Landing Pages
Validating with paid early access gives you the benefit of direct payment, but other options can still benefit you indirectly. Today we will look at landing pages, what you get out of them, how your customers benefit, how to make them, and some general guidelines
What are Landing Pages?
Landing pages are web pages without navigation and are focused on achieving a single result (call-to-action). For most businesses, this would be something like requesting an info sheet or viewing a product demo video. Typically this will be gated by requiring the user’s contact information. For validation purposes, it is common to just log interest. This will primarily be the number of visits to the page and hopefully getting the visitor’s email address. It’s very common to provide a valuable asset to the visitor and offer “to keep them updated” on the status of the project.
Why Make Landing Pages?
The goal of this page is to get a feel for interest.
If no one visits, you don’t know how to talk to your customer.
If no one signs up, you might have a dud on your hands.
But, if you have lots of visits and sign-ups, you might be on to something!
How Do You Make a Landing Page?
Many website packages include tools for creating dedicated landing pages. This will be a separate template option typically. Additionally, most email marketing tools include landing page functionality. Some common tools are:
These tools are designed for ease of use, integrate well with other analytics packages, and give you the data you need to help validate your product idea.
Guidelines
You will want to follow normal web best practices for content creation, being, clear, concise, and helpful, but landing pages have a few additional things to be aware of:
- Navigation: Landing pages shouldn’t have navigation to help avoid distractions. You don’t want to lose a user on a different shiny object!
- Popups: Avoid popups. As great as your newsletter is, don’t try to have them join when they should be focusing on your main call to action
- Focus: Each landing page should be extremely focused, even at the risk of duplication. If you are acquiring views via ads, for example, you want each ad to go to a landing page that is custom-tailored for that specific ad.
When someone visits your landing page, you want them to know this is the perfect solution to their problem and be dying to get connected with you or our product. That is how we measure success!