When should I use a landing page?

Dedicated landing pages are often used by internet marketers when they’re promoting a specific campaign. I’m sure you’ve all seen one; they usually take the form of either an extremely long sales letter with an “eye catching” benefit dripping headline, or a short, sharp sales page with some benefits and a lead capture form.

Traffic to landing pages is mostly delivered via paid search, through banners and AdWords, or email marketing campaigns, etc.

The other thing they normally have in common is little or no navigation. If you end up on a landing page, there are usually just two ways to leave it, exit completely or respond as you’ve been instructed.

The irony is that they often have very high bounce rates – many people recoil and get the hell out of there – fast! But for marketers, it’s all about the valuable few who do stick around and convert.

And landing pages done properly convert much better than normal pages. In some cases up to 55% higher than normal website pages.

They’re usually incentivised by some kind of value-exchange for your email address like a whitepaper, free trial or similar.

A couple of days ago, an interesting new website launched called Unbounce. The initial reaction by many online commentators is that this thing could be worth keeping an eye on.

The people behind Unbounce have really done their homework and productised landing page development online. If you’re working in a larger business this means no more waiting for IT departments to get your campaigns going as you can create build and test your own campaign landing pages without having to wait around for anyone else.

They offer “best practice” landing page templates you can customise to your needs as well as A/B split testing and multivariate testing. It’s all hosted on their servers but can be configured to make your pages to appear as if they were on your website. You can also pop in your own Google Analytics script to get reporting on landing page performance metrics within your analytics account.
At this stage it’s a free service, but if you’re into building lists or have a requirement for landing pages, I reckon you should give this a try.

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Chris Thomas heads up Reseo, a search engine optimisation  company which specialises in creating and maintaining Google AdWords campaigns and Search Engine Optimisation campaigns for a range of corporate clients.