The Current State of Lead Gen Landing Pages

Anna Talerico is getting ready to host a new webinar all about improving lead generation landing pages in about 30 minutes.

In preparation for the webinar, Anna asked me to do some research and find some high-quality lead gen landing experiences that aren’t from our clients. So I searched. And I searched. And I searched some more. I clicked on banner ads and search ads. I checked my inbox for offers.

And I couldn’t find any.

Out of the 50 ads from Fortune 1000 lead gen marketers I clicked on, only about 3 of their subsequent landing pages followed any basic landing page best practices. 

• 40 out of the 50 landing pages were deep links within a website 
• 37 out of the 50 landing pages had no clear, defined call-to-action
• none of the landing experiences featured any form of segmentation
• 35 out of the 50 landing pages had more than 3 paragraphs of copy

For such complex, high-value sales, the landing pages were pretty archaic. 

When generating leads online, it’s important to follow these 5 basic landing page best practices:

1. Try segmentation with 2-step landing pages. Segmentation can separate your high-quality leads from the unqualified.

2. Keep your forms relevant. Don’t scare away your prospects with 15 or more required form fields. Data is important, but user-directed segmentation can reveal market segment and demographic data in a friendly manner that’s beneficial to the user.

3. Streamline, streamline, streamline. Just because your sale is complex, doesn’t mean your landing page should include paragraphs of details about your product or service. Less is more when conversion is the goal.

4. Stay away from deep links! Prior to engaging with us for their full-service post-click marketing, ion client Overland Storage was sending their paid traffic to deep links within their website, and their conversion rate was less than 1%. After only one month, we boosted that by over 500% by developing targeted landing experiences. 

5. Message match. We’ve said it 1,000 times,  but if your ad mentions a white paper, don’t make your visitor dig through your site to find it, because chances are, they won’t.

The current state of lead gen landing pages is pretty pathetic at the moment, but for marketers who have effective post-click marketing in place, it’s a competitive advantage.

Comments

[Leon]

"Just because your sale is complex, doesn’t mean your landing page should include paragraphs of details about your product or service. Less is more when conversion is the goal."

I don't think so!
If you're talking about salespages for infoproducts, seminars, etc., long sales copy wins - time and time again.

[Megan Leap]

HI Leon,

Thanks for the comment.

For lead generation landing pages, our clients' results show that less copy results in higher conversions most of the time.

For transactional landing pages, it is important to include necessary specs and product information, but also make the copy digestible and easy to read.

In every instance, it's important to test to find out what results in the highest conversions. But overall, our results have shown the less is more approach wins most of the time.

Thanks for reading!

[Chris]

I think the point is that the landing page itself can be short to peak interest and offer the ability to segment traffic... then the offer page can be longer and include sale copy. At least this should be tested.

[Megan Leap]

Well said, Chris!