Here are 10 best practices for landing pages to increase their effectiveness in converting website traffic from PPC, SEO, Print Advertising, Direct Mail, Email, Trade Shows, Blogs, Public Relations, and more.

1. Continuity. If you want prospects to respond to your banners, emails and pay-per-clicks, you need to think about the continuity of the messaging process. Reinforce the exact messaging in the search, in the hit, and on the landing page for best results.


2. Keep it crisp. With today’s media-induced attention deficit disorder, it’s easy for people to lose interest and stray.  Your job is to make your information easy to follow. 
   • Keep the message above the fold on the landing page
   • Use bulleted text, with straightforward language
   • Make your offer obvious on the page
   • Minimize the need for any scrolling


3. Don’t let them slip away. The vast majority of people will exit from a landing page in a few seconds. If you want to capture them, don’t distract them with:
   • navigation to other pages on your website
   • other offers that are loosely related to your original offer
   • a long registration form


4. Limit your survey questions. If this is your first contact with this visitor, you should only ask for the essentials, like name and email address, and carefully limit any other questions. And you should reward them for providing that data with something for free. As the interaction continues you can safely ask more questions.


5. Tailor your offer. Your offer should be tailored to fit the exact needs of your target audience. It sounds easy, but it isn’t. Most companies offer whatever they have on hand. The magic words seem to be “white paper,” but if the topic is not timely, if the writing is not crisp, and if the title is not compelling, you are shooting yourself in the foot.


6. Strengthen your offer. Your prospects arrive at your landing page with great expectations. You need to reinforce that by making the information clear, compelling and easy to digest. By all means, design this carefully. You’re not trying to scream your offer at them in all capital letters, you’re simply trying to explain it clearly.


7. Test your ideas: The latest technologies available to build and test landing pages enable marketers to implement stronger programs than ever before. But this technology also allows you to go overboard. Don’t test everything at once. Start with basic A/B testing and test which graphic works best, which survey works best, which button works best. With the large ticket items common in B2B, every percentage point increase in response becomes extremely important. After you’ve covered the basics, you can expand your testing strategy.


8. Test available channels. Today, more than ever, you can compare spend and returns from different channels quickly and easily. Use your landing pages to direct mail vs. email, inside front cover vs interior ad placements, banner ads vs. pay-per-click, Google vs. Yahoo, and more. And while you’re at it, test new channels like video and podcasts. This is the way to increase your knowledge base of what works.


9. Understand your analytics. It’s easy to see how many people clicked through to your landing page, but that’s not the whole story. You need to also understand why they leave and where they go next. Pages that call potential customers to action are the beginning of the sales funnel. If 98 percent of people are visiting a page and leaving before filling out the form is it because the form is hard to understand or asks too many questions?


10. Rethink thank you. Once you’ve delivered the goods, redirect your prospects to a page that does more than offer a simple thank you. Pretend you are escorting this visitor around your company. After he has seen your latest product, you wouldn’t usher him to the door. Show him something else. You can implement this on your website so that appropriate recommendations appear automatically. 

    This also makes it much easier to measure the impact of your offer, messages and page design. Stay with the idea of simplicity and resist the urge to have additional features. You’re not trying to increase their awareness, you’re trying to convert them.