Landing Pages are Just Effective Web Design

Posted July 22nd, 2008 at 12:09pm

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Ahhh, landing pages. This stuff is FUN. Seriously, I love this.

And when I say ‘landing page,’ I don’t mean a one page site where I might promote an affiliate offer. I mean the page that a visitor hits first when entering your site. In reality, every page on your site is a landing page. Every page is a doorway, so really we are just talking effective web design. Any page that gets any kind of traffic is a landing page. Any page you send PPC traffic to is a landing page. And page that is linked to from an email or a refer-a-friend form is a landing page.

Any page on your site could be the first page that a new visitor sees. Every page is a landing page.

I may not now from WHERE a visitor is coming when they arrive at my site (okay, well I can know that, but that’s another post), but I DO know what I want them to do when they arrive. (Yes, people: know, love, and USE your analytics, but I am speaking real-time.) That desired activity is different for every site, but each site has one or a few desired actions, and we must design pages that encourage that activity to nurture our visitors to do what we want them to do (without them knowing :D).

If you are an e-commerce site, you want the visitor to buy something and/or find related products and/or sign up for deal alerts.

If you are a content site, you want visitors to subscribe to your feed, read, and stumble through related posts on the topic.

If you are doing lead gen, you want them to submit their information.

If you are a content site you are encouraging sign ups and subscriptions to content.

You get the idea. Landing pages get your visitors moving, but you better make sure that the process after that page is easy peasy or your landing page won’t matter a fig.

When a visitor lands on your site, questions immediately pop into their head subconsciously:

Is this site for real?

Does this site have what I am looking for?

Will this site be easy for me to use?

What do I do now? Where do I click?

Should I leave now or look around?

You have a few seconds seconds to answer each of these questions or you lose the chance.

So what’s a girl to do? In my book, there are some core principles that are not rocket science:

Keep it Simple. Don’t Muck it UP!

You must know *exactly* what YOUR desired conversions are. Forget the other stuff that visitors could do on your site and focus on what you want them to do.

Let’s take a real life example. If I want to go to the movies with friends, but I don’t want to decide for the group, how might I end up getting the result that *I* want - a trip to the movies?

Let’s apply a common web approach: throw a bunch of crap at the wall and hope something sticks (ie. hope the visitor ends up clicking somewhere). So in the real world, that would go something like this:

“Hey guys, let’s go out tonight. We could go to the mall, go to the zoo, go out drinking, go hang out a friends house, go fly a kite, go make new friends, go to the pound, go find gold out west, go to the library, or maybe to the movies…

Whaaaaat? See what I mean?

Limit choices! If there is something that you want visitors to do (ie. the things that make you or your company money), don’t give them a million options. Keep it simple.

Make it *totally* obvious.

This ties in with above, but it deserves it’s own special mention because you can really muck this part up. Everything must be obvious - don’t try to be cute at the expense of your visitors.

Can you see the navigation here?

If you make me hesitate, I will leave. Period.

Put things where people will expect them. Nav at the top, logo links to home, etc. If you need to change your navigation design so it’s available, but it doesn’t distract, DO IT. It pays off.

Only Ask for the Minimum

This one varies tremendously by industry, but the basics are the same: Ask for the MINIMUM information that you need for EVERYTHING. If you are doing any kind of lead capturing (which you should be), ask for the least amount of information possible. Don’t ask for information that you can gather yourself. For example, if a visitors submits their email on a product page to get alerts for deals on that product, don’t ask me what I am interested in! Send me an email later that let’s me tell you what else I might be interested so you can segment your list further, but make it fast and easy or I won’t complete it.

If you have a long process for some sort of qualification (think insurance leads or something similar), make it a process that let’s the user drop out anywhere, but hopefully don’t want to - the longer they stay in, the better the lead, but you can still work it with less information. It’s a trail and the key is to keep them on the trail as long as possible. Make sure that the information that you ask them is obviously relevant to satisfying their needs and for-the-love-of-everything, use effective error handling and help messages.

Fix my Pain and Fix it FAST

I don’t want to know how great your company is and how pretty your staff is - I came to you because I have a pain large enough that I searched Google for a solution and found you and I want you to show me that you can fix it in the first 1 second that I am on your site. (See my stomping my feet?) Fix my pain and I will stay.

But what about the testing?

We have all heard this time and again, but it bears repeating (and deserves its own post): TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST TEST. Seriously, never guess about what will work - you just have to try. If you can’t do this yourself, find someone who can help you, but your gut knows nothing about what works for your visitors. I won’t say any more now except that none of the above applies without testing.

Resources for those who want to rock their landing pages:

LukeW is the king o’ forms and sign ups. His work is amazing and fascinating. Go read and read and read. Makes the heart all warm and fuzzy, doesn’t it?

Need some inspiration? Check out the top 100 sites where forms should matter. DISCLAIMER: Just because they *should* be awesome, that doesn’t mean they do everything right. But there’s a lot to be learned by observing and using these sites as a visitor and not developer.

Jonathan Mendez writes a GREAT blog called Optimize and Propheize. Check it and read every page.

SEOmoz ran a landing page contest last year that’s a good read to see landing page examples that battled it out for the “best” design. As you will see, pretty does not always = effective.

A couple of examples of effective landing pages:

Mortgage Lead Example

Medicare Supplement Lead Example

Online Marketing Lead Example (though I would have liked to see an email entered on step 1 to “email the report.” I bailed on the process - they wanted too much info on step 2.)

Free Medicine Lead Gen Example

Does anyone else have an examples to share to make this post an even better resource?