You’ve spent hours creating a great digital marketing campaign: a well-thought-out strategy, clear objectives, beautiful ads, or emails, but have you considered where you are going to send all this new traffic?

• Should you send it to your homepage?
• Should you send it to a product or service page?
• Or should you send it to a landing page?

Answer? You should send traffic to a landing page purpose-built for your campaign to help users convert and achieve your campaign’s objective.

Sending visitors to a landing page ensures they do not get lost along the way towards taking an action such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or downloading information.

What is a landing page?

Leadpages defines a landing page as a page “designed to receive traffic from one or several specific sources (such as an ad or an email campaign).”

What is the purpose of landing pages?

If well-executed, your ad or email campaign will persuade the user to click. Now comes the hard part, convincing them to take an action. You’ve hooked them in, now you need to convert them and that is where a landing page can help.

It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. (Source: https://www.sweor.com/firstimpressions)

You can tailor a landing page to different campaigns based on the action you want them to take. Businesses with multiple business lines have the perfect case for landing pages. If they are trying to promote a certain portion of their business they should have a landing page dedicated to that.

Landing pages are good for:

• Advertising – PPC, Facebook, etc.
• Lead magnets (webinars, eBooks, free trials, etc.)
• Email Blasts

Why do landing pages work

Landing pages should look and act differently than the rest of your website. A landing page is a single page (usually with a thank you page), that is specific to an item or offer. It usually has text, images, and a form.

A landing page typically does not have your website’s navigation to avoid users being distracted by other content. It contains minimal or no links off of the page. It contains a form used to capture leads.

Landing Page Best Practices

• A single landing page should have one focus, one goal.
• A landing page’s message should match that of the promotion that sent them there.
• Remove navigation and hyperlinks.
• Ensure your call to action is above the fold.
• Use minimal form fields
• Use video if possible.
• Keep copy short and sweet, use bullets where applicable.
• A/B test
• Use directional cues
• Provide your contact information so your users can contact you (email or phone number) aside from the form.
• Use social proofs such as testimonials or reviews
• Ensure you have the proper tracking on the landing page including conversion tracking on your you page
• Give users the opportunity post-conversion to continue to interact with you

A/B Testing

With landing pages, you easily have the ability to test different copy (headline, call to action), personalization and voice, value proposition, button color, page flow, media, and keywords to see which leads to more conversions. But don’t do it all at once, you need to be strategic and test one thing at a time to see what makes a difference.

Google Optimize is an easy-to-use tool that only requires a small snippet of code to be added to your site to be able to run A/B tests. The program allows you to change text, images, form placement, and even HTML and then select the percentage of visitors you want to see the B version of the landing page.

After the conversion

You’ve converted a user. They arrive on your thank you page. Don’t waste this valuable opportunity for them to learn more about you. While thanking your user for converting is great, we also recommend giving them some simple actions to keep the conversation going such as: following you on social media, visiting interesting/relevant content such as blogs, downloading a whitepaper or e-book.

Final thought

You’ve spent all your time, money, and energy in building a great landing page, you’ve gotten traffic there, you even have some conversions. But what about those who didn’t convert? Don’t waste your hard-earned marketing dollars on simply advertising. Ensure you a lot some of your budget to remarketing and tracking them.

Need some inspiration? Check out HubSpot’s list of 19 best landing pages.