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?

• 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.

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

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.

The confident (the message matched experience)
Ah yes, the confident landing page. This handshake is well-designed and on-target. It’s slick and adapts easily to different people or segments. A confident landing page is message-matched, features high-quality design & delivers great brand. This is the type of landing page that you’d want to bring home to mom. And the type of landing page that delivers great brand and converts visitors.

Remember, first impressions count. Don’t blow off your potential customers with a wimpy landing page. Put your hand out and deliver a great handshake.

• Improved marketing performance
• Valuable insight into what works (and what doesn’t)
• Reduced resources needed to make & manage pages
• Faster speed to market for landing pages
• Real-time A/B/N testing
• Centralized brand & assets, decentralized content & tactics

Just like an airplane pilot, you need to be in control your landings.

If you are driving social and organic traffic you might have limited control over how people find you, what they click and where they land. But for your traffic from sources like PPC, affiliate, email, and display you have total control over both your ad messages and where people land when they click those ad messages. It’s where you send your ad clicks that will make all the difference to your campaign performance.

• Review your process
• Evaluate your current & future needs
• Set goals & objectives 

To get started, I recommend reviewing your current landing page management process. What are the steps—whether they be 3 steps or 30—to get a landing page launched and tested? What stakeholders are involved? If you map out your current landing page program you will probably see some areas you can streamline staring right back at you. What can you do to reduce the number of people involved? Decrease the number of steps from concept to launch? Where can you reduce ‘friction’? Look at your process with fresh eyes to find ways to improve.

Next, it’s important to evaluate your landing page needs for both today and tomorrow. How many landing pages are you running? How is that trending? Are your landing page needs increasing or decreasing? If you are like most companies, your landing page needs are increasing exponentially. Don’t fight it. The highest converting customers we have here at ion are almost always the ones who have hundreds or thousands of landing pages. Embrace it. And I mean that literally. Get your arms around your landing page universe because it’s important to know what the needs are today, how it’s trending, and where you need to go next. You already know that nothing about the web is static. Your landing page strategy will evolve right along with the rest of the web, and you might not be able to predict all the ways it will shift, but you can take a forward facing view to see what’s coming.

And finally, define your goals and objectives. I know, I know—Duh with a capital D. A landing page program should always have higher conversion quality and quantity as it’s primary objective. That’s gotta be the primary driver and it’s why we get out of bed in the morning to go make the landing pages, right? It’s to drive more leads and more transactions. Landing pages are the means to the end. But beyond increasing conversion quality and quantity, is there anything else you want to accomplish? Speed to market? Better visibility into results? If you don’t define your goals and objectives, you won’t know where you are going and you won’t get there.

If you are using landing pages, then you have landing page management. It’s up to you to decide how effective (or not) your current approach is and where you can improve it. I view effective landing page management as the ability to do the following landing page-related tasks without friction:

• Create
• Review/proof
• Launch/host
• Test
• Analyze
• Iterate
• Organize

I’ve been referring to ‘friction’ a lot lately. I don’t think I need to define it as it relates to landing pages. I think if you have friction you know it. It’s the steps you have to take to get a landing page built, the team members who have to be involved, the number of hoops you have to jump through to go from concept to launch. The opportunities to eliminate friction depend upon your organization. If you are in a heavily regulated industry such as financial services or health care, you aren’t going eradicate legal reviews & approvals. But maybe you can find another area to boost efficiency, like getting a test launched, or viewing real-time analysis. 

Take a look at the landing page tasks listed above and determine if you can make any of them easier than they are today. If you can, then you can boost your conversion rate. It’s just logical that landing page friction inhibits results. If you can easily launch a landing page, run a test on it and see the results, then you can get a lot more done and be a lot more effective when you do. And that will lead to better results. 

Scott has a great post on 3 landing page metrics for you to check out. And if you haven’t read 36 Landing Page Management Secrets, it’s definitely worth a peek. 

• Rapidly growing # of landing pages—You, like the rest of us, probably started out with 1 landing page. Which quickly grew to 10. And now maybe you are tickling 100 (or 1,000). If the number of landing pages you are responsible for is growing, then it’s probably time. You need a way to centralize elements like brand, forms and flows, while you decentralize tactics such as content and production. If you are statically managing landing pages, or even pressing a website CMS into action for your landing pages, you will probably find it’s hard to keep your arms around all the pages you are running.
• Friction to launch or test a page—You know what I am talking about. It’s the marketing team, the agency, IT, your boss, your uncle, your boss’s uncle. If the people, resources, processes and calendar time to launch a landing page is causing you to up your daily does of Zantac, it is definitely time for a landing page management solution. I will go as far as to say that any friction in your landing page development process it is hindering your results. Get the process as friction-free as possible so you can go from concept to launch in a small window.
• Increasing need for sophistication—Your first foray into landing pages probably started with a headline, a sub-headline, some bullets, a hero shot and a call to action. Maybe it got the job done, maybe it didn’t. But as your landing page needs grow, often the sophistication of the pages does as well. If you are tickling keyword substitution, personalization or anything even slightly out-of-the-standard-landing-page-box you’ll probably find that the right tool helps you get things done better, faster and easier. It’s either that or get on your hands and knees and beg your best friend in IT to help prioritize your landing page project over the myriad other mission-critical stuff they have to deal with every day. 
• Can’t keep pace with demand—Right about now you are probably telling everyone in your office to take a number and get in line because your team is backed up and can’t get to their landing page for a while. If this is you, it’s definitely time for a landing page management tool. You will be able to produce, launch and test a lot more landing pages with fewer resources if you have the right solution in place.
• Global or disparate teams—If you gather up all the global landing pages your company is running do you have a hodgepodge? A mishmash? A nightmare? Chances are, you do. It’s hard enough to manage a single market’s worth of landing pages. Here’s where a landing page management tool can really come in handy. Teams can easily share what’s working (or what’s not), re-use assets and consolidate templates. Think “reduce, reuse, recycle” for your global landing pages!
• Lack of real-time, actionable results—You launch a landing page (or hopefully an A/B test with multiple landing pages), traffic starts flowing and you need your fingertip on the pulse of those pages. How many unique visitors are arriving and what are they doing? How are the pages performing? What’s converting? What isn’t? You need real-time data so you can respond and influence the outcome of your campaign. If you are looking at postmortem data on your landing pages you’ve undoubtedly left conversions on the table.

Landing page management will help you get more done with fewer resources. And most likely you’ll increase your conversions too.