Last updated on July 26th, 2024 at 01:27 am
You have probably heard that landing pages are important. But what exactly is their purpose?
Today we are going to discuss why you should use landing pages in your business.
What is a Landing Page?
Let’s start by defining the term “landing page”.
A landing page is a web page designed with a specific conversion goal in mind.
There are two main types of landing pages:
- Lead generation landing pages that are designed to convert visitors into leads by persuading them to provide their contact details – typically an email address, although some companies ask for more information.
- Sales landing pages that are designed to convert visitors into paying customers by persuading them to buy a product or service.
Keep in mind that in theory, the term “landing page” is an umbrella term that covers both types of landing pages, but in practice it’s usually used to refer specifically to lead generation landing pages.
Also, while lead generation and sales are the two most common landing page uses cases, the conversion goal can be anything.
Basically, whenever you need to persuade Internet users to take a specific action, creating a landing page is probably your best bet.
You can use landing pages to get people to participate in a survey, provide feedback, share a piece of content on social media, etc.
What is the Purpose of Landing Pages?
The purpose of lead generation landing pages is to convert visitors into leads by persuading them to give you their email addresses.
But generating leads is just the first step. You then need to convert those leads into paying customers and repeat customers. And you must do that in a way that allows you to make a profit!
That’s why it’s so important to understand that landing pages don’t exist in isolation – they should always be viewed in the context of your overall sales funnel.
We recommend designing your sales funnel first so that you would understand the big picture.
There are several popular sales funnel models out there. Which one should you use for your business?
We believe that the most effective way to sell anything online is the Value Ladder sales funnel.
It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!).
This sales funnel has four stages:
- Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
- Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service.
- Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service.
- Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service.
Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue.
We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers in order to maximize your revenue.
The Bait stage, also known as the lead generation funnel, revolves around your lead magnet landing page.
Once the potential customer gives you their email address, they become a lead, enter your sales funnel, and hopefully progress to the Frontend, Middle, and eventually Backend stages.
Something to keep in mind here is that what happens in the Bait stage has a cascading effect throughout the entire sales funnel.
Again, don’t look at your landing page in isolation, evaluate it in the context of your overall sales funnel.
Are you generating high-quality leads that you are then able to convert into paying customers and into repeat customers?
Okay, now with all that out of the way, let’s discuss the three key reasons why you should use landing pages in your business.
Reason #1: Landing Pages Convert the Best
Conversion rate is a metric that measures what percentage of web page visitors converted aka took the action you wanted them to take.
In the context of lead generation landing pages, it shows what percentage of landing page visitors provided their email addresses.
It’s calculated with this simple formula:
(Total Conversions/Total Visitors) x 100 = Conversion Rate
Say, if 3782 people visited your landing page and 785 of them gave you their email addresses, then the conversion rate of that landing page is 20.7%:
(785/3782) x 100 = 20.7%
Of course, no one uses this formula to manually calculate conversion rates anymore, it’s all done automatically by whatever software that person is using.
Still, it’s important to understand how they are calculated because if you don’t, it can lead to developing various misconceptions that can have a negative impact on your business.
Landing pages have the highest conversion rates of all types of web pages, which shouldn’t be surprising given that, by definition, they are designed with a specific conversion goal in mind.
Unbounce did some interesting research where they analyzed lead generation landing pages across 10 different industries with a total of 74,551,421 visitors. What did they find?
The average conversion rate of a lead generation landing page was 4.02% but there was also a significant variation between different industries.
As you can see in the chart below, average lead generation landing page conversion rates range from 2.6% in the higher education industry to 6.1% in the vocational studies and job training industry.
At first glance, these conversion rates may not seem that impressive, but it’s probably safe to assume that they are higher than the conversion rates of traditional websites in those same industries.
Also, these are just the average conversion rates, so you can almost certainly do much better than that if you put some effort into your landing pages.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t use traditional websites to generate leads. In fact, we advise optimizing your business website for lead generation. This will allow you to make the most out of the traffic that you are getting.
However, your primary lead generation method should be driving traffic directly to your lead magnet landing page as that is likely to produce the best results.
Reason #2: Landing Pages Can Help You to Generate Leads
The most effective way of generating leads online is building a lead generation funnel:
- Create a super valuable lead magnet
- Create a landing page for that lead magnet
- Drive traffic to that landing page
Let’s take a closer look at each of these steps:
Create a Super Valuable Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to potential customers in exchange for their email address.
It can be anything that people can either download to their devices or access online:
- An eBook
- A video masterclass
- A video course
- An email course
- A webinar
…etc.
For Example:
We have a whole bunch of digital lead magnets.
Here are some of them:
- “The Funnel Hacker’s Cookbook” (eBook)
- “Death of a Website” (webinar)
- “Funnel Scripts” (webinar)
- “Secret Funnel Strategy” (webinar)
- “Funnel Builder Secrets” (webinar)
- “5 Day Lead Challenge” (online course)
Regardless of the lead magnet format that you choose, you need to make sure that:
- Your lead magnet offers a solution to a problem that the potential customer is struggling with.
- That problem is either the same one or related to the one that your paid product or service addresses.
Also, it’s important to understand that people won’t give you their email addresses unless you offer them something super valuable in return.
That’s why the key to designing an effective lead magnet is creating something that your dream customers desperately want and then giving it to them for free!
Create a Landing Page for That Lead Magnet
Once you have your lead magnet, you need to create a landing page for it.
We recommend starting with a basic squeeze page. You don’t yet know whether your free offer will resonate with your dream customers, so it doesn’t make sense to invest resources into creating an elaborate landing page for it.
Here’s an example of a simple, yet high-converting squeeze page:
Once you have validated your lead magnet idea, you can upgrade its landing page by adding more copy, social proof, video, etc. Just make sure to A/B test everything!
Also, if you don’t have any previous landing page design experience then it’s best to use a proven landing page template instead of creating your landing page from scratch.
Our software, ClickFunnels, includes a template library that features high-converting landing page templates for all the most common use cases.
So why waste time reinventing the wheel when you can simply do what’s been proven to work?
Drive Traffic to That Landing Page
Once you have your lead magnet landing page, you need to start driving traffic to it.
Paid advertising is the best way to do that because paid traffic is targeted, predictable, and scalable.
All major social media platforms allow you to run ads on them;
- YouTube
- TikTok
Pick the platform that makes the most sense for your business, create an ad campaign, and start running ads with a small daily budget.
Once you figure out how to do it profitably, you can begin scaling your campaign and experimenting with other platforms.
Avoid Lead Generation Myopia!
There’s something that we call lead generation myopia where entrepreneurs become so focused on lead generation that they lose sight of the big picture and end up hurting their businesses in the long run.
This can manifest as:
- Making bombastic claims then failing to deliver what you promised. Say, if you create a lead magnet called “Learn to Code in 30 Days”, you might generate a lot of leads but then you’ll disappoint them because it’s not possible to learn to code in such a short period of time.
- Using a lead magnet that appeals to the largest possible audience despite having a product or service meant for a much smaller niche. Say, the “Learn to Code in 30 Days” lead magnet would have a wide appeal but what good is that if your product is meant for software engineers?
- Lack of logical progression from the lead magnet to the frontend offer. If someone downloaded your “Learn to Code in 30 Days” lead magnet, they will expect your frontend offer to be related to learning to code, not something random like a course on negotiating one’s salary as a developer.
If all you are looking at is the number of leads generated, then it might seem that you are doing well despite your myopic approach causing predictable problems further down the road.
That’s why it’s so important to consider how the Bait stage of your sales funnel will affect the Frontend, Middle, and Backend stages!
Remember, the goal here isn’t to generate as many leads as possible, it’s to generate high-quality leads that you can then convert into paying customers.
Reason #3: You Can Use Landing Pages to Build a Pre-Launch Email List
Are you preparing for a product launch?
Then you can use a simple lead generation funnel that we described in the previous section to build a pre-launch email list.
For Example:
If you are planning a book launch, you can create a lead generation funnel where you offer the first chapter as a lead magnet.
And if you don’t have the first chapter yet, then you use a simple squeeze page where you announce the book and encourage potential customers to sign up to get notified when it becomes available.
You can also take this approach to the next level by building a product launch funnel that looks like this:
Page 1: A squeeze page
Page 2: Video #1
Page 3: Video #2
Page 4: Video #3
Page 5: Video #4
Page 6: A product order page
Page 7: An order confirmation page
Creating a product launch funnel will require more effort than creating a simple lead generation funnel but it will likely be more effective.
Either way, building a pre-launch email list is the best thing you can do to ensure that your launch is a success, so if you haven’t started yet, you need to get on it ASAP!
Build Landing Pages That CONVERT With ClickFunnels!
ClickFunnels has everything you need to create landing pages that convert:
- Proven landing page templates.
- Visual editor that you can use to customize those templates.
- A/B testing functionality that you can use to optimize your landing pages.
What’s best is that we have a free trial which means that you can check out our software without any risk!