Imagine that you’re running a business website where you sell a consulting service or physical products, and you’re targeting several groups of different consumers. Your website homepage obviously cannot be tailored to each group with different needs and demands, and therefore cannot perform equally well in converting all of your target customers.
This is where landing pages become your secret weapon. Let’s deep dive into the essential roles that landing pages play in optimizing sale funnel conversions and how they work together with email marketing to help you seal the deal with prospects.
What Are Landing Pages?
Building sales funnels with clearly defined goals is a critical part of growing your businesses. In plain words, a sales funnel is a path, consisting of a set of activities, that prospects follow to reach the final step, which is the desired conversion goal.
In a sales funnel, landing pages are stand-alone web pages that don’t belong to your main website, but focus (ideally) on one single conversion goal in the funnel.
Differing from normal websites, landing pages typically:
- Have a single conversion goal.
- Have a clear call-to-action to drive conversions throughout the page.
- Omit or limit off-page navigation.
- Have a clear and minimalistic design to avoid confusion.
- Contain an offer that meets what the target audience wants.
Roles that Landing Pages Play in Sales Funnels
Landing pages are single pages with purpose, containing information and elements that drive people to take a desired action in the sales funnel. Landing pages can stay on top, in the middle, or at the bottom of funnels, as long as they cater to the gaps around them. For example:
- Welcome new traffic from ads, articles, promotional campaigns, referral programs, etc.
- Convert traffic into signups, email subscribers, or social followers.
- Convert prospects into buyers.
- Collect early birds in pre-launch campaigns.
- Act as a thank you page, where converted customers are motivated to promote the business through social shares of referral.
While websites are permanent, landing pages can be personalized and split-tested to different groups within an audience. Testing just a small piece of text, an image, or a button can result in more clicks, more conversions, and greater success in the bottom line.
What Is “Drip Marketing”?
The days of sending mass emails are long gone. In this noisy world where every brand wants to stand out, personalization, relevancy, and timing are the keys to success in email marketing.
Drip marketing, also known as “automated email marketing”, is a series of targeted emails which are triggered when customers take an action such as signing up, viewing a page and clicking a button. Drip marketing allows you to send out personalized and relevant emails to prospects, as if you’re writing and personally sending the email to them, but in a completely automated way that saves you 90% of your time and manual effort.
How Landing Pages and Drip Campaigns Work Together in Sales Funnels
The relationship between landing pages and drip campaigns in a sales funnel is two-dimensional. Email subscribers collected from a lead generating landing page will enter a segment that triggers a series of drip campaigns that aim at converting subscribers into users or buyers. Vice versa, receivers of a drip email flow can be sent to a targeted landing page where they will get further detailed information to make a buying decision.
When landing pages and email marketing are combined in a sales funnel, they normally serve one of the following conversion goals:
- Welcoming new subscribers.
- Onboarding users.
- Nurturing leads and converting into sales.
- Recovering abandoned carts.
- Sending recommendations.
- Engaging and reactivating inactive users.
How can we build perfectly-matched landing pages and drip campaigns that can multiply the conversions we aim for? Keep in mind these five best practices that are tried and proven to be effective:
#1 Write Matching Content
Repetition can do wonders. Your email campaign and landing page should contain matching messages that you want your prospects to remember and take action from there.
This is an example of how Paypal matched the key messages “Get paid with the click of a link” and repeated the usage of the new Paypal.me short link feature in its newsletter and landing page:
#2 Design Matching Looks
The email and landing page should have a similar look in terms of aesthetic and overall design to avoid causing confusion to your customers. When prospects click on an email’s call to action and are taken to a matching landing page, they instantly know they are in the right spot. It’s a visual cue that helps your customers follow with the flow smoothly without getting confused.
#3 Provide Tempting Benefits
By providing special offers and benefits, you can reinforce customers’ decisions to take the action you target. Offers such as free ebooks, free trials, discount coupons, free gifts, or even security guarantees can go a long way in converting customers online.
#4 Focus on One Call-To-Action
Your landing page and drip marketing should have only one single common call-to-action. It might be tempting to provide extra navigation, but keep in mind that the whole point of using landing pages is to keep prospects focused on one task, so don’t introduce additional options at this point.
#5 Keep Testing
A/B testing is the key to maximizing conversions and success in the bottom line. The fact that normal websites don’t usually work in a sales funnel is that they cannot be tested and changed too frequently. You can test different key messages, calls-to-action, benefits, images, designs, but don’t forget to do so on both emails and landing pages consistently. Your test versions should have matching messages and looks so your customers don’t get confused.
Bonus: 5 Best Templates to Build High-Converting Landing Pages
Convinced that your business needs landing pages to boost conversions?
Nowadays, you don’t need to master any coding skills or hire external designers and engineers to build landing pages. There are a lot of templates available on Envato Market, with flexible customization options, that you can work from to create your own branded landing pages.
Here are five outstanding choices to consider:
1. SuperProps - React Next Landing Page Templates
React Next landing pages are built with React, Next JS, Gatsby JS & Styled Components (no jQuery). Check out the many available demos and see which one fits your landing page needs!
2. Vixus | Startup & Mobile App WordPress Landing Page Theme
Vixus is a WordPress landing page template, made with the Elementor Page Builder. The easy-to-use admin panel for this theme will help you customize every single aspect of it. The theme is supplied with a set of easy-to-manage page layouts that can be expanded and customized using shortcodes and custom widgets.
Learn more about Elementor with these video guides:
How to Build a WordPress Website With Elementor
How to Customize Your WordPress Website With Elementor
3. AeroLand - Responsive App Landing WordPress Theme
Being highly compatible with the Gutenberg editor, while still working with the classic editor, AeroLand offers a big collection of customizable responsive layouts for you to create powerful landing pages. Based on multiple landing concepts, AeroLand makes it possible for you to create various pages for different purposes.
4. Softino - Software Landing Page
Softino is a software landing page built with Bootstrap 4, Sass, HTML5 and CSS3. Softino is flexible, customizable and uses organized code. All files and assets from Softino are lightweight, and you can easily customize your pages the way you want.
5. Zeeko - Landing Page Template
Zeeko is a multi-purpose landing page template built with Bootstrap 4. This would be perfect for showcasing apps, startups, using for personal websites, web agencies, or any other type of businesses.
Final Thoughts
If you’ve read all the way to these concluding thoughts, you will have a concrete idea about landing pages, drip marketing, and their use cases in sales funnels. Optimizing these through A/B testing will help you create streamlined and efficient customer journeys, with maximized conversions. We have provided you with the best tools in hand, now it’s your turn to get the work started!
More Landing Page Resources on Tuts+
