Business Consulting - Spotted Koi

What if I told you that there is a way to guide visitors into signing up for more information about your site before they even really get there?

What if I told you that there is a way to capture valuable leads for your business in real-time just through regular inbound traffic?

What if I told you that there is a way to provide specific content to a visitor based on how they reached your site?

I am telling you all three of those things now. This is not magic. This is the science of landing pages.

What is a landing page?

Very simply, a landing page is a separate-but-equal portion of your website that allows you to capture a visitor's information in an easy-to-use form or serve up useful content for them. Landing pages are highly-customizable, and can be tied to traffic sources so that you can tailor content to your audience's deepest, darkest desires. For instance, links from Twitter, Facebook, email newsletters, and ad banners that head to a landing page allow you to know what you're going to tell a visitor before they even ask. Properly-built landing pages can drastically improve conversion rates, and they help visitors get acquainted with you and your site. Imagine your visitors as people dropped into the Amazon rainforest. Your landing page can be the map AND compass that guides visitors until they are comfortable navigating by themselves.

Landing page strategy

There are two kinds of landing pages: transactional or reference. A transactional page is one tailored to lead capture, which generally means that there'll be a form for visitors to fill out. Commonly, these forms include a field for an email address, but can also be very detailed, providing fields for interests, phone numbers, and other contact information. Transactional landing pages can also offer a visitor special offers or free content in exchange for that contact information. Remember, when you're trying to capture leads, you want to be able to sink as many hooks in as you can. Having something ready to offer is another way of doing that. It's also worth noting that transactional pages are very often tied to search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns. A Goodle ad that says "Click here for the newest ebook on unicorn preservation" needs to lead the clicker to the landing page where they exchange an email address for what really sounds like an amazing ebook. A reference landing page is one that provides pre-loaded and relevant content to the visitor. Someone who's followed a link from your email newsletter doesn't want to visit a page where they have to provide their email address again (generally). Reference pages serve up useful content on a silver platter. Maybe a Twitter user will want to see your newest articles about best practices for Twitter. Reference landing pages can do that. They force visitors to not waste time looking for what they want. And who wouldn't want that?

The touch, the feel, the fabric of a landing page

Landing pages are NOT your main website's homepage, unless they are. If your homepage is optimized as a landing page, it can certainly function as one, but you'll otherwise want to tailor landing pages to a specific function. Remember, transactional pages need to guide a visitor to enter information and become a lead, not distract with other buttons or cat videos. They can sometimes look like sub-pages or pop-up boxes (lightboxes). It's important to have a very clear path to what you want, even if that's the relevant content of a reference page. It's probably worth it to include social networking "share" functions to help widen the footprint of your landing page. Sharing builds traffic and traffic means leads, especially with good landing pages.

A/B Testing and Optimization

As Christopher Walken famously danced: "You can go with this, or you can go with that." In much the same fashion, we can determine what visitors to our landing pages really want to go with, so to speak. This is called A/B testing, and it shall change your life. Note: If you don't like the natural progression of our alphabet, you can also call it "split testing" - we won't be offended. A majority of websites don't split test, which is to say that they don't tweak portions of their site in an incremental and testable manner. If we extend this language to landing pages, A/B testing means changing small parts of your reference or transactional pages in an attempt to raise your conversion rates. A landing page that features a free ebook download in exchange for an email address might do just swimmingly, but add a picture of Leonidas to it, and you may have a gold mine on your hands. ?

? Of course, if your visitor can't stand Leonidas, you could have failure rates through the floor. ?

Split testing helps you figure out what works, and more importantly, what doesn't work as well. A/B testing goes all the way, with changes to color, field names, placement, images (or lack thereof), overall copy, position of a "submit" button, etc. The most robust split testing is done with minute changes to determine the best overall combination. An A/B test involves sending the same amount of people a given link, but that link will drive equal parts of the test group to two different pages. The page that has the highest conversion rate (probably NOT the one with screaming Leonidas) is deemed the winner, and further changes can be made to improve it with more A/B tests. The great thing about split testing visitors to your site, or your newsletter subscribers for that matter, is that no one is the wiser. Only you and perhaps your web developers will know that they're being tested. Granted, if a person is curious they may be able to try and dupe the test by visiting from a different browser or link, but in general, split tests won't make your visitors any less comfortable. They may, however, help you raise your overall conversion rates. Landing pages are great ways to increase engagement and generate leads for your business, and with proper A/B testing, you can start to create a formula for what works. As always, if you'd like to hear more about these topics, or see how Spotted Koi can help you, drop us a line!

Source: http://spottedkoi.com/2012/02/09/what-are-landing-pages-and-why-are-they-important/

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