With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot), you have the power to drive conversions through Landing Pages. This is a crucial tool in your marketing toolbox to help drive sales goals, but it needs to be used effectively in order to be successful. Providing a great first impression to win over your customer begins with you ensuring specific qualities are in place to drive expected performance and engagement.
What is a landing page?
Landing pages are targeted web pages built by marketing teams to drive traffic from campaigns, including email links, social media posts, or digital ads. The key difference between a landing page and a standard website is that a landing page focuses on a single action with the end goal of generating new leads through targeted confersions.
Website vs. Landing Page
Key differences, in addition to the call-to-action, between a website page and a landing page include:
- Single CTA – Websites have multiple points of navigation and include several points of conversion, whereas a landing page often has no navigation and focuses on one singular point of action.
- Focused message to convert – Websites tend to be content heavy and filled with information from a multitude of channels, including company details, business offerings, careers, etc. A landing page uses a single persuasive message to convert a specific subset of your target audience to do something.
- Keep visitors on the page – Websites link to additional pages, social sites, or sign ups for email communications. Landing pages typically don’t have standout links that would potentially drive traffic off its page.
Why use a landing page?
A landing page is used to convert new leads in exchange for them receiving something they find valuable. Such valuable items could include:
- Offer Codes or Discounts
- White Papers or Articles
- Newsletter Registration
- Webinar or Event Attendance
- Free eBooks, Blogs, or Infographics
- Free Software Trials
- Online Course Enrollment
- Pre-Orders or Interest Levels
Best Practices
Now that we have a better understanding of what a landing page is and how it can be used to drive conversions, let’s review a few best practices when it comes to building a landing page.
Focus on One Point of Conversion
A landing page should have one singular focus or goal for the visitor to take action on. When you have more than one item to focus on, the chances of hitting a conversion drops. That’s why we recommend:
- Limited, if any navigation on your landing page
- Social icons should be reserved for the footer rather than called out in copy
- Your conversion point, whether that be a button or a form, should be located at the top of the page to draw the visitor’s attention to it from their initial landing.
Use Consistent Language
When driving traffic from an outside source to your landing page, you want to keep mirroring that language in both locations.
What you promise with your ad, should be delivered on the landing page. Without consistency and not keeping your “promise,” you may lose trust and a potential customer.
Use Inspiring Calls to Action
Ensure that your CTA button is obvious to your visitors by putting it in a well-placed position, using contrasting colors to make it stand out, and by using action words. Remember, visitors are seeking a solution to their problem and the CTA should be that solution!
Not only should the words be clear and concise, but you should ensure the CTA is above the fold of the page. Here’s a blog post that dives deeper into CTA best practices.
Consider Interactive Elements
Entice your visitors and drive them to a central point of action using interactive elements, which include:
- Videos
- Illustrations
- Gif images
- Bright colors
- Quizzes
- Polls
- Calculators
These offer engaging content, eye-catching art, and allows you to collect additional insights about your audience, all while showing off your organization’s unique personality.
Design for All User Experiences
As of November 2022, studies have shown that 59.5% of all web traffic is coming from mobile devices. Despite this, several organizations are still not building their websites and landing pages to be responsive. This results in a very poor user experience.
Instead, take the time to build responsive landing pages that adapt automatically to each user. If not, you will lose valuable leads.
Pardot user? Use these templates to build your landing pages.
Be Considerate of Forms
Let’s say you get traffic to your landing page and the page looks great, but the form has 6+ required fields with invasive questions. This will drive that traffic OFF of your page.
Instead, you should aim to have your form have no more than 5 fields and target more basic details, such as first, last name, company, and email.
From there, enable Progressive Profiling, to continuously ask more questions of your customers. In addition, whenever asking an open-ended question, try to do so using drop-down menus, radio buttons, or checkboxes, rather than open text to create a better experience.
Thank You Content is a Must
Redirecting your landing page traffic to a thank you page not only wraps up the present and puts a bow on the experience, it also allows you, as the marketer, to retarget them and drive additional traffic to like-minded content. For example, you can drive them to additional product pages, resources, engage on social media, or drive them to contact a sales team member immediately.
Need additional help? Contact Sercante today for help with templates or strategy!
