The best landing pages are the ones that convert. I sometimes call them ‘high-performance’ landing pages. High performing landing pages have 4 characteristics. They are engaging, dynamic, disposable and agile.

An engaging landing experience uses an arsenal of tools like flash, video, social media and pre-conversion segmentation to capture and keep the user’s attention and drive them through conversion.

Dynamic landing experiences are those that are highly context specific, perhaps even personalized with content based on where the user has come from, what they have searched on or what they’ve done in the past. They aren’t static, they are specific.

Most importantly, landing pages should be disposable. The best online marketing campaigns employ continuous testing for continuous improvement. And that means we can’t get too tied down to any one landing page concept. We can’t invest so much into a landing page that it becomes too expensive to trash it and move on if it’s not working.

And finally agile. Landing pages need to be concepted, executed and launched in minutes, hours or days. Not months. We talk to companies every day who can’t get a landing page developed and launched in under 4-12 weeks. That’s a long time. A really long time. A 4-12 week development cycle on a landing page probably means that too many resources are being spent on the page—from IT to agencies to marketing resources—and it probably means it is no longer disposable as well.

So, take a look at your landing pages. Can you use the words engaging, dynamic, disposable and agile to describe them?

The big question we get a lot is, “What makes a great landing page?”. Actually the big question often comes in the form of a lot of little questions, like:

• What color should my button be?
• Should the form be on the right or the left?
• One column or two column form?
• How much copy?
• Do bullets work best?
• How long should the headline be?
• What layout always wins?

When marketers ask us these types of questions, we feel their pain. We all want a simple formula for magically high conversion rates. I know I would certainly like a formula like that! But there is no one thing that always works in ever case.

In fact, there is only one answer to any landing page question: Test It.

If you are running landing pages let Test It be your mantra. 

We all know what makes a landing page great—it’s high conversion. So, while I can give you a running list of best practices and a barrage of ‘shoulds’, none of them really matter if they aren’t tested & proven in context. What works well for one campaign might not work well for another. What works well for email might not work as well for PPC. You get the drift….There are no hard and fast rules for landing pages. No one single thing that will always work.

There are benchmarks, there are guidelines, there are best practices. But there are no rules. 

Don’t be afraid to color outside of the lines with your landing pages. Don’t hesitate to experiment. At the end of the day all that matters is what converts, and you will only know what is converting if you are testing.

So, the next time you find yourself wondering…black or blue? long or short? keyword insertion or static? form on the left or the right? Don’t wonder, just test it. Your users will tell you what works.

Here’s a list taken from our recent “Honest Seduction for Landing Pages” webinar—a quick run down of  wins & sins I found when randomly surfing some landing pages. You can check out the good, the bad and the ugly yourself—I posted the slides on slideshare, which include screen shots. 

The sins:

• Message mismatch
• Ad, or topic-inspecific pages
• Visual clutter
• Offer complexity
• Fuzzy call to action or next step
• Inappropriate to the context
• Message, offer or call to action too deep or too high in the funnel
• Lowest common denominator page
• Assuming users will wait for pages to load
• Self indulgent use of Flash or video
• Hurdles to convert

The wins:

• Honest representation of the brand
• Message match
• Ad, or topic-specific pages
• Visual clarity
• Simplicity
• Clear call to action
• Appropriate to the context
• Appropriate to user’s place in the funnel
• Reinforce the ad promise—give the gorilla the banana

I think this will be my last post on landing page management for a while. I’ve been on a roll and the roll is officially ending. But let me leave this theme with just a quick narrative of what I think landing page is….

Simply put, landing page management is the process by which you create your landing pages, launch them, test them, analyze them and organize them.

These tasks are really just the fundamental building blocks of any landing page program, right? You have to make pages, launch them, test them and analyze their effectiveness so you can make them better. No matter if your approach is ad hoc or super sophisticated, if you have landing pages you have landing page management.

The thing is, good landing page management can make your landing pages much more effective. Everyone knows that landing page best practices can help boost landing page performance. But what a lot of marketers don’t realize is that the way you manage your pages can help or hinder your effectiveness. You want to get more done with fewer resources in order to drive up your conversions.