An effective sales plan involves prudent selection of the marketing tools complemented with the appropriate Search Engine. While these would catalyze the arrival of the visitors, it may not necessarily facilitate conversion of these visitors to a sale / sign up.
The visitors may arrive as a result of the marketing initiatives like pay per click ad, email marketing or simple keyword based organic search. Brevity and clarity of the message that is being communicated through the respective page, would ensure that the visitor performs the desired action. Further, the message should have enough call for action to persuade the visitor to initiate the appropriate action.
In Marketing parlance, while the marketing initiatives may bring the horse to the well, it may not be adequate to make it drink. The well should be appealing to galvanize the swig!!
Determine the objective of the Landing Page: While designing the landing page, it becomes imperative to identify the objective, that is expected to be achieved through the landing page. A landing page is required to be a highly focused web page. It may be designed to achieve any of the following objectives:
Sell a product.
Provide Contact Information.
Promote a service or an idea.
The landing page demands considerable effort and time, and should be developed after due introspection. Sending your viewer to the homepage is not always a good idea. Doing this would make the visitors search through the site for information proposed (through the email or pay per click link). Consequently, the visitor may leave the page out of dismay. It is always recommended that there should be ease of navigation for the visitor and the visit should be well orchestrated.
It is ideal to get the visitors to an attractive landing page, carefully crafted for the ad link. It should be in consonance with the brief ad copy, given in the email or the PPC link. PPC driven landing pages may be thematically organized for each keyword. Further it is suggested that the look and feel of the landing page is consistent with the email content, as it renders user experience, more fluent and persuasive.
Know the identity of the target audience: Landing pages may be used to target both B2C and B2B contacts, with each having their specific characteristics. While B2B customers seek detailed information, price range and testimonials to facilitate decision-making, B2C customers are more interested in brand names, price tags, discount rates, free offers and shipping charges.
For a B2B customer, the landing pages must establish a sense of reliability and quality for the company’s products and/ or services. Landing pages for B2C must be concise, quick to scan and focused on selling, rather than convincing. B2C pages must sport product pictures with exact price tags, preferably inclusive of shipping charges and other applicable taxes. Irrespective of the type of customer, there should be an attempt to provide a promise of privacy, and the policies of the company must be communicated succinctly.
Gather contact information – The immediate objective of a landing page may also be to obtain some ‘call of action’ for future follow up. It is essential to capture useful contact information of the visitor to facilitate follow-up. However, asking too many questions may irritate the visitor. Hence it is is a good practice to desist from collecting too much personal information. Just the relevant questions intended to elicit appropriate information is usually sufficient.
Technical considerations – Fast loading time of landing pages is absolutely essential to hold and capture the otherwise short attention span of the potential customers. In other words, the landing pages should be vivacious in every sense of the word. Hence, heavy flash images are usually not recommended.
Use of daughter windows is often recommended while opening new content, rather than overlapping information in the same window. This would ensure that even if the landing page takes the visitor to a third party link, the return can be easily accommodated.
Incorporating the aforementioned points while developing the landing page, would reduce the bounce rate of the respective page, and increase the chances of a closure. This would assist in achieving the Online marketing objectives. In other words, this would ensure that the horse drink from the well. Happy closures.
In our experience, an effective marketing plan includes the use of conversion paths instead of landing pages. One size fits all landing pages generally have poor conversion rates. Like you said, landing pages are supposed to “establish a sense of reliability and quality for the company’s products and/or services.” That’s a lot to ask for in one page. Conversion paths are a series of pages that segment users, find out their needs and earn their trust. Why box yourself into selling your product and/or service on one page, when you have the opportunity to do so much more?
[…] An effective landing page is only as good as the visitors that it attracts. Hence, the next logical step after development of an effective landing page is to promote it. This involves attracting qualified visitors to it, by employing various online marketing efforts, viz. PPC or SEO , email marketing. Another frequently employed online marketing tool with the twin benefit of economy and effectiveness is Link Building. […]