TIPSHEET The Simple Way to Create Landing Pages
THE SIMPLE WAY TO CREATE LANDING PAGES Landing pages are a crucial element of a successful digital campaign, but frequently marketers are discouraged from creating them by bureaucratic, time-consuming and sometimes expensive processes involved in getting new pages created on their company s website. The reality is that marketers can create and optimise landing pages externally, using hosted services to design and optimise landing pages. There are many benefits of using such services, as they avoid bureaucracy, unnecessary expense and delays that can be associated with producing effective landing pages. The following tips summarise some of the benefits of hosting landing pages externally, and how they can benefit your campaigns and ultimately conversion rates.
BUILD EFFECTIVE LANDING PAGES WITHOUT SPECIALIST KNOWLEDGE There are many online solutions for creating and optimising landing pages, and these solutions are great for the simple reason that they enable non-developers to build, publish and A/B test landing pages quickly and easily. In addition to providing multiple pre-designed templates, many provide a simple drag and drop page builder feature, allowing marketers to create responsive pages without any support from the technical team. THE PAGES APPEAR TO BE PART OF YOUR MAIN SITE Although these systems are hosted externally, it s relatively easy to create templates that reflect the look of your main site. With a small amount of configuration, the services will also let you make use of a subdomain of your main website for example if your website is www.napierb2b.com, you can use www2.napierb2b.com for the landing page service. This helps users feel more comfortable filling out the forms on the page. NO NEED FOR IT REQUESTS The great thing about these landing page services is that, aside from not needing and coding experience, marketers also have full control when producing and making changes to these pages. Gone are the days of waiting three days for IT to fix a typo, and even longer for approval of the page itself. The only interaction you will require with the IT department is to request that they make a simply change to the DNS records for your domain, adding a CNAME, so that your landing pages can show the company URL.
CREATE AND PUBLISH IN LESS THAN AN HOUR Even if you have the resources at hand to build web pages, landing page platform providers make it possible to produce pages quickly and easily. Any pre-designed template can be edited to reflect your corporate branding and marketing messages, or alternatively you can start from a blank canvas. By saving your own time, as well as any time interacting with IT, not to mention the time they spend making modifications, you lower your customer acquisition costs. The landing page services also have the back office features built-in. It s simple to configure automatic confirmation emails to the users who complete the forms, and they will also record all the data for you, which can then easily be exported. SYNC WITH YOUR CRM SOFTWARE Many landing page platform providers sync with major CRM and email systems, ranging from Salesforce and Marketo, to Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor and MailChimp. While it s always worth checking with individual providers, in most cases the analytics from your landing pages will be able to automatically sync with your CRM system. Additionally, many providers will enable automatic enable alerts for when a visitor completes a conversion on your landing page, and also provide you with options to export leads, review conversions, set up targets and goals and monitor customer interaction. ANALYSE USING PAGE VARIANTS AND A/B TESTING The purpose of a landing page is to increase conversions, and by sending traffic to promotion specific pages, you increase the performance of your marketing campaigns. Many providers such as Unbounce, Lander and Instapage provide simple A/B testing, enabling you to determine what works well and what doesn t, and ultimately optimise conversions. ADD GOOGLE ANALYTICS Although the landing page isn t hosted with the rest of your site, you can still benefit from Google Analytics tracking. Most providers make it easy to generate and paste the tracking code into your landing pages. All you need to remember is to enable subdomain tracking. If you would like any help executing a successful email marketing or marketing automation campaign, give us a call today on +44(0)1243 531123, or send us over an email to mike@napierb2b.com.
t: +44 (0)1243 531123 f: +44 (0)1243 779070 e: info@napierb2b.com w: www.napierb2b.com Donnington Park Birdham Road Chichester West Sussex PO20 7DU United Kingdom Launched in 1984, Napier was one of the first agencies in Europe to specialise in the electronics market, subsequently expanding to help clients in a range of B2B technology sectors. Initially a PR agency, Napier responded to the clients need to manage information across every element of the marketing mix by bringing together a team of multi-talented and multi-lingual engineers, linguists and technical journalists as well as PR and marketing professionals.