Cool design may win awards, but in my experience, simple page design out-sells fancy… every day of the week.
Landing pages are a case in point.
In case you’re new to my blog — a landing page is a special kind of web page that you advertise and promote instead of your main site.
Effective landing pages only ask the user to perform a single action — to buy, subscribe, download or sign up. You create them with a single offer in mind, targetted at a specific type of customer or client. Namely, the type you most want to attract at the moment.
My clients always end up with lots of different landing pages. At least one landing page for each type of customer or client they want to attract.
And at least one landing page for each type of front-end offer that applies to each type of customer or client.
None of those landing pages contain any outgoing links (to other web pages) — apart from maybe a couple of small and very subtle links at the bottom of the page for article and link directories.
They work. Because they’re simple.
Aftr multiple rounds split-testing, one of my own landing pages converts between 96% to 98% of all visitors sent to it.
Last week one of my clients performed a small test – drove a small amount of traffic onto a new multi-variate tested landing page and it produced 67% conversion — and a stream of hot leads his sales team are following up on this week.
What type of conversion would I or my client have got if we did the usual thing and drove traffic onto our homepages? Certainly nowhere near those figures.
It’s experiences like this that prove landing pages are more effective as the first ‘point of contact’ with a prospective customer or client — than sending someone new onto a large corporate site.
Because they keep the prospects mind focused on one thing only. And you can also easily multi-variate test and split-test landing pages, meaning you can scientifically optimise the page for even higher response.
The next time you commission the design (or redesign) of your company web site, maybe all you need is a simple landing page to funnel in new customers or clients.
True, it won’t help your site win awards for artistic design and creation, and perhaps your web developer won’t be very excited about what you ask him to create — but then if the tactic works more effectively than large multi-page corporate sites, why would you pay thousands for the latter.
The caveat to this is e-commerce. Obviously you need a large multi-page site for that. But the same principles apply on how to capture the trust, desire and interest of a first-time visitor. Which is why many of the most successful e-commerce sites display a popup, or at least a special offer for new customers — or other form of incentivised data capture.
Search this blog and refer to my book for details on how to design highly effective landing pages. Then discover how to generate awesome levels of sales and response.
-Ed.
[tags]landing pages, split-testing, multi-variate testing, conversion rate, page design[/tags]
