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Search Marketing Guide:
How to Write a Landing Page That Converts

 

SUMMARY: A Landing Page is is an integral part of a Paid Search Engine Advertising campaign. It's the page linked to from a Pay Per Click or other Ad. It works best when designed specifically to follow up on what the ad offers. This article covers how to write effective Landing Page copy. The goal is conversion - turning traffic into members of your mailing list or into buyers. 

If you're paying for click-through's from Google or another search engine, you want to make sure your investment provides a return.  You do that with a landing page.

Searchers click-through to your page because your ad captures their attention and creates interest.  Your landing page now needs to build on that interest, turn it into desire and, ultimately, get action.

To be effective, your landing page needs to work like a sales letter.  It needs to be designed around a very clear objective - the action you want - and it needs to employ all the motivating and persuasive tools necessary to get the job done.

Whether it actually is a sales letter depends...

YOUR GOAL GUIDES THE APPROACH

You have to clearly define what it is that you want the visitor to do. The format you use to achieve that varies depending on the objective.  Even though dozens of variations exist, there are really only two objectives . You're trying to get the visitor to either...

1. give you their email and possibly other information for your mailing list, or
2. buy

If you want them to buy, then throw all the logs on the fire. Put a long-form sales letter on your landing page that they just cannot resist.  Be sure it uses an appeal that matches up to what the visitor was originally searching for.  That will increase your chances of making a sale.

But don't expect a high rate of conversion -- even if your letter is strong enough to bend steel. Research keeps telling us that almost no one buys immediately when they're shopping online.  Conventional wisdom says a prospect has to see your message at least seven times!

The reason you won't often sell straight off the landing page goes back to the very reason the visitor got there in the first place -- the search engines. When a visitor arrives from a search, it's just too easy to back up and compare prices, find other sources, and shop around.

MOST MARKETERS WANT AN EMAIL ADDRESS

Which is why so many landing pages just try to collect email addresses. It's still not EASY, but it's eas-ier. And actually, it leads to more sales in the long run.

The tried and true approach is to offer a free "something" in return for signing up for the e-mailing list. It used to be enough to offer a free subscription to your newsletter, but that rarely works these days.  Too many newsletters flood the e-waves and few contain any useful information (present newsletter excepted, of course). Seachers realize they're just signing up to get a lot of sales pitches.

No, you have to offer something more.  A book or software or an audio or video tutorial -- something with real, immediate value.

And that's what your landing page copy sells.

It seems odd that we have to put out so much effort just to give something away - but we do. The only difference is that you can usually make your pitch relatively brief.  The key is to have a good giveaway.  If the searcher really wants it, you don't have to say as much.

YES, YOU EVEN HAVE TO SELL YOUR FREE OFFER

That's especially true when you've featured the giveaway item in your pay-per-click ad.  You can usually just

• Confirm in your headline that the searcher has arrived at the right place to claim their prize
• Prove it's worth having with a benefit-heavy bullet list
• Explain briefly that their email address is required because of your delivery method
• Present an easy to use form for them to input their email address.

You can ask for anything on your form, but most marketers restrict the required blanks to capturing an email address and a name.  The more you ask, the more you have to sell why you need it.

The actual email form is most often linked to an autoresponder service these days.   In a future article, we'll cover how you use the autoresponder service to handle your follow up and ultimately sell the prospect who's just been added to your mailing list.

FINAL WORD

Here's an example of a landing page, from master marketer, David DeAngelo: Double Your Dating
You may even want to sign up and get on his email list to see the kind of email marketing campaign he conducts.  (Note that the link is NOT an affiliate link.)

It's a mistake to pay for traffic and then send it to a generic home page.  Create a landing page that sells exactly what you offered in your ad.

And if you really want to reach the heights of Internet Marketing achievement, focus on building your e-mailing list. Like the (richest) guru's say, "the money is in the list!"

 

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