Myth busted: it can’t!

Your website’s homepage is simply the digital storefront that conveys how you want your brand to be visually represented online. A landing page, on the other hand, is a page that is designed for a very specific purpose. The name can be confusing though… Landing pages aren’t simply a place where visitors“land.” They’re also a place where visitors are supposed to complete a specific action.

Take a look at giant retailer Amazon’s homepage:

Looks like a warm and friendly way to get in the mood for shopping, doesn’t it? That’s all it is! The face of the online store that gives you an overview of what people are talking about, what they are buying, and other how-to’s and interesting content.

Now, here’s one of Amazon’s landing pages:

As you can see, this landing page has a much more targeted purpose. It isn’t merely a page that we look at, but one that calls for engagement. Visitors on this page are meant to do something… Take a particular action: like downloading a coupon to get more perks (in this case, a tablet, access to the Amazon library, and free digital games and apps).

A landing page is built to convert. Not American dollars to British pounds or inches to centimeters; but visitors to subscribers – or customers. In other words, any page that asks for the visitor to take action in order to convert them.. THAT is a landing page!

Can a Landing Page Help Grow your Business?

By using educational, and even entertaining landing pages, you can convert casual shoppers or people who click on your ads into paying customers. You need to create a place that pushes your visitor to make a purchase decision, and bringing them to a page with a call to action (CTA) is how you make that happen.

Let’s refer back to our example above. Look at Amazon’s landing page: the moment visitors arrive at the “Get Coupon” button, they’re prompted to make a decision – should I click on it, or should I leave? It’s the marketer’s job to understand how to get these visitors to a ‘Yes, I want to do this!’ That means, that the better you are at understanding the needs and concerns of your customers and communicating how your product or service aligns with those, the more conversions you’ll get.

There are countless tactics businesses use to acquire more customers: multichannel marketing, social media marketing, inbound marketing, etc. And, landing pages? Well, they are a powerful conversion tool that when effectively executed, work to enhance these tactics and generate more sales for your small business.

Let’s explore 4 reasons why small business landing pages are such a great tool for growth.

1.  Measurable

Measuring the effectiveness of your small business landing page gives you a “big picture” perspective on how well you are doing at converting visitors.

This is beneficial because it enables you to see changes in performance in very clear terms. If you notice your numbers drop from one month to the next, you’ll know that there may be something wrong with your page and it could be time for a refresh. Are the graphics in the wrong place?… Is there too much text?… Are there too many form fields? The great thing about landing pages is that they can be tweaked and tested in order to determine the format and content that gets the most clicks and conversions.

2. Easy to test and iterate

Conversion research makes it possible to dig deep into analytics, and crunch numbers to determine where your biggest conversion lift opportunities lie. This comes from running split tests. But only 52% of companies that use landing pages actually run tests to find ways to improve conversions. By running different pages with varying layouts and content, you can get a better understanding of which landing pages outperform others. Iterative testing is also effective in helping measure different elements of a landing page against one another to optimize results.

But, before running any test, you need to figure out the goal of your testing: what is it that you’re trying to achieve. Combining split, or A/B tests, with an iterative approach to optimizing your pages over the course of your testing timeline will yield the best results.

3. Create a more targeted conversion funnel

Building unique landing pages for different offerings or limited-time promotions will allow you to create a more targeted experience for your customers. By establishing different funnels for different products or offerings, you can segment customers into smaller groups. Then, you’ll be able to more easily optimize campaigns for those segmented groups. Creating a more targeted conversion funnel like this will increase sales because you’re providing a more personalized and tailored customer experience.

4. Learn more about your customers

Adding additional form fields to your landing pages in order to collect more information from a contact when they sign up or contact you lets you know more about their needs, allowing you to further personalize their shopping experience. The more personalized the experience, the greater the chance you have to get the conversion.

Tips to Optimize Your Small Business Landing Page

Establish a clear goal

You should always be approaching your landing page game with specific objectives in mind. For example, maybe you’re trying to:

• Generate leads for your sales team?
• Get more visitors to download an eBook?
• Sell more of a certain product?

Each objective calls for a different strategy in creating the content, design, and CTAs for your landing pages. If you want to capture the attention of your visitors and encourage them to take the next step, you need to establish what it is you’re trying to achieve. A one-size-fits-all landing page is not a solution. Each should be unique, clearly conveying the desired action or outcome that you want from the visitor.

Avoid creating too much friction

An important question arises when trying to build an effective small business landing page – how many form fields should be included to maximize conversion rate? Forms allow you to collect useful information about a visitor. But, visitors will often abandon a page if they think it has too many form fields. That’s because it can feel invasive to give too much personal information on the internet, or it can also simply be the result of a visitor not wanting to put in the amount of effort it takes to fill out a few extra boxes.

Either way, if you find yourself in a situation where you have a landing page, plenty of traffic, but no conversions, the number of form fields may be causing the problem. Keep in mind that the optimal number of form fields for the most conversions from your landing pages is three, though this may be different for your specific audience.

Adding too many form fields creates friction to the conversion process, which reduces the success rate of your page. Be sure to only collect the information that you need from your page visitors to make it easier for the contact to interact with your small business landing page.

Don’t forget to follow-up

In sales and marketing, the follow-up can make or break your success. If you’re collecting email addresses from your landing page visitors, be sure to establish a relationship with them through a follow-up process. Send your visitor a welcome email to continue the engagement.

This is where marketing automation comes in. Once you have a lead, you can use lead scoring and lead nurturing to continue building that relationship and moving leads closer to a conversion. Client relationships are essential for small businesses, and using a marketing automation tool to scale one-to-one communications with new leads and customers is a great way to start off on the right foot.

To Conclude…

A landing page is essentially a puzzle. The right pieces have to come together. All the elements should form a page that guides the visitor toward conversion.

Companies see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. So, focus on your conversion rates and study the landing pages of your competitors. This way, you’ll know where to invest your time on getting more clicks and conversions – all while spending less money!

The post Small Business Landing Pages: What you need to know appeared first on Sendinblue.

So, you’ve got paid search ads going, your pages are optimized to generate good organic traffic, and your social ads are set up as well. Voila! Your marketing game is on point. But, if this still sounds a little too out of reach to you, don’t fret – with a bit of inspiration, you can get there, too.

If people are visiting your site, but you’re not seeing your conversion numbers move, don’t throw your hands up and quit on your marketing too soon.

You have to investigate your website visitors’ behavior to understand what the problem is. Take a look at what people do after they go through your ads. If your landing page isn’t great, it’s like you’re fishing without a net: you’ve gotten your visitors this far, but you’re not able to get them into the boat.

While traffic is nice, we don’t just want people to visit our pages and leave – we want them to take action once they arrive. So, let’s make it as easy as possible for them by implementing elements from the kind of landing page examples that actually CONVERT.

Before we share some inspirational landing pages with you, you should know that the best examples will always have a strong call to action (CTA).

The CTA is the action that you want visitors to perform as a result of landing on your page:

• Buy Now
• Sign Up
• Try It for free
• Contact Us
• See Our Demo

It’s amazing how a single button can make or break a conversion.

Whatever you need to do to move people further along your acquisition funnel, that’s what you should ask of them, and you should be doing it clearly.

Now that you know the basics, let’s look more closely at how this looks in practice. Here are some inspirational landing page examples for you to give you some ideas on how to spruce up your own!

1. Signup Landing Page

Probably the most common use case for a landing page out there, the signup landing page is used for exactly what it sounds like: encouraging visitors to sign up for a product, newsletter, or another type of account. These pages usually consist of a quick description of the offering, followed by form fields to collect information for the signup process.

Prominent features of the landing page:

• The headline grabs the attention of the reader by using statistical data and bolding the text.
• The dark form with the red button calls for action. They stand out from the rest of the page.
• The company logo tells the visitors that it is serious business and acts as social proof.
• The gravity of the page makes it alluring to cautious investors. (The excessive use of fine prints can be toned down a bit though.)

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Be sure to keep form fields to a minimum. Only collect what you need.
• Communicate the value proposition of signing up very clearly.
• Avoid too much fine print that might scare away visitors before completing the signup CTA.

2. Event Landing Page

Landing pages are perfect for event promotion because they aren’t a core page on your website, so they can be easily changed when the event details are updated.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The header is professional and instantly conveys the large scale of the convention.
• Just under the header, you have a big picture of an influencer — that’s social proof for days!
• List of benefits right underneath draws the reader in toward action.
• Though not visible in the image, this landing page also listed the event speakers right after this segment.
• The process is streamlined — It’s like hitting one button after another for the customer.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Provide as much information about the event as you can (e.g. price, speakers, activities, themes, sponsors, etc.).
• Use social proof.
• Consider including an option to “share” or “invite” others to the event so you can expand your reach.

3. Resource Download Landing Page

A resource landing page is a page on a site offering a useful resource to visitors. From whitepapers, to videos, reports, and even short guides — the goal is to provide the free resource in exchange for a visitor’s contact information.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The first thing to notice is the curious headline right on top. It immediately communicates the problem that their resource will help you resolve. That can have a very strong effect on incentivizing more downloads.
• They also use the red color strategically on the top and bottom of the form to immediately draw your attention to the form.
• The combination of black and red actually gives the page a sleek, yet sassy look as well.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Use a quote or a testimonial from a customer to make the asset more compelling.
• Make it more visually appealing by adding a graphic of how the resource would actually look if it was tangible.
• Use more lively graphics in the bottom three descriptions of the content you get inside.

4. eCommerce Landing Page

An eCommerce landing page is designed with a single purpose in mind: to convert visitors into solid leads and buyers. The goal is to get leads to convert more, make more sales, and more profit.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• Product images are big, which often leads to more clicks on the product.
• The design is unique and aesthetically pleasing without being overbearing.
• The ‘Buy Now’ button with the border is a subtle, but still powerful CTA urging visitors to click and make a purchase.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Make sure that the page linked to from the product image and CTA in your email is a checkout page or dedicated product landing pages so you can achieve a higher conversion rate. You don’t want the user clicking on a product link only to end up on the homepage of your site. This will cause them to lose all motivation.

5. eBook Landing Page

Like the resource download page mentioned above, the goal of the eBook landing page is to capture visitors’ contact information in exchange for a downloadable resource. However, eBooks are often very dense content resources, so they can often look a bit different than typical resource pages because they have more information in the value proposition.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The headline shines brightly. It communicates the value to visitors immediately.
• The copy is separated into chunks, making the text easier to read and digest.
• The image pulls the attention of viewers and serves to reinforce the offer.
• Finally, the big wide form on the right consumes the major portion of the page. It’s like it’s fighting for attention from the text and the image, and it’s WINNING. This isn’t great because it’s placing the same amount of emphasis on the form fields as the text description on the left.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Make sure to capture information in as few form fields as possible.
• This page could be more engaging with social proof (use quotes that praise the asset).
• Supporting copy on the graphic to the left can be shorter and more targeted.
• Feature the description and value proposition for the resource (in this case the eBook) more prominently than the form fields.

6. Action Landing Page

Action landing pages often have the most simple designs because they have a very direct goal. Usually, they are used with digital ad campaigns to provide clickers with a hyper-targeted experience.

This type of landing pages normally includes a simple input form field or a tool that prompts an action from the visitor. It’s not like offering an eBook or a piece of software though. Most of the time, the page is providing a direct answer or solution to a question that the visitor has. For example, a landing page for people looking at buying life insurance might have a price calculator. Another example could be an offer to set up a free consultation with a physician for people looking for advice on high blood pressure.

With action landing pages, it’s all about hitting the problem without any fluff talk or beating around the bush.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The non-hyperlinked logo won’t allow the visitors to leave the page to check out the website.
• The big gecko mascot keeps it fun and appealing (and on-brand of course).
• The headline is simple and disarming, just like talking to your neighbor next door.
• The lack of any other text makes the CTA button all the more powerful. It’s like you have no other choice but to enter your zip code and find what lies behind the curtain.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Don’t be afraid to add a bit more copy to make the call-to-action clear. It can dispel any anxiety visitors might feel with the ambiguous CTA.
• Don’t be afraid to test adding more form fields to get more information upfront.

7. Promotional/Contest Landing Page

Promotional offer or contest landing pages are designed to maximize the number of people who enter. This is done by playing up the value of the offer or prize in order to entice visitors to give up their contact information.

Remember though, If you’re using a page like this and you have customers or visitors in Europe, be sure that you provide explicit opt-in options that are compliant with the GDPR.

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The header is the winning factor of this landing page: very well-designed to keep the professional feel to the event with a strong call-to-action that alludes to the promotional offer.
• The bullet points do a good job of showcasing the list of incentives for winning the prize.
• The message creates a strong sense of urgency by mentioning the deadline and number of potential winners.
• The CTA button pops with the shadow effect, making it more visible and actionable.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• Minimize the copy (too much content overwhelms your visitor) and avoid cluttering the landing page.
• No social proof to see what others have gained from the experience in the past.
• It may pay off to communicate the message more quickly.

8. Nonprofit Donation Landing Page

Donations are the fuel that keeps nonprofits going — in fact, it’s the main source of revenue for many of these organizations. So, anything to increase the effectiveness of donation campaigns is super important. Enter, the donation landing page:

Prominent features of this landing page:

• The top headline is full of strong emotion and is positively charged. The page should ooze positivity because that’s the result you seek through receiving the donation.
• ‘Support Drissa’ at the top gives it a personal touch. Rather than donating to a faceless organization, donors can choose a child to support, which gives their donation more meaning.
• Many nonprofits have missions that impact people in a real and substantial way, so it’s absolutely essential to use the power of emotion to communicate that. The strong use of images in this page really drives that pathos home.

Tips for optimizing this landing page:

• A call-to-action for a guide or brochure to provide more information about the program could increase conversions. You could also link to your mission or ‘About us’ page.

In conclusion…

Designing and building a landing page that converts is a delicate art. As a marketer, you need to wear many hats:

• Marketer
• Salesperson
• Designer

As a marketer, you need to find the right content, conducting A/B tests along the way to find the most optimized result. You’ll have to test things like headers and footers, links and social media buttons, CTA buttons, etc. All of these can have an effect on the conversion rate of your landing page and, and the marketer, you need to address them.

As a salesperson, you need to understand the needs and pains of your customers in order to find the right words that create the highest level of engagement from your audience. Link the visitor’s problems with the value that your solution provides so they know that they can’t live without your business.

Finally, as a designer, you need to well… design! Think about how the user will experience the page and create CTAs that standout and an experience that doesn’t place too much pressure on the visitor, providing a pleasant, yet targeted experience.

At the end of the day, your landing page visitors are your guests. Treat them to the kind of experience that will make them want to stay way to the late hours of the night.

Now that you have some quality examples, it’s time to take their inspiration and craft your own to really boost your conversion rates!

Don’t know how to start building your own landing pages? Sign up for Sendinblue and try our new drag and drop landing page builder to create landing pages that look great — no technical skills required!

The post 8 Effective Landing Page Examples that Convert appeared first on Sendinblue.

Learning more about customers in order to streamline conversion funnels is one of the most important tasks for digital marketers. But, it’s not always easy to know the best way to achieve this.

Here at Sendinblue, we’re always looking for ways to help our users better connect with their customers and grow their business. That’s why we’re announcing a new feature that lets you build and launch custom landing pages for your business directly from the Sendinblue platform.

Here are some of the Landing Page tool highlights:

• Get started in no time with a selection of high-converting landing page templates
• Easily customize pages with the new drag and drop landing page builder
• Engage customers on any device with mobile responsive design
• Choose from thousands of royalty-free stock photos, in app and ready to use on your site.
• Make follow up more meaningful by capturing unique information with custom form fields and syncing them to contact lists in Sendinblue.

Landing pages built to your needs

While subscription forms can be a quick and effective way to capture contact information for specific purposes, landing pages offer something more.

Improve conversion rate:

Knowledge is power. Landing pages allow for more form fields because they provide more space for images or other design elements to break up the required input fields and look less intimidating.

The extra information you collect from contacts on your landing page can be helpful for optimizing the sales process. This is especially true when you’re looking for ways to qualify leads for your sales team.

Save time:

No more need to worry about complex integrations! With the new Landing Page tool, you can build your own landing pages for your site and have the data you collect sync automatically — all without having to leave your Sendinblue account.

Additionally, our selection of high-converting landing page templates will help you quickly design and launch your page — it usually doesn’t take more than 30 minutes!

Release your creativity:

Take advantage of the vast library of stock photos and images to design on the fly and get the exact look and feel that you want for your page.

You can also utilize the smart form features (hidden fields, dynamic prompts, url parameters, etc.) to create advanced landing pages for more sophisticated goals or processes.

Get even more advanced:

Launch pages using your custom domain name for a more seamless experience. That way, you’ll never be off-brand.

Our Landing Pages tool is also optimized for speed, so there’s no need for any SEO concerns with the pages that you create. We also make it easy for you to take your SEO efforts to the next level by customizing the page meta-data and structure your page for better crawlability!

A landing page for every use case

There are many ways businesses can use landing pages to streamline a process or provide a better customer experience. If you can imagine it, you can probably make it happen in the new Landing Page tool in Sendinblue. Some example use cases include:

• Building a product-focused landing page to receive traffic from your email campaign and drive conversions.
• Use landing pages to receive traffic from ad campaigns and collect/sync lead info directly into your Sendinblue account. Use Automation to score leads and follow-up with them automatically.
• Promote a content resource that you’ve created for your audience and collect information from readers when they click download. Sync the data with Sendinblue and use Marketing Automation to send them an email containing your resource so they have it for later as well. You can even follow up with another email to ask for feedback!

Getting started with Landing Pages in Sendinblue

Available for all Premium plans on Sendinblue, you can find the new Landing Page tool in the Campaigns section of the platform. Just log into Sendinblue, navigate to the “Campaigns” tab, and click the “Landing Pages” option in the left menu. Then, select “Create a landing page.”

From here, you can choose to:

• Use a customizable landing page template
• Create a page from scratch
• Duplicate a previously-created page

It’s probably best to start with a template unless you already have something specific in mind. Building a page from scratch can be challenging without inspiration, especially if you don’t have much experience with landing pages.

For more details on how to build out your landing page, take a look at our detailed landing page tool tutorial. Once you’ve completed the design, click “GO LIVE” and watch the traffic start rolling in!

Want access to the Landing Pages feature? Upgrade to a Premium plan today!

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