What exactly is a landing page used for? A landing page by definition is a standalone page that a visitor lands on after clicking a link. Its main purpose is to convert visitors into leads or sales. A lot of landing pages contain intake forms for collecting lead information in exchange for some kind of offer (eBook, event, discount, etc.).

All in all, landing pages play a big role in influencing your readers to take action, so it’s important to use them strategically. Here are a few tips for making the most of your email marketing campaigns using landing pages:

1.  Send your visitor from the email directly to a related landing page

This is an easy thing to do, but often overlooked.  As we mentioned earlier, landing pages are meant to convert - meaning that their sole purpose is to prompt a specific action from your visitors. So, if you’re sending all your visitors straight to your website’s homepage, you’re leading them to a page where they have numerous potential actions available to them. That’s not the most strategic outcome for your email campaign.

Your emails CTAs should lead people to exactly the action you want them to take. If you want users to register for an event, you send them to an event registration page.  If you have a clearance center, send. If you have a specific product you refer to in the email, send them to THAT product page. You spent valuable time getting hard earned-traffic to your site, and you want to set your campaigns up for success by providing a straightforward and consistent user experience. The less navigating your visitors have to do on their own, the better.

You’ll that find this strategy alone will get you better results in the form of better conversions. More people stick around to follow through on the call-to-action you want them to follow.

2.  Build a better mousetrap (in the form of a better landing page)

Landing page testing and conversion best practices have been around for a while now, meaning there are a number of proven methods you can follow to get better landing page results. Take CTAs for example - are you more likely to respond to a button that says “Schedule a Demo” or one that says “Free 10-minute Demo”? The answer probably varies by person, but that’s why it’s valuable to A/B test both options and see which one resonates more with your visitors. If the second one performs better, you know that your visitors are conscious of cost and time when making a decision. This can be useful information when building your future campaigns.

If you follow our philosophy on testing, you’ll know we’re big fans of A/B testing different versions of landing pages to get your conversion numbers as high as possible. We’ve seen pages go from 3% conversion to over 25% conversion — which means, for every hundred visitors to the landing page you would now have 25 leads instead of 3, just from a few mindful changes! Even if you boost your conversions from 3% to 12%, that would be a three hundred per cent increase!

To put it plainly, A/B testing is just too rewarding to pass up. Spend some time to develop a simple testing process for your landing pages and get better results.  Of course we do this for our clients all the time.

3. Tailor forms to your leads

Having data on your leads is great - the more information you can get, the better you can segment campaigns and target your audience. But in most cases, visitors are going to be hesitant to share too much of their information with you right away. Sharing personal information is a commitment, and before you can expect your visitors to make a big commitment you need to build a relationship with them. This is extremely important to keep in mind when running email campaigns that lead to landing pages with intake forms.

A good best practice is to match your intake form to the “warmth” of your lead. If you’re reaching out to a lead for the first time, keep your intake form simple. They might be interested enough in your offer to click on the email CTA and go to your landing page, but it’s unlikely they’ll be willing to fill out a bunch of fields to access whatever it is that you’re offering. However, if you’re reaching out to a lead for the third or fourth time, then it might be more appropriate to include a more granular form that asks for inform like budget, company size, industry, etc. If your offer is product demo, for example, these fields would be relevant to the type of demo that is provided.

Lastly, when considering where to place your intake form on your landing page, you always want to try and place it higher up on the page so that visitors don’t have to scroll to find it (also known as “above the fold”). Another option is to use a scrolling sidebar or header feature to keep your form prominent and visible to your visitors.