What is your landing page and what is it supposed to deliver? Your landing page is where your customer has come to get what you said you were going to give him. If you have an ad promising free podcasts on scuba diving in the Bahamas, now is not the time to try to sell them your chartering services.

If they clicked through on an ad for outdoor grills, your customer doesn’t want to land on your home page and search for the category. The landing page is not where you try to sell them something more or something other than what they came for. It’s where you keep your promise and start building trust.

Just as your content in a specific blog promotion educates your customer in a buying decision, your landing page is where he finalizes that decision, thus a landing page is designed with one specific intent.

Before you design the page you have to decide what it is you want your customer to do there. If you want him to sign up for membership – as per the Netflex example above – than the page needs to be designed with that specific conversion in mind. The landing page facilitates what you want your customer to do.

Other considerations would include the following:

• Employ your graphics and white space so that they visually lead your customer to the conversion exit with ease.
• Optimize your forms so that they present little cause for irritation. Make sure the cursor goes immediately to the next field when the customer is done with the prior field. Auto-populate where you can.
• Place all key content above the fold. Do not force your reader to scroll.
• Just as you would not interrupt a customer while they are in the middle of signing for a purchase to direct them to another part of your store – just so he can make sure he is getting what he wants – you do not disrupt the conversion process by offering promotions or links to the rest of your site. Give then what they came for and they will come back for more.
• Test, Test, Test. Re-test.

Tags: blog-promotions, building_trust, conversion, landing_page, optimize

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 4:01 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing, Content Promotion Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.