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Landing pages can prove to be a very powerful strategy to increase conversion rates, nonetheless a strategy we believe is not used enough by email marketers. That’s why we invited Oli Gardner, our favorite landing page optimization expert, to share the value that landing pages can bring to optimizing your conversions.
Landing pages and conversion rate optimization
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process for improving the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities. Landing pages act as the “marketing glue” between your advertising source (e.g. email campaigns, PPC, banners) and the customer interaction with your product.
They are a targeted extension of your ad that helps keep your visitors focused on your intended conversion goal, and as such, they convert more effectively that when you use your company homepage as the destination for your marketing traffic.
Your visitors walk through a 3-step mental process within the first 5-10 seconds of arriving on your page. “Am I in the right place?”, “Is this what I need?” and “How do I participate?”. Landing pages are important in any CRO strategy as they address these questions more quickly and in a more focused manner than your homepage can. They do this by creating a good conversion M.A.P. for your customers which means they:
M – Match the expectations of your visitors
A – Address the needs of the consumer
P – Point them forward (towards your conversion goal)
Logistically they can also reduce the political and technical bottlenecks often encountered when trying to make changes to your homepage.
It’s helpful to have some design, content and layout inspiration when starting to work with landing pages. Here is a series of landing page examples that can put you on the right path.
Optimizing landing pages, step by step
One of the first things you need to figure out when considering conversion rate optimization is what your current conversion rate is. Without this basic information you have no benchmark from which to optimize. When using landing pages for your advertising and marketing campaigns you should ensure you have a measurement device in place to track your conversion rate.
Once you’ve been running your campaign for a while and have some baseline metrics it’s time to run an A/B test. The concepts surrounding what you can do to improve your landing pages are covered in detail in the 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program, which also includes a 20 question checklist to uncover basic issues with your page.
In summary, there are three key points to remember.
- Conversion optimization helps you get the most out of your existing traffic stream
- Landing pages increase your conversion rate of your marketing campaigns compared to your homepage
- Optimization is an iterative process that requires repeated testing over time.
Your pages can always be better. Go optimize them.