand, hopefully encouraging customers to come back to your page later on.
Other features that distinguish a landing page from a homepage include:
- Less links: a well-optimised landing page should only have a few specific links, rather than on a homepage where you may find at least ten links;
- A Narrower range of CTA’s (call to action buttons): landing pages will generally have one goal with a tailored CTA. A homepage might have a much broader range of options;
- A different audience and purpose: users who visit your landing page probably have an idea of what services or products they are looking for. With a homepage, they may simply be browsing to see what is available. Therefore, you need to make sure your landing page is ready for this specific purpose.
<h2<10 top tips to improve your landing page
You can improve your landing page and optimise it for conversions through the following ten tips:
- Write an enticing headline: we all know the power of a well written and enticing headline to pull you in. Aim to provide strong content to keep users on the page long enough to translate into a conversion by including words such as ‘free’, ‘now’ and ‘special offer’.
- Provide testimonials: show evidence of happy customers through great reviews. Studies show that up to 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business;
- Provide your contact details: this allows potential customers to reach out to you if they have any issues or questions;
- Deliver your message via video: a great way to capture customers attention, especially when combined with text to make an interactive experience;
- Show your product or service in use: this helps users to visualise using the product themselves;
- Make your content shareable: make your content exciting and unique, and allow leads to share your landing page and increase the potential to connect to a bigger audience;
- Earn backlinks: backlinks are great to direct traffic to your landing pages, sending a positive message to Google and increasing your search engine results and ranking;
- Increase AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page): AMP is related to page loading speed on mobile devices. Optimising and increasing the loading time of a landing page for mobiles is a great way to get more conversions.
What is AMP?
A feature that has become more important for landing pages over the last few years is AMP (Accelerated Mobile Page). Faster websites mean happier users, more conversions, and a higher ranking in Google.
Research indicates that globally there are approximately 6.378 billion people globally using smartphones. In addition, studies show that up to 40% of users will leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and a 1-second delay in web page speed decreases conversions by as much as 7% (Kissmetrics ). Therefore, a mobile-friendly landing page and a responsive and personalised user experience are vital to translate into conversions.
AMP strips websites down to their basics, storing a cached version on the Google servers and allowing sites to deliver content almost immediately. Google used to identify AMP websites with a lightning bolt icon, but this has recently been dropped.
AMP was introduced by Google in late 2015 , which they launched as an open-sourced project to ensure websites could operate at optimal speed. Google’s aim was to create web designs that were consistently fast, as well as visually appealing. Advantages of AMP include a loading speed faster than almost any other type of website, reducing the time between clicking on the ad and viewing the product and higher search rankings.
However, AMP has come with some drawbacks. These issues include AMP websites only working effectively if the user clicks on the AMP version of the website, limited tracking data from AMP, and hard to implement if you don’t have WordPress.
However, it is still a good idea to include AMP as part of your website. The benefits of having a faster loading rate correlate with a much higher conversation rate.
Swipe Pages to build landing pages
Swipe Pages is one of our tools available for clients to build fast websites using AMP that uses Google’s cache and is a bit like the Ferrari of landing page builders! And the best part is, you don’t need to use any code. Useful features that Swipe Pages offer include:
- Build a standalone website;
- Stripe payment system, allowing direct selling from your landing page;
- Lower bounce rate, as they load in less than 2 seconds;
- Better converstions – a lower cost per click;
- Easy-to-modify ready-made templates;
- Access to professional images from Unsplash;
- You can invite team members and assign roles to manage projects;
- Personalises user experience by using dynamic text;
- In-built analytics for insights and optimisation;
- Custom domains. You can publish landing pages to your domain, keeping the URL’s consistent with your brand;
And many other fantastic features to make your landing page experience easy to create!
We offer this tool to our customers to provide you with the very best and fastest solutions. This one is a newcomer, but we’re expecting big things, and we’ve invested in their future. They have already been utilised by bigger companies, including BMW, and are recommended by Google.
For further information about how we can help you create an effective landing page for your website, visit our services page or contact Design Grid today!
