Building landing pages to test out new ideas at a minimal cost is a technique that revolutionized the marketing industry in the early years 2000’s. It makes it possible to gauge market interest without having to spend virtually any money on product design, pilot batches, and order fulfillment. Landing pages for those products and services that take off in the marketplace then become even more valuable as they are tweaked and refined to drive conversion rates and revenues through the roof. If you haven’t integrated landing pages into your marketing campaign, you’re missing out on an incredibly powerful tool that could potentially reinvigorate your business.
So how can you get started? Well, you’re going to need a basic understanding of the internet and website building. Hopefully you’re already there. Once you are you can do quite a bit of the work yourself if you’re willing to put in the extra time and effort to learn the technologies, or you can defer to some tried and true services that make all landing page campaigns a breeze. Let’s get started by going over the basics of creating a landing page.
Landing Page Basics
The concept is simple. You set up a web page that describes your offering and include a call to action where your visitors can “opt-in”. At first, this can simply be signing up to a mailing list or joining a wait list. Basically anything that shows that a visitor is interested in your offering, as opposed to reading your page and leaving uninterested. Then you drive visitors to your site by any number of tactics and see what percentage of them opt-in. If the numbers make sense, then you can go on with developing your product or service.
Once you have a successful landing page you’ll want to continue development to get the most out of it. In essence what you’ll be doing is improving the design of the page to increase the number of opt-ins. You’ll manipulate layouts, try out different images, use different button colors, etc. to find what works best with your visitors. How can you know for sure which combination works best? You’ll utilize A/B testing.
With A/B testing you’ll split the traffic from your visitors evenly and randomly, and you’ll send one portion of the traffic to a version of your landing page as it currently exists (“A”) and the other portion of the traffic to a version of your landing page with your modifications implemented (“B”). Then you’ll give the your visitors time to use both versions of your landing page thoroughly and make the calculations to figure out which version performs better. You can do this in several iterations until your landing page is a finely-tuned conversion machine.
Integrated Landing Page Solutions
Conceptually this makes a lot of sense, but truth be told it can be an absolute headache to manage on your own. It will take in-depth knowledge of building websites and quite a bit of effort and resourcefulness. It this sounds a bit off-putting to you then rest easy, there are quite a few services out there that will handle the brunt of the work for you.
Leadpages, for example, is a simple and straight-forward tool that works great for people who have little interest in going deep into the design of their landing pages. They offer an excellent landing page builder that will have you up an running in minutes. With a variety of templates and built-in page elements you can have a professional design simply by clicking around with your mouse. If you take a look at Leadpages pricing, you’ll see that it’s quite affordable for the value that you’ll get out of it.
Instapages is another great service that also has a lot of clout. They also offer a page builder, though it may take a little more getting used to before you’re off and running. Your reward for the extra effort is a bit more of a custom touch on the landing pages you make. Both of these services provide an A/B testing system as well, making it very easy to work on improving your conversion rates once you’ve made successful landing pages. They’ll even integrate with tons of other marketing services such as MailChimp and Constant Contact so that you can view everything all in one place.
Landing pages are a powerful technique that you can incorporate into your marketing campaign. They’ll potentially save you a ton of expenses when testing new ideas, and they may even send your revenues soaring once you’ve come across an idea that the market loves. If you haven’t given them a try, there’s little to lose.
