What Is a Landing Page And Why It is Important ?
A Landing Page is just a page but this page have a purpose to serve and encourage visitors to take an action. The action might be submitting their email address, creating an account or downloading something. The most usage of landing pages is to grow email lists or sales funnels.
A Landing Page can be a homepage but the difference in purpose is great between a landing page and homepage. Lets compare these two kind of pages to better understand.
1. Home Page
- Homepage is the front page of a website which is the first page a use visits.
- Homepage helps in navigation of a website.
- Homepage serves as a ground for basic understanding of the website and provides information about it.
Homepage is designed to help users navigate the website and get the content or information they need, It provides necessary information about the website for first time visitors to know about your website.
2. Landing Page
- A landing page is a standalone page that a visitor visits after clicking on an advertisement.
- It is focused and provides sufficient information for visitor to take an action.
- It does not have a navigation, learn more and any distracting links, A landing page focuses on one distinct actions also known as Call To Action.
A landing page is that first page on which a visitor arrives after clicking on ads. The landing pages are further divided into to parts. Sales Landing Page, Lead Generation Landing Page.
Sales Landing Page
Sales Landing page also known as sales pages are the landing pages which persuade the visitor to visit the next page, where they can complete the sale or action. The common example of a sales page is the product page which contains the information about the product and the click through following page is a shopping cart or checkout page.
The purpose of a sales landing page is to complete the sale or registration in case of subscription based products. If visitors are directed towards the checkout or completion page without providing the subsequent information about the product or service the sales/conversion rate would be really low because the user don’t know what he is getting in return. So the sales landing page plays vital role in providing the right information to the customer.
Appointment booking pages, Donation Pages are also sales landing pages.
Lead Generation Landing Page
Lead Generation Landing Page are pages used to persuade visitors to submit their information mostly contact information such as email and phone number. A lead generation landing page gathers the user information so it can be used to connect with the visitor to complete the lead action at a later time.
A lead generation page gathers the user information via a form and offers some valuable resources in return which encourage visitors to submit their data.
A lead generation landing page can be used for various purposes some of them are :
- Ebook or Research Paper.
- Free Consultation and Professional Services.
- Webinars Registration.
- Coming Soon Pages.
- Freebies or Free trial.
If your homepage has a form it does not make it a Lead Gen Landing Page, There are also other criteria to be fulfilled such as The Landing Page being part of a campaign, and the sole purpose of the page should be to gather leads.
Why Landing Pages are so Important ?
Landing Pages have become indispensable part of marketing but why ? With the development of internet almost everything is now being sold online and selling with your eyes closed is hard. Landing Pages offers ground base for you to understand your prospects better and automate the process of selling by doing research on what information about your product or service works and helps your prospects making a decision.
With time Landing Pages are also being evolved from simple sales page to Lead Capture it all combines design elements which encourage visitors to take action there is a clear psychological reasoning behind every action a visitor make and you can identify these reasons by A/B testing and analyzing the analytics. Hubspot has written this great guide on how to A/B test your landing page : How to A/B test landing pages
Analytics tools like heatmaps and click tracking helps you analyze the behaviours of visitors on your landing pages.