Do you have all the right online marketing ingredients, including pay-per-click ads and email blasts, but you still aren’t clear where landing pages fit into the mix? Before we discuss the best landing page ingredients, let’s review what a landing page is. Essentially a landing page is used to capture leads from traffic that is sent to the page to perform a transaction of information. It can also sometimes be used as a reference page.

Usually landing page traffic comes from various types of online marketing campaigns such as PPC search marketing, banner ads, and email blasts. The landing page is a great online tool for companies to track such advertising, as well as to collect information about prospects and customers. Typically the data collected is basic contact information such as a name, email address and phone number.

So now that we know what a landing page is, we can talk about what elements you’ll need to combine to optimize your landing pages and achieve great results.

What You’ll Need – Landing Page Prep

It goes without saying that effective content is the base of the landing page mix. Here's what you need to do:

1. Offer value. What key benefits do you have to offer? Product value is key. It’s also a benefit if the product or service is unique or the offer is compelling, otherwise the challenge will be to sell something with minimal benefits. Tell people what's in it for them - how will your offer meet their needs?

2. Be relevant. This is the key to selling anything. Landing page content has to be personal and relevant to your audience. Know who your target market is and strive to create a design that appeals to them including relevant messaging that ‘connects you’. Think about how to relate to people, and then make your connection.

3. Keep the messaging simple. Today’s savvy Web users are busy, skeptical, and informed. Enhance your messaging with simplicity. For example, if we design a water bottle targeting three demographics - athletics, upper class, and skeptical - which design will be most effective? The one for the skeptics because the messaging and packaging will be simplistic. The point is to be clear and concise, with a great design. 

4. Provide proof of how great your service or product is. Usually this is done with testimonials. But even better – statistics. Case studies are also great proof of an exceptional product.

5. Call to action - use one! It's a simple and effective way to grab people's attention to perform a desired action. A few examples of CTA’s are offerings of a whitepaper download, newsletter subscription, free promotional item or savings discount.

6. Test, test, test. Make use of testing to accelerate the successful performance of your landing pages. A/B testing or multivariate testing - it’s up to you - both provide useful data to help with landing page optimization.

Recipe for an Effective Landing Page Design

Now that you've prepared the content, you need to bring it all together with an effective visual design. Here are the main ingredients:

1. Relevant design. Keep the landing page design consistent with graphic elements used for banner ads, email blasts and any other related marketing tools.

2. Usability. Make it easy to use and easy to navigate. Also, it’s a best practice to remove any search functionality and navigation to keep the user from surfing away from the landing page.

3. Easy-to-complete form. Use only the minimum number of fields necessary. Earlier I mentioned that today’s Web users are busy, so eliminate any unnecessary steps to make the forms easier and less time consuming to complete. Web savvy people also like to navigate forms using the tab key to quickly enter personal information, so always enable this feature. And limit the use of dropdowns, check boxes or radio buttons to optimize forms for tabbed navigation.

4. Key benefits at the top. Such important information should not exceed 400 pixels in page length. The closer you can keep the offer and benefits to the top of the page and above the fold, the better.

5. Simple design and messaging. People tend to scan for information online, so use icons, bullets, numbers or arrows to guide the eye visually across the page, to engage and entice the reader. Remember the purpose of the landing page is to get the message across clearly and to convince people to complete the desired transaction of information. And don’t forget to create synergy between the imagery and messaging.

Combine all of these content and design ingredients into your landing pages and you’re sure to achieve great campaign results!

More useful landing page tips here on LyrisHQ.com:

• Landing Page Types
• Landing Pages: What Direct Mail Can Teach Us (Part 1)
• Landing Pages: What Direct Mail Can Teach Us - Part 2
• Is it a landing page or a conversion page?  

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About the Author

Christine Whone is a creative Web designer at Lyris. She works closely with customers to create and develop unique Web designs to suit their brand and marketing needs based on Web 2.0 standards and best practices.

Related Resources:

• Subscribe to Inside Lyris HQ our monthly online-marketing newsletter.
• Download free online-marketing guides, tools and webinars in the Lyris Online-Marketing Resource Center.

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