A primer to perfect landing pages.

One thing to remember about landing pages is that there should only be one thing worth remembering on each landing page.

Why it matters:

You’ll miss out on an opportunity to optimize your ad spend if you get landing pages wrong, or worse, if you don’t do them at all.

Landing pages are critical to Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), the most gratifying type of marketing. Why? Because CRO is like a superpower!

The impact of CRO with landing pages is immediate and quantifiable. Also, it’s one of the few parts of the funnel where we truly control our destiny. On one end, ad platforms have their black box algorithms - on the other, a checkout/conversion process possibly owned by a product team.

First, what are Landing Pages?

Technically, any page a customer “lands” on is a landing page but when most marketers talk about Landing Pages they mean a page specifically linked from an ad campaign and nowhere else. These landing pages, or LPs, are hidden from Google’s search engine robots and you can’t even get to them without knowing their exact URL.

Why are Landing Pages useful?

1. Freedom. 
   Landing pages are a playground for messaging, design, promotions, and product offerings. Being isolated from the rest of the site means you can try new things without worrying about consistency or contradiction.
   

2. Conversions, not Search Rankings. 
   Good LPs are designed to get customers to do one thing and one thing only. Because of this focus, landing pages typically include LESS content than a normal page.
   
   The rules of SEO don’t apply because LPs shouldn’t be indexed by Google. Headlines don’t need to be aligned to search queries. 1500-word content blocks won’t be needed. Links pointing to this page and other internal links are avoided.
   

3. Analysis. 
   Reporting on the performance of a lander is extremely easy because there’s only a single channel or campaign pointed to it.

Three rules to build great Landing Pages

Rule #1: Write first. Design second.

The average page is only viewed for 52 seconds. To make the most of that, write down the answers to the following questions before creating a page:

• In 10 seconds, what’s the one thing they need to remember?

• In 30 seconds, what are two supporting things to know?

• In 60 seconds, assume inaction, what’s something else they could do? hint: capture their email!

This exercise forces you to say no to all the value props competing for attention in your head. Next, design with intentionality emphasizing the answers above in their exact order.

Rule #2: One Destination.

You should only have one link on the page. You got them to this page, now where do you want them to go?

Your header absolutely needs a button with a CTA that points to this destination. Here are some easy ones:

• Add-to-Cart

• Get a Free Quote

• Sign up

• Join now

• Start a Free Trial

Below that, add the content from Rule #1 and try different CTAs linking to the same destination throughout the page.

Strip down your navbar. A logo for brand recognition linking back to the homepage is ok. Remove all other links and menus - feel free to leave the same CTA button in your navbar though.

Get rid of all footer links. Don’t point to your careers page or Instagram account. Get rid of the footer completely if you’d like.

Here’s a great example:

Landing pages go against everything you think make a visually appealing webpage. Brand Membership’s LP is their actual homepage it has all the elements of a good landing page - check it out.

• Only one thing to remember: Unlimited design & development resources.

• Only one destination - Schedule a call on that calendar.

• Two more things to know - Pricing & legitimacy.

• One last thing - A last-ditch form at the bottom to grab an email.

Rule #3: Keep em separated.

Over time you’ll have multiple LPs for different purposes. For example, if you’re a beauty brand you probably want one for all your lotions and skincare and another for your makeup. I’ve seen brands with 100s of LPs.

• Keep em in a subfolder of your website. A common one is always /lp. This makes it easy to analyze the performance of both the pages and the ads in your analytics tool.

• Make sure Google cannot index these pages so that they don’t show up in Google Search. If you don’t know how to do this… Google search it.

• Do not link to these pages from anywhere else on your website.

Still with me?

Here’s two extra tips for those with really good attention spans!

Marketers need to own the marketing stack. It’s as if every company I’ve talked to has asked itself whether the Marketing or Product/Engineering team should own the development of the website. I’ve dealt with both setups and feel strongly that:

• Marketing should own the production of the main content-driven pages of your website

• Product may own the conversion funnel depending on the complexity of your product

Speed to iterate and freedom to try new things is why getting this structure correct is so important. This also means that you’ll need design and front-end development to sit within marketing as well.

If you get the structure right, make sure you choose the right tools in the stack as well. To power the site, my preferred choice is Webflow. It’s the absolute best website development tool in the game right now and no this isn’t a plug or an affiliate effort. It simply is the best.

If you absolutely can’t own the website development then own the production of LPs by creating a part of your site on Webflow or Wordpress just for LPs. You can also use a tool like Unbounce or hire an agency who could build pages on Unbounce pages for you.

Read Smart Brevity. Smart Brevity is a book about copywriting written by the founders of the Axios newsletter. It rewires your brain to keep things short, structured, and straight to the point. Much like how landing pages need to be.

I haven’t been good about employing smart brevity for this newsletter - but that’s the point of me writing this shit, so I can keep learning and challenging myself!

Hopefully, you find some value in this stuff too.