Successful Landing Pages
When you’re spending money on an advertising campaign you need to bring potential customers to your website where are you going to direct them?
Sending people to the homepage is one option but the challenge with that is you can’t then control where they go and to keep them focus on the message of the advertisement you’ve spent money on.
You need them to arrive on a landing page that is a bridge between the advertisement and the sale.
The landing page provides focus and carries over the images and words from the initial advertisement that brought them to you. This is to keep continuity and to minimise customer confusion.
The landing page can have additional images and information but it is vital to keep a visual and information link between what initially attracted people to go to your site so they know where they are and to keep clear lines of communication open.
A home page has dozens of paths visitors can take and it is difficult to promote a single message. The purpose of the home page is to immediately let visitors know where they are, what’s the purpose and value of the site, keep them interested and go exploring.
A landing page is to communicate only one or two messages and be a bridge from the advertisement to sales.
It is designed to focus the customer and generate more interest that results in an action – whether that be buying something or subscribing or whatever your aim of the advertising program.
Sometimes there’s confusion between a landing page and a Splash page. A landing page has a clear purpose to impress and clearly communicate with a potential customer.
A splash page is usually designed to show flashy high tech pictures and has a dreadfully high rate of really annoying visitors, so much so that they leave immediately and don’t return. Splash pages are also really bad for search engines to read and index. Personally I haven’t found one decent, good reason for Splash pages to be used as front doors to websites but there are plenty of reasons not to use them at all (just because others are foolish enough to use them doesn’t make it a wise business decision).
Splash pages cost every website they are used on income, customers, visibility and search directory listings.
Landing pages are the opposite. They are the front door for potential customers that greets them with a clear and concise message that answers questions and helps achieve the core purpose of the advertisement.
For me the Sale page is a Landing page. I’ve answered questions up the top quickly and down the right column. The purpose of the Sale area is to sell jewellery and jewellery accessories at discounted prices for a limited time.
To keep the address simple I’ve created a separate area for it so people need only remember a really easy URL: www.creativelybelle.com/sale
This is really important because people won’t always have the direct link or have it written down in front of them. By keeping it simple I’m increasing the