Very few businesses exist without a website to support their sales and customer service activity. Additionally, most businesses now use some sort of application to send out emails to prospects, customers or partners and all conduct some form of advertising. However, few have a good understanding of how these elements, the website, email distribution and advertising, should work in concert with each other. Of those people in the US using the Internet, 85% now use search engines to find products and information. Therefore, any contact or potential customer may find a commercial website or be sent to the website via an email link or URL mentioned in an advertisement. However, sending such interested parties to your home page is a huge mistake. A key advantage of using email and digital advertising is that the potential buyer can be directed to a specific page of information eliminating the need to browse through a site looking for it. This specific page is referred to as a landing page.

There are two types of landing pages, Informational and Transactional. In both cases the objective is to secure a lead. Landing pages are not normally part of your website map. They exist to support a specific product campaign or initiative. An informational landing page usually presents, well, information as text, video, image or a combination of all. A Transactional page may use the same means of presentation but it always has a form or email link that the visitor can fill out or send to create a lead. At ANPI, we use landing pages to provide information and to secure contact information to develop a lead. Therefore, all of our landing pages would be deemed Transactional which I believe is best practices for most marketing professionals. Exact Target found that 75% of marketing professionals worldwide use landing pages to increase the success of lead generation campaigns.

A good landing page begins by ensuring that the information presented first confirms to the visitor that the page is associated with the advertising or email first read. Then the following five elements:

1. A strong headline that is relevant to the campaign and concise/interesting
2. Has content that expands upon the ad or email
3. Contains a call to action which drives the visitor to provide contact information by either filling out a (3.b) form or sending an (3.c) email request to be contacted. With instant chat, an invitation to speak with a person can be sent while the visitor is on the landing page.
4. Stays above the fold. Where websites today clearly have gotten longer, a landing page should keep the title, information, call to action and action button above the fold.
5. Has and action button.

Digital ad spending worldwide hit $137.53 billion in 2014 according to eMarketer, yet some suggest nearly half of these dollars are wasted. They are wasted because the proper tools to track and leverage the ads were not employed. Good landing pages leverage and extend good advertising.