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The lowdown on landing pages, what are they and what do they do
I have been asked recently by a few people “What is a landing page and what does it do”? In a few short paragraphs, let me answer this question. I will post more about how to structure you landing pages later, but for now, here is the overview.
A landing page is the page on your website where a customer first comes in. If they just type in your domain name, they land on your home page. That would make your home page a landing page. As often as you can, use the page that your visitor lands on as a clue to find out what they want.
Some customers will come to your site from places you have no control over, like blogs or links from friends. There is not much you can do to control this other than track these visitors, see where they came from and try to see if there is some context to give you an idea of what they are looking for. If these links push enough traffic to you, you might want to consider reworking the page to reflect you customers expectations, but other than that, lets talk about the landing pages you can control.
Any advertising you do, traditional or digital, make sure to give a unique landing page address for each campaign, brand or channel. This allows you to not only find out where people are coming from (was it your email campaign or the print ad you have in the paper) but it also give you the ability to customize the page to reflect what the user is looking for. If you sell multiple products or services, this is a must. When a customer lands on your site, they do not care what else you can do yet. They only care about two things: 1. Is this what I was expecting, and 2. can you solve my problem. You can work on cross selling later, but the landing pages must be specific to the users needs. Don’t send all your traffic to your home page unless you only sell only one thing and advertise only one way.