Going beyond the basic landing page

In last week’s post, we looked at ways that you can set your landing page up for success. We shared lots of tips to make your landing page more useful to your brand, including writing text with readers who scan in mind, using lots of enticing visuals and incorporating user generated content.Now you have the basics, we want to share a few more insights with you to help take your landing pages to a whole new level. This is important because, the more versatile and sophisticated your landing pages the greater the performance of your new website design as a whole.Our tip for going beyond the basic landing page? Take time to understand the different types of landing page you can create. Once you can recognise the different variations, you’ll be better equipped to select a format that really pulls its weight for you and performs much better at lead generation.

1. Squeeze page – also known as the email capture If you have any experience creating landing pages for your website, chances are you’ll have built a squeeze page at one time or another – even if you didn’t know what it was. If you haven’t built one, you’ll certainly have visited one. This type of landing page has a single focus and that is to gather email addresses. If you’ve ever been instructed to input your email to unlock a special offer for example after clicking on an advert, that’s a squeeze page.To make your squeeze page successful, you’ll need to make sure you’re giving your visitor a compelling reason to part with their email address. Offering a discount is a common incentive but don’t feel that’s your only option. Be creative! 2. Lead capture page – gathering more information Again, it’s highly likely that you may have created a lead capture page without realising. If you’ve produced an ebook for example, and you ask your visitor to give you their name, email, phone number and perhaps their job type, company size, budget, number of employees or sector, you’ve created a lead capture page.As the name suggests, this type of page is focused on building your lead pipeline so it’s used to gather information about your prospect. You’ll have to have a very compelling proposition to encourage your visitor to provide so much personal information but, when you crack this landing page, you’ll have lots of great data that you can use further down the line to generate new business. 3. Splash page – keeping them keen A splash page is essentially an advert – it won’t usually ask for an email address or other information but it will share an announcement, often in the form of an advert. If you have an upcoming special event, are selling tickets or have a sale on for a limited time for example, an attractive splash page is a great way to get your visitor interested. A splash page is often shown on the destination page after a visitor clicks through from elsewhere (such as a PPC ad). It may appear for a fixed amount of time and then disappear or allow the user to close it and move on to a different page.