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5 Good Things About Landing Pages
Last month, Scott Brinker told you
the top five bad
things about landing pages. Now that you know what
to avoid, it’s time to incorporate the good—they
were created for a good reason after all! Here are
the five best things about landing pages. Try
utilizing them in your latest marketing strategy.
1. Landing pages are quick and cheap.
That’s not a putdown—fast, inexpensive
experimentation is very important in this landscape
of a thousand niche marketing opportunities. But
“cheap” should be measured by CPA
(cost-per-acquisition), not just absolute dollars.
If I spend twice as much on a 3-page path, but it
generates a 5X factor on my conversion rate, I win
economically. As for being fast, speed in the
digital realm is almost entirely a function of
“process-izing” repetitive tasks; although the
mechanics of producing conversion paths over landing
pages are more advanced, they can still be
streamlined.
2. Landing pages can be “matched” with
advertisements.
Huge benefit! (Although not everyone using landing
pages takes advantage of it.) Arguably the power of
message match, where content a respondent sees
post-click is tailored to the promise of the
specific ad they clicked on, is the core reason why
landing pages have improved conversion rates. We
think it’s vital to retain this pre-click/post-click
continuity in other landing experiences that go
beyond a single page.
3. Landing pages can be tested and optimized.
Absolutely: test, test, test. One of the problems
with big web sites is that they suffer from inertia.
Online direct marketing campaigns thrive on the
freedom of rapid experimentation (we call it the
post-click marketing ecosystem), and landing pages
have enabled that...to a point.
You can experiment only so much within the box of
one page (”let’s try every color in the web palette
as our background!”). It’s time to experiment with
bigger blocks such as the sequencing of presentation
or the directed behavioral segmentation of your
respondents, and to start testing in three
dimensions (traffic source, landing experience,
audience segment) instead of one or two.
4. Landing pages are easy to manage.
Actually, this may not be true—you’ve no doubt run
across a lot of outdated or link-broken landing
pages. As you scale up to running dozens, hundreds,
or even thousands of targeted landing experiences of
any kind, the content management challenge is
daunting. But this too is a problem that can be
solved by software, whether it’s single pages or
multi-page paths. Marketers shouldn’t have to be in
the weeds here, regardless of the format.
5. Landing pages are friendly for respondents.
Well...the idea of message match is friendly, to be
sure. But there are three cases of how a one-page
format can be used:
A: A simple but compelling idea, applicable
to all respondents, is well presented on one short
page; B: a more complex idea with different
variations for different respondents is all jammed
on to one long, crowded page shoved at everyone
indiscriminately, leaving the confused and
overwhelmed respondent to sort it out for
themselves; and C: a more complex idea with
different variations for different respondents is
artificially edited on to one short page—but loses
fidelity at best or becomes empty/nonsensical at
worst.
The dream of friendly landing pages for respondents
is only materialized in case A, but there’s a heck
of a lot of direct marketing campaigns that don’t
fit that mold that end up being short-changed in the
landing page format to be B and C. Trying to squeeze
a Labrador retriever into a Chihuahua carrying crate
is just not pretty..
---Source:
Scott Brinker is the president and CTO of ion
interactive (www.ioninteractive.com).
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