A landing page is a webpage that your visitor ‘lands on’ after clicking on an advertisement from one of your digital marketing channels. Landing pages are an essential component of a digital business's success and, when optimised, will dramatically boost your online conversions. Some of the benefits of landing pages include:

• More Leads: Lead generation is crucial in reducing your customer acquisition costs, and landing pages are one of the most effective ways to generate leads for your business.
• Higher Conversion rates: With landing pages specific to particular products/services, you will reap a much higher conversion rate. Landing page conversions are often as high as 10%!
• Improved Metric Measurements: If you want to measure the success of a particular marketing campaign, you can utilise a landing page to monitor your campaign easier.
• Clarity and Context: Some marketers skip the landing page and jump right to conversion, but you can use a landing page to explain your product or service more clearly to your customer and increase the likelihood of a sale!

The differences between a home and landing page

It’s an easy mistake to think that a home page can be a landing page, but this is incorrect. There is a critical difference between the two; homepages are for user exploration, but a landing page focuses on conversions. 

Landing pages:

• Have a singular CTA.
• Have texts and images that match a particular campaign and are tailored to a niche audience.
• Have minimal distractions.

Home pages:

• Are an introduction to your brand.
• Incorporate everything your brand has to offer.
• Have text and images designed to target a much broader audience.

Types of landing pages

There are many different reasons why you would have a landing page; thus, there are many kinds of landing pages you can choose from.

1. Lead Capture Page: As the name suggests, this landing page focuses on capturing new leads for your business. Landing pages can be an incredibly effective way of generating leads. In fact, by having a lot of landing pages, you could boost your leads by 700%!
2. Click-Through Page: When you are trying to promote a particular product or service, sending traffic directly from your digital marketing channel to a home/product page can reduce your conversion rate. A click-through page is a page in between your ad and the shopping cart; it allows you to showcase the true value of what you are selling. 
3. Squeeze Page: A squeeze page is a means to collect visitors' email addresses. Though this could be categorised as a lead generation page, a squeeze page is relatively brief with a simple heading and little text. Squeeze pages tend to promote a special offer, restricted access or valuable content such as an eBook or a webinar.
4. Long Form Sales: If you have a product or service that is difficult to understand, very expensive, or simply requires a lot of persuasion to secure a sale, long-form sales pages will be the best choice for you. With a long-form landing page, you can educate your visitors and highlight the value that this product or service will bring to them. When creating long-form sales pages, just ensure that all information is essential and straightforward! 
5. 404 Pages: Although you should always avoid 404 pages, no matter how hard you try, it’s likely that some of your visitors will arrive at a 404 page. You can create a landing page for these error pages and reduce your bounce rate! For example, you can give visitors a choice to read related articles for article page errors. Similarly, you can direct users to other products within the same category for product page errors.  
6. Splash Pages: A splash page precedes any other pages and typically doesn’t try to generate leads or sales directly but instead relays a message or gives visitors a choice before continuing to the site. An example would be to offer UK visitors the choice to go to the UK version of a website instead of USA site. Or verify the user's age before entering the site. You can also use splash pages to showcase brief messages to improve your branding.

Optimising a landing page 

Optimising your landing page will make a massive difference to your bottom line! Here are our top seven tips to make killer landing pages:

1. Don’t Oversell: Overselling is just as bad as underselling! If your landing page copy feels too ‘salesy’ to your visitors, they will have less trust in what you have to sell. Rather than proving value in copy alone, showcase testimonials, show the number of sales the product already has, or for a new product that has no sales, show your company's reviews on Google or Trustpilot. 
2. Prioritise the Important information: In all likelihood, your visitors will not read your entire sales copy, they are far more likely to scan through the page or read just the first few paragraphs. It is essential to keep this in mind when building a landing page. You should keep the most important and convincing information as close to the top of the page as possible.
3. Use Scarcity/FOMO: Fear of missing out can be a powerful marketing tool, it is estimated that 60% of shoppers make a purchase because of FOMO and usually within the first 24 hours! Adding a deadline or a limit on the number of orders will boost your landing page conversions! Just make sure you do it tastefully, as putting too much pressure on your visitors will likely have an adverse effect. 
4. Use Exit Popups: Maybe the visitor mis clicked on your advert, wasn’t convinced by your sales copy, or the price is too high; there are plenty of reasons they might choose to exit the page. But you still have an opportunity to save that sale/lead by setting up a popup for when an exit is attempted. 
5. Remove all Navigation: Because you’ll be using landing pages for specific goals, it makes sense to limit the number of options the user has on the page. You could remove the header and footer on the page to reduce the possibility of a user clicking on an internal link rather than your CTA.   
6. Consider an agency: One of the best ways to optimise your landing page is by hiring an experienced expert to do it for you. We’d be happy to share our expertise with you! You can click here to get the landing page you have always dreamed of! 

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