What is a landing page?
Landing page is a standalone web page that is specifically designed to achieve a certain marketing or advertising goals. It is the page where visitors of your website “land” on when they click on your ads, social media posts or a link in their email. In general, the intention of a landing page is usually to provide quality and valuable experience for visitors that comes to your website that could help drive more conversions to you and your business. But it all depends on the types of landing page that you want to create.
Tools to help you create landing page
What is your goal for a landing page?
First, you have to decide the goals that you are trying to achieve by having a landing page. Once decided, only then you can design your landing page accordingly to achieve maximum conversion. Landing page can convey different messages to your audience. As such, you have to make it clear on your objectives in order for you to have landing pages that is tailor-made to address those objectives.
Landing page can just be a simple announcement to launch new model of your products that would create awareness to your visitors. It can just be about amazing offers that your business has before entering your website. It can be a starting point for visitors to navigate to your website or start trials with what you’ve got to offer. Most of the times, landing pages are used to fetch out contact info from visitors that would turn them into leads for your business.
Types of landing pages
Not all landing pages are the same as they would have different goals to cater to. Particularly, different landing pages address different stages in the marketing funnel of a person’s buying process. To give you an idea on what are the landing pages that are used by marketers today, have a look below.
1. Splash page
Splash page is a normal landing page that helps you to make a good first impression of your brand or business. It is a way to engage with your audience and provide them with value before entering your website. It is an introductory page that acts as a hook to your audience, grabbing their attention to what it is that you can offer.
Take for example Forbes, they embedded a landing page that features motivational quotes to their audience, something their visitors would appreciate when coming to their website. Forbes visitors would normally be that of a business or leadership background that would really need to hear some of the quotes shared.
2. Squeeze page
Squeeze page would normally be crafted to “squeeze” visitors into providing their email address so that they can enter your marketing funnel and become leads. It is usually a straight-forward type of landing page that is shorter, have less images and straight-to-the-point. Attract them with free offers, discount vouchers, or ask them to become your subscribers for your newsletter in exchange of their email contacts. Once succeed, you can now nurture your leads using email marketing or marketing automation techniques to increase conversions.
Neil Patel has a good squeeze page where visitors can enter their email to win some of Neil’s SEO services that would boost your business. Whether they win or not, Neil will get their email and build a list full of leads.
3. Lead capture page
Lead capture page is one of the most widely used landing page by marketers. It is with the sole purpose of getting information and contacts about your potential customers to begin to make sales. It is a longer version of a squeeze landing page and normally would require visitors to fill a simple form for us to gather more information about themselves.
If your lead capture page is with the intention for people to get started, then a basic form would do. But, if your customers already shown an interest to your products or services, you may ask them a little bit more questions to understand them more for you to direct them where applicable.
An example of a lead capture page would be from Campaign Monitor where they ask their visitors for their names, email address and company, just to get to understand their potential customer profile. A benefit to understand the customers better is so that they can construct their marketing efforts accordingly.
4. Click-through landing page
A click-through landing page is with the intention to get your audience to act on with the information given in your website. Oftentimes, this type of landing page will appear after visitors checked out your website for 2-3 minutes to prompt them of moving to the next stage. It’s like“you’re obviously interested with our business, don’t you want to move forward?”. The landing page which features a call-to-action (CTA) button will trigger your audience to go ahead and sign-up for free trials, sign-up based on special offers, or just get started based on the value that you’ve given them on the web.
One of the examples is by Business Insider. After scrolling through their website, a landing page pops out showing a special offer that is running, prompting us to subscribe with the following pricing.
5. Sales landing page
Sales landing page is usually the toughest landing page to do as it needs to convince and persuade your audience to buy or make a purchase of your products or services in a single landing page as compared to just getting their email addresses. You can expect this type of landing page to be a longer than any of the landing pages as it needs to explain a lot more on the values of your goods to your potential customers. This would naturally come with a CTA button for your customers to decide and act on based on information received.
For example, Adespresso. In order for them to promote Adespresso University, they have a sales landing page explaining the video courses and live webinars, the benefits of subscribing to this program, and also testimonials and reviews of the program. This is to convince people to get onboard with the program in one single landing page.
6. Thank you page
Thank you page is a landing page that is best to have to complete customer’s experience when they have sign-up for free trials or subscribe to your newsletter. It is a way to nurture your leads and make them feel secured with the treatment that you are providing them. Not having them would be like not saying thank you to your customer and probably blow your chance for you to have repeatable purchase from single customer.
Shopify included a thank you page whenever their visitors convert into subscribers for their newsletter, to provide that rich,quality experience altogether.
7. Unsubscribe page
You may want to consider implementing unsubscribe landing page as well. Although it is not a type of landing page to win new customers or get their contacts, it is a way to win back your about to leave customers.Instead of accepting straight away when they decided to unsubscribe to your services, have them land on a page where you give them options to select on certain preferences to stay loyal to you. If that works, you’ve succeeded in retaining customers that is about to leave. Besides preferences, have them answer why they want to unsubscribe and improve what you can based on the feedbacks.
Grammarly has an amazing unsubscribe page. They allow subscribers to adjust their preference of their subscription instead of unsubscribing entirely.
8. 404 landing page
404-error page is never a good place for your visitor to land on. It diminishes that excitement the visitors have when they want to visit your website. To keep the mood going, altered any 404-error page into a landing page that can divert your visitors to the homepage or to a neutral landing page. A good feature to have is to get creative and add humor to offset the error experience. Many brands are taking this approach to retain their customers this way.
IMDB has the perfect way to deal with visitors who stumble upon its error page. The words appear refer to a famous line from the movie Se7en where Brad Pitt’s character would say “What’s in the box”. IMDB change it to “What’s on the page”.
9. Referral landing page
If you have good and loyal customers, and because of them,you are getting more customers due to their recommendation to their friends and families, you certainly have a big advantage here. To provide that more personal connection to new referred customers, be sure to design a referral landing page to make them feel welcome even more. It will surely make them feel special when they land on a referral landing page rather than the normal homepage of your website.
Whenever an existing customer of Barbell Apparel recommend to their friends and families, that particular person would land on the landing page below to get some discounts before proceeding to the main page.
How to create a landing page?
You can create a landing page on your own either using:
- Landing page tool from existing website builder software
- Standalone landing page tool that you can find on the web
Landing page tool from existing website builder software
If your website was built using a website builder software such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace or Webflow, there should be a feature for you to create a landing page to complement your main website. Usually, they would have templates already that you can use and a simple drag-&-drop editor for you to make changes. Be sure to check it out and start building that landing page.
Standalone landing page tool that you can find on the web
There are a few tools that you can utilize and start using to create your landing page. These tools are created specifically to make impactful landing pages, have far more templates to choose from, equipped with analytics for you to assess the effectiveness of the page, and of course, a very easy to use drag-&-drop editor.
Some of the landing page tools are:
1. Unbounce
- Build a high converting landing page with Unbounce using a drag-&-drop builder and choose from over 100 templates to start with.
- By using Unbounce, you can search and use instantly stock photos from Unsplash to embed your landing page with high resolution images.
- Unbounce is equipped with AI-powered optimization called Smart Traffic where it studies the visitor’s attributes and send them to different variant of landing page that you have that they think will have higher chance of converting.
2. Leadpages
- Popular choice by small businesses; over 40,000 small businesses are using Leadpages
- Choose from templates available. You can also choose high converting pages that they have set up to give you an idea and also according to industry.
- Responsive support team that can assist you if you run into any problems.
3. Instapage
- Choose from 500+ landing page layouts
- Equipped with heatmaps to analyse how visitors interact on landing page created to get a better understanding
- Featured with AMP technology that can create faster responsive landing page
4. Landingi
- Choose from over 250 landing page templates
- Easy-to-use drag-&-drop editor for you to customize your own landing page
- Affordable entry pricing. Suitable for those who are starting out on having landing pages
Extra tips to create a landing page
- Be sure to write a killer headline that will attract your customers to know more about your brand instantaneously
- Design of your landing page should be interesting to capture visitor’s attention
- Use high resolution images in your landing page where applicable
- Clearly convey the value of what you’ve got to offer in a single landing page so that it is sufficient for the customers to stick around and move to the next step
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