Web Site Cookbook

8.2. Creating an Effective Landing Page

Problem

You want to get sales or responses from visitors who arrive at your site from your sponsored search results ad, email campaign, or online banner ad.

Solution

Create a landing page for people who follow an external link to your site from an ad, email newsletter, or other promotional vehicle that you're using to drive traffic to your site. A landing page might be a web surfer's only look at your site, so it has to convey value and reliability to convert visitors into customers. The most successful landing pages do this by:

• Reiterating the search term to assure visitors they've come to the right place

• Encouraging one specific action—be it buying a product, registering for a demo, or requesting more information

• Displaying little, if any, navigation to other parts of the site

• Using easy-to-scan content, such as an enticing headline and bullet-list copy

Discussion

Landing pages are the infomercials of the web, and, like their broadcast world cousins, they begin and end with the goal of generating a response from their viewers. But the web is not TV (and don't let anyone tell you it is), a distinction that sets landing pages apart from infomercials, despite the similarity of their goals. Although infomercials employ a Chinese water torture approach to closing a sale, landing pages have to work fast—most of their visitors will back out within the first 10 seconds of arriving. But good landing pages have the advantage of addressing an audience predisposed ...