What is a Landing Page?

Simply put, a landing page is the web page that an Internet surfer lands on when clicking on an ad, email link or other form of advertisement. The purpose of this page is to introduce a product or service and give the reader enough information to want to discover more about it.

The landing page is usually a single page, separate from your main website. Your site may have several products or service; however, a landing page has only one theme as its focus. There are no outgoing or global links to the main website. The sole purpose of the landing page is to concentrate on one product, idea or service and guide the user in making a decision.

There are two types of landing pages.

On form of landing page is the click-through page and its purpose is to lead the reader into buying or subscribing to your product or service. The other type is the lead generating page. Its purpose is to capture the viewer’s contact information, such as name and e-mail address, generally by offering a subscription to a series of e-mail based lessons or newsletters, a contest entry, a free trial offer or discount coupon. This allows the site owner to contact the viewer with offers later.

There are two schools of thought concerning landing page design.

One is the long sales letter style that will sometimes provide a long, descriptive explanation, several testimonials that are often in video format, is formatted in both paragraphs and bulleted lists and has the call to action near the bottom of the page and sometime sprinkled in other locations as well. This type will often focus on features of the product or service.

The other style uses a shorter format. It has a primary headline, announcing the Unique Selling Proposition. Sometime a secondary, explanatory headline is used as well. The product or service description usually focuses more on benefits than features to appeal to the viewer.

Photos or videos of the product in action are often included. It will include a call to action, as well as a secondary CTA for those who are not ready to commit yet. All of these elements are “above the fold,” which means that the reader does not have to scroll to view them.

P.S. If you have a wordpress site – Max Foundry – makes a wordpress landing page plugin that allows you to create landing pages on your exiting website.