eCommerce is shaping today’s digital landscape through daily innovations. It’s central to everything from buying groceries to ordering new furniture and clothing.
Its opportunities are seemingly endless. Given this rapid rise in ecommerce, it is crucial that businesses keep up with the changing demands of consumers and stay focused on keeping things fast, convenient, and easy.
That’s where landing pages come in.
What Is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a single, stand-alone web page that focuses on a hyper-specific goal.
What are landing pages used for? They are a key tool to lead generation and, increasingly, for making sales.
Although the exact goal may differ, the overarching idea is either to get a marketing lead or convert a lead into a paying customer.
Going forward, it’s important to remember that website landing pages are short and to the point. They must present the most direct route for a visitor to take the desired action.
No distractions, no obstructions, a precise marketing instrument that ignites the irresistible desire to buy, subscribe, or start a trial.
What Can Landing Pages Do?
Now you know the gist of what a landing page is, but what can they do?
We’ll go over the two obvious uses in a little more detail first and then discuss a few of their unique advantages.
Increase Conversion
Obviously, landing pages are excellent at increasing conversions. Being hyper-focused as they are, they have a better chance of converting than a traditional web page with too many distractions.
When someone “lands” on one, they immediately know what’s being offered and are encouraged to answer the call to action, thus fulfilling the landing page's purpose.
Visitors will often end up on a landing page after clicking on an ad, email, or social media post, but an organic Google search can also lead to one.
In other words, when they get to the page, they’re already interested or at least curious.
Grow Mailing Lists
One call-to-action that landing pages often promote is for visitors to sign up for mailing lists.
Be it in the form of a newsletter or an info product, or even a discount code, the ultimate goal is to accumulate email addresses.
When users sign up, they’re now a lead, and you can market to them further. This can be used to get them to other landing pages you include in future email marketing campaigns.
Landing Pages Provide Finer Data
Because landing pages are somewhat self-contained, they offer finer insight into who is visiting you and the performance of the specific campaign you’re running.
Site analytics can show you know how many users are coming in and what they’re interacting with.
Landing pages allow you to see what specific things are stoking that engagement because each one is so particular, designed to serve a single purpose.
Testing and Experimenting
Lastly, landing pages are excellent for testing.
Most landing page builders have built-in split testing, so you can deploy variations and see what works best.
While sites require significant time and effort to test individual elements, landing pages are built quickly at no extra cost. What’s more, doing A/B testing on a live site can have a detrimental SEO impact.
This insight from a few landing pages can even help inform the design of your site later on.
Types of Landing Pages
There are different landing page types.
They don’t differ in terms of mechanics but in purpose.
This will naturally affect design.
The two broadest categories are lead generation and click-through pages.
Click-through or Sales Landing Pages
Sales pages are click-through pages that want the user to “click-through” and buy a specific product.
Membership Subscription Landing Pages
These click-through pages exist to get users to sign up for a subscription service.
They may initially offer a sign-up for a free trial, making the CTA more attractive.
Redirection Landing Pages
Any click-through landing page can be a redirection if it redirects the users to your website, a microsite, or a social media page.
The point is that it directs the user past the landing page further down the sales funnel.
Email Marketing Landing Pages
These are basic lead generation pages that aim to get users to sign up for a mailing list, opening up more marketing opportunities later.
Viral Landing Pages
Viral pages are landing pages built to be shared by visitors.
They are often experimental and have some novelty to them.
These often contain links to social media pages in order to try and direct engagement to them.
Microsites vs. Landing Pages—Are These the Same?
At their core, microsites and landing pages share many similarities. Both are designed to capture user attention and direct it towards a particular goal or outcome.
Whether that goal is to convince users to make a purchase, sign up for a newsletter, or simply learn more about a product or service, tools have one key job: to get visitors and start engaging them.
However, there are also some important differences between microsites and landing pages.
Difference in Size
Whereas landing page purposes tend to be focused on just one specific thing, microsites are often much more comprehensive in scope.
They are miniature hubs that often fulfill a few purposes.
Perhaps they include information about a product line and links to buy it, or perhaps they’re about a side project your brand is running.
Difference in Purpose
They also differ in purpose.
Landing pages are focused on generating a lead or getting a sale, but microsites can be a lot broader in what they do.
They could be a way to interact with the brand directly or serve some broader informative purpose a landing page couldn’t manage.
Difference in Price
Microsites require less effort and cost than big websites, but they are far from free.
When it comes to time and money, landing page digital marketing is far cheaper to put together and manage.
Many cheap hosting solutions are available for a microsite, but hosting often is the smallest expense. By definition, design and copywriting for several pages cost more.
On the other hand, with landing page builders, you can often find monthly deals that offer an unlimited number of page builds and the tools to build them quickly and efficiently.
Landing Pages in Sales Funnels
Landing pages can play a big part in creating sales funnels.
They can be part of the “top” of the funnel by capturing leads, or they can be part of the “body”, by converting a lead into a paying customer.
Sales funnels are versatile, and what are landing pages if not versatile themselves?
Using them together to achieve various conversion-centric goals is an excellent strategy.
Conclusion
To briefly recap what a landing page is, they are hyper-focused web pages built for a specific marketing goal.
Their modular nature allows for quick and cheap development, plus the ability to gather granular data and adjust strategy on the fly.
With the rapid growth of ecommerce, a modular approach is becoming vital.
The rise of headless ecommerce and its benefits proves as much. And even if you are considering a more traditional approach to online selling, landing pages can be the perfect vehicle to provide tremendous value to your customers.
Garan is a writer interested in how tech reshapes the environment, and how the environment reshapes tech. You'll usually find him inoculating against future shock and arguing with bots.
